The 76th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Sessions, starting today in New York, will almost exclusively focus on COVID-19 under the theme “Building Resilience through Hope” - to recover from COVID-19, rebuild sustainability, respond to the needs of the planet, respect the rights of people, and revitalise the United Nations.”
More than 100 world leaders, including President Gotabaya Rajapaksa are participating in person at this year’s UNGA sessions. Last year, only a very few leaders made it to the summit in person as COVID raged worldwide. This is an important milestone as the UNGA serves as the main deliberative and policy-making body of the UN, addressing complex world issues as well as the challenges facing individual members. It is the only body in the organisation where all Member States have equal representation.
According to the UN Charter, the body is charged with addressing matters of international peace and security not currently being addressed by the UN Security Council (UNSC). It also debates matters of human rights, international law, and cooperation in “economic, social, cultural, educational, and health fields”. The latter is particularly important in the context of COVID-19.
The 76th UNGA Session is also significant for South Asia in another context – new UNGA President Abdulla Shahid of the Maldives will be formally elected by the body, replacing outgoing President Volkan Bozkir of Turkey. This is not the only footprint of South Asia at the UN - India’s tenure as President of the UNSC just ended with the first resolution being adopted by the UNSC on the situation in Afghanistan following the takeover of Kabul and the rest of the country by the Taliban. Afghanistan, another South Asian country, will indeed be among the focal points of UN Members as the Taliban has mostly reneged on its promise to form an inclusive Government that respects the rights of women and ethnic/religious minorities. The recent attacks on a Taliban convoy in Jalalabad in Afghanistan have also raised the prospect of foreign terror groups such as the ISIS-K using Afghan soil to launch attacks.
But there is hardly any doubt that the biggest focus will be on COVID-19 and the myriad challenges arising from it. All the world leaders and members of their delegations arriving for the UNGA are supposed to be vaccinated – it is an “honour system” whereby UN officials will not actually ask them for proof of vaccination. There will be some leaders like President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil who has refused to be vaccinated and it is unclear if and how they will be accommodated.
Once the discussions get underway in earnest, the world leaders should address the issue of “vaccine apartheid” – the hoarding of vaccines in excess by rich and powerful countries at the expense of developing countries. Worse, some developed nations are even planning to give third or “booster” shots to certain segments of their population.
The Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had urged a moratorium on such boosters until at least the end of the year to allow each country to protect 40 per cent of the population. In wealthier nations, 80 per cent of the population have had at least one dose; in poorer ones, just 20 per cent (Sri Lanka is an exception with over half its population having received both doses). Across Africa, the figure is less than 3.5 per cent. It could take many lower-income countries at least another two years to reach most citizens. Covax, the global pooled purchasing scheme (from which Sri Lanka also got some vaccines), has announced that it will fall 600 million doses short of its target of distributing 2 billion doses by the end of the year. Many of the pledges made by wealthy countries to donate any extra doses remain unfulfilled - less than 15 per cent of the 1 billion doses promised by high-income countries have actually materialised. The European Union last week pledged to donate 200 million more by the middle of next year. But as of earlier this month, only 18 million of the 200 million it has already promised had been delivered. UK and the EU remain staunchly opposed to patent waivers which would facilitate the manufacture of vaccines in developing nations, although the US had endorsed the idea in principle. There has however been no technology transfer so far.
The leaders of emerging economies must therefore raise their collective voice at the UN against the sordid practice of “vaccine apartheid”. It does not matter even if developed nations vaccinate 100 per cent of their populations, everyone will be in danger as long as the virus circulates among the largely unvaccinated populations in developing countries. This could rise to variants of the Coronavirus that are even more contagious than the dreaded Delta variant. There is also the real possibility that some future variants could be resistant to the current iterations of the vaccines. It simply makes more sense to distribute vaccines equally around the world right now to achieve global herd immunity. As the saying goes “no one is safe until everyone is safe”.
Add new comment