Two years in, Covid pandemic needs a greater global response

TWO years on from when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic, it is increasingly clear that key policy mistakes were made in 2020 and 2021 that may have significantly extended the length of the crisis.

It is former UK prime minister Gordon Brown who has become one of the most vocal critics, including over vaccine inequality which he has rightly highlighted as a "monumental international policy failure", warning "history will not be kind" to leaders for stockpiling jabs. He re-emphasised recently how a relatively small number of countries have monopolised the purchase and therefore control the supply of the vast majority of vaccines, getting to a point where many of these jabs have gone past the use-by date and need to be destroyed.

Brown, who hosted the 2009 G-20 summit in London, and has been credited by some with having staved off a second Great Depression, believes that a similar act of international coordination is still urgently required to tackle the continuing Covid crisis - which the WHO said last Friday (Mar 18) is most likely to be only at its mid-point. In so doing, he has urged countries to consider "extraordinary measures" similar to those taken during the global financial crisis to increase developing nations' access to vaccines.