World leaders should make the right call

In a joint letter addressed to Joe Biden, more than 60 former heads of state, including former leaders of Britain and France, and over 100 Nobel Prize winners have called on the US president to back a waiver of intellectual property rules for Covid-19 vaccines. A waiver would hasten vaccine manufacturing and quicken the ability of poorer countries to respond to the pandemic, which might otherwise take years. As president, Biden had previously recognised and publicly said that no one would be safe from the virus until everyone was safe.

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that with the G7 meeting coming up, now would be an excellent time for the US to provide the kind of leadership that the world needs. In that regard, the most important decision would be for the US president to support a proposal by South Africa and India at the World Trade Organization to temporarily waive intellectual property rules related to Covid-19 vaccines and treatments.

Based on the current pace of vaccine production, most poor nations will have to wait until at least 2024 to achieve mass Covid-19 immunisation. And as we have already seen over the past months, new mutations of the virus are continually claiming more lives all across the planet with countries struggling to keep up with its deadlier variants. Meanwhile, the damage being dealt to individual economies as well as the global economy due to the pandemic are immeasurable. As a result, lives are being ruined and people are losing their livelihoods.

For the sake of saving lives everywhere, the US president, and all other world leaders for that matter, should back this proposal. At this point, there should not be any doubt in anyone's mind as to the danger posed by the virus, and also the perils of every country not working together to defeat it.