Experts Warn Rich Nations’ Push for Boosters Could Lock in Vaccine ‘Apartheid’ | Common Dreams News

Jake Johnson August 19, 2021

Scientists and public health experts are growing increasingly concerned that rich countries’ pursuit of Covid-19 vaccine boosters could entrench inequities that have left billions of people in poor regions of the world without access to a single dose, denying them protection from the surging Delta variant and prolonging the deadly global pandemic.

In an Washington Post op-ed published just hours after the Biden administration announced its plan to roll out booster shots for the entire U.S. public as soon as next month, William Parker and Govind Persad argued that “this decision is a mistake,” particularly as just over 1% of people in low-income nations have received at least one vaccine dose.

“Not only does it risk depriving millions throughout the world of the vaccine, but there also is no evidence that additional shots meaningfully reduce death or hospitalization from Covid-19 for healthy Americans,” wrote Parker and Persad, who respectively serve as assistant director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar in Bioethics.

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Nearly Half the World’s Children at ‘Extremely High Risk’ for Facing Effects of Climate Crisis, Report Finds | Common Dreams News

Julia Conley – August 20, 2021

On Friday, the third anniversary of climate campaigner Greta Thunberg’s lone protest outside the Swedish Parliament, a global report revealed the scale of risks posed by the climate emergency for the world’s children.

The United Nations’ agency for children’s rights, UNICEF, introduced the first-ever Children’s Climate Risk Index, which shows that nearly half of the world’s children are at “extremely high risk” for being faced with dangerous effects of the planetary crisis.

“The climate crisis is a child rights crisis,” said UNICEF.

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