The president made the call while in his virtual speech at the high-level segment of the 76th session of the UN General Assembly.

Diaz-Canel affirmed that more than 80 percent of the vaccines administered in the world were in middle- and high-income countries, whose populations represent less than half of the world’s inhabitants.

Hundreds of millions of people in low-income nations are still waiting for their first dose and cannot even estimate whether they will ever receive it, Diaz-Canel said.

In his speech, the Cuban head of State described as inconceivable that such inequality should occur when military spenditures in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, totaled nearly two billion dollars.

In this regard, he wondered how many lives would have been saved if those resources had been allocated to health or to the production and distribution of vaccines.

The possible answer lies in changing the paradigm and transforming a profoundly unequal and anti-democratic international order that puts selfishness and the petty interests of a minority first, the Cuban president stressed.

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