G7 vows action on COVID jabs, climate change

G7 vows action on COVID jabs, climate change

CARBIS BAY, United Kingdom: G7 leaders yesterday vowed to start delivering one billion doses of COVID vaccines and to step up action on climate change, in a summit call to arms by a revived democratic alliance that also confronted China and Russia. In a final communique issued at their first physical summit in nearly two years, the leaders of the elite club largely hewed to US President Joe Biden's push to regain the West's cohesion after the tumultuous era of his predecessor Donald Trump.

"We will harness the power of democracy, freedom, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights to answer the biggest questions and overcome the greatest challenges,“ the leaders said. But the pledge on vaccines for poorer nations fell drastically short of the 11 billion doses that campaigners say are needed to end a pandemic that has claimed nearly four million lives and wrecked economies around the globe.

"I'm afraid there will be smiles (at the G7) but they are not solutions,“ former British prime minister Gordon Brown told Sky News, calling the summit "an unforgivable moral failure“. "Millions of people will go unvaccinated and thousands of people I'm afraid will die,“ said Brown, who helped coordinate