The EU just announced it is donating an additional 200M vaccine doses to low-income nations in Africa on top of the 250M doses already pledged. ‘With less than 1% of global doses administered to lower-income countries, the scale of injustice and the level of urgency is obvious,’ said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Von der Leyen said that deliveries would be made by the middle of 2022 and that they would come on top of the 250 million vaccine doses already committed by the bloc for donation to lower and middle-income countries by the end of the year.
“Our first and most urgent priority is to speed up global vaccination,” she said in her speech. She called the discrepancy in vaccination between the developed and developing world “one of the great geopolitical issues.”
