Thread by @faisalislam

Just interviewed exPM @GordonBrown for tonight’s @BBCNewsnight who calls “hoarding”/wastage of vaccine by G20 nations “probably biggest international public policy failure of our times”…

And says SA President @CyrilRamaphosa “rightly” feels “very let down” over vaccine promises

https://twitter.com/bbcnewsnight/status/1464294862572953607

Brown: “There are enough vaccines to get round the whole world, probably around 500 million vaccines that are unused, stockpiled, you might say hoarded, in the West today. That’s in America and in Europe, including the United Kingdom. Vaccines that could be moved very quickly…”

“…and transferred out to poorest countries of the world to enable vaccination to take place. There is a huge danger that many of these vaccines that are being unused here are going to be wasted. They run out. They expire. The use-by date is past and they have to be destroyed.”

“amazing science, brilliant manufacturing potential capable of producing 12 billion vaccines by end of year in total. That’s enough to vaccinate everybody twice over but yet in some countries, 2%, 3%, 4% have been vaccinated. It’s a complete failure of political coordination”: GB

Asked Brown if he seriously thinks any UK government would divert vaccines for booster jabs abroad…
“I’m not asking people to make a choice between boosters and first vaccines, I’m asking us to use the vaccines we’ve got far more effectively and to have a G20 coordination…”

Brown: “not just that it’s morally right to do so, it’s clearly in our enlightened self-interest to make vaccines available to people who are otherwise unprotected and from where the virus is spreading, mutating, and liable to come back to hit us some time soon.” @BBCNewsnight