Vaccine inequity will cost the world trillions of dollars, WHO Foundation warns

Vaccine inequity will cost the world trillions of dollars, WHO Foundation warns

The CEO of the WHO Foundation has told CNBC that the global economy will lose "trillions of dollars" if more Covid-19 vaccines aren't delivered worldwide. Anil Soni, who became the Foundation's first CEO in January 2021, said "the governments of Europe and the West have a clear obligation to donate excess doses and to put money on the table to buy the vaccines, the volumes necessary to deliver to 70% of the world's population this year." The World Health Organization has . Speaking in late February for this week's episode of CNBC's on vaccine equity, Soni said it is a "moral imperative" to vaccinate the world against Covid. "We live in a world in which we see the effects of deep, structural generations-long inequity. This is an opportunity to do something very different and show that history can be corrected. That we can achieve the moral victory of an equitable response where everyone in the world, all of us have equal value, receives the same access to this life-saving technology," Soni said. "But epidemiologically and economically, vaccine inequity is self-defeating, the numbers just make that clear. We're going to lose trillions of dollars in the global economy if we don't