Archive for March 24th, 2021

24/03/2021

End Vaccine Apartheid Before Millions More Die

Human Wrongs Watch

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Mar 23 2021 (IPS)* At least 85 poor countries will not have significant access to coronavirus vaccines before 2023. Unfortunately, a year’s delay will cause an estimated 2.5 million avoidable deaths in low and lower-middle income countries. As the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General has put it, the world is at the brink of a catastrophic moral failure.

Anis Chowdhury

Vaccine apartheid
The EU, US, UK, Switzerland, Canada and their allies continue to block the developing country proposal to temporarily suspend the World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement to enable greatly increased, affordable supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, drugs, tests and equipment.

Meanwhile, 6.4 billion of the 12.5 billion vaccine doses the main producers plan to produce in 2021 have already been pre-ordered, mostly by these countries, with 13% of the global population.

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24/03/2021

Turkey’s Withdrawal from Women’s Protection Treaty, “a Very Worrying Step Backwards”

Human Wrongs Watch

(UN News)* — Turkey’s decision to withdraw from an important treaty on protecting women is “a very worrying step backwards”, a group of independent UN human rights experts said on 23 March 2021.

UNDP Turkey / Levent Kulu | Two women walk in the Taksim district of Istanbul, Turkey.

“This decision…sends a dangerous message that violence against women is not important, with the risk of encouraging perpetrators and weakening measures to prevent it”, said Dubravka Šimonović, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women.

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24/03/2021

‘Acute Hunger Set to Soar in over 20 Countries in the Coming Months without Urgent and Scaled-Up Assistance’

Human Wrongs Watch

ROME (FAO)*  – Acute hunger is set to soar in over 20 countries in the coming months without urgent and scaled-up assistance, warn the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) in a new report issued on 23 March 2021.

Photo: ©FAO/Stefanie GlinskiAgong and her child in South Sudan, where over 7 million people are projected to fall into crisis or worse levels of acute food insecurity.