Written by Humana People to People

COVID-19 passes the 4 million death mark and there are no signs of it stopping anytime soon. Inequality, lack of political will and non-committal to mass production of COVID-19 vaccines by wealthy nations fuels the rich and poor divide.

The rate at which COVID-19 is taking people’s lives is shocking. Less than three months ago 30,00,000 people were reported to have died from the pandemic according to data from John Hopkins University. We are seeing new tougher strains of the coronavirus killing people in a short space of time.

“The world is at a perilous point in this pandemic. We have just passed the tragic milestone of four million recorded COVID-19 deaths, which likely underestimates the overall toll,” World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press conference at WHO headquarters in Geneva.

WHO has blasted wealthy nations for‘COVID-19 vaccine nationalism” as the global death toll passes 4 million.

“Vaccine nationalism, where a handful of nations have taken the lion’s share, is morally indefensible. At this stage in the pandemic, the fact that millions of health and care workers have still not been vaccinated is abhorrent,” says the WHO Director.

Tedros said variants were currently outpacing vaccines due to the inequitable distribution of available doses, which he said was also threatening the global economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis.

The tally is equal to the number of people killed in battle during all of the world’s wars since 1982, according to USA Today, as well as three times the number of people killed in traffic accidents around the world each year. Officials believe the total is an undercount in many countries due to unidentified COVID-19 cases in various countries.

“People are dying in large numbers in countries without enough health workers or ventilators to save them and vaccine stocks have run dry. We will see many more needless deaths, especially in developing countries, which are being hit by a third, wave of the deadly disease, unless vaccines are produced on a much bigger scale, more quickly and at much lower prices’ says Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s health Policy Manager and spokesperson for the People’s Vaccine Alliance, said.

What is clear is many of these deaths could have been prevented had the successful vaccine science been shared and the production of doses ramped up by more manufacturers across the world.