The summit, starting on Friday, is the first between G7 leaders since the pandemic and the UK as president…reports Asian Lite News.
With four days left for in-person G7 Leaders’ Summit to be held in Cornwall, the Downing Street announced that Prime Minister Boris Johnson will call on fellow leaders to make concrete commitments to vaccinate the entire world against Covid-19 by the end of 2022.
“Next week the leaders of the world’s greatest democracies will gather at an historic moment for our countries and for the planet. The world is looking to us to rise to the greatest challenge of the post-war era: defeating Covid and leading a global recovery driven by our shared values,” Johnson said in a statement on Saturday.
The central themes of the meeting are vaccine supply and support for equitable access, tackling climate change and getting more children into school.
The summit, starting on Friday, is the first between G7 leaders since the pandemic and the UK as president.
India has been invited as a guest country, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi expected to participate virtually.
On Friday, the G7 agreed to speed up cooperation on vaccine and therapeutic trials to tackle COVID-19 and future pandemics, the UK government announced after hosting a two-day meeting of the bloc’s health ministers at the University of Oxford.
According to the official statement, a Therapeutics and Vaccines Clinical Trials Charter will soon be implemented to help deliver “high-quality, reliable and comparable evidence from international clinical trials” and avoid unnecessary duplication of efforts.
“It (the agreement) contains a series of measures to make us all safer by improving clinical trials, quicker and wider access to safe vaccines, better use of data, more accurate health surveillance tools and greater collaboration between countries,” the UK health minister was quoted as saying.
The G7, made up of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, also agreed to work together on the mutual recognition of testing and vaccination certificates.
The meeting, which served as a preparatory event for the group’s summit to be held in Cornwall next week, fell short, however, of expectations that the seven richest countries would commit to donate more COVID-19 vaccine doses to developing countries.
Despite highlighting the World Health Organisation’s central role in responding to health emergencies, the G7 announced that vaccines doses will only be shared once their domestic situations are solved.
According to non-governmental organizations, at least 90 percent of people in 67 low-income countries stand little chance of getting vaccinated against the disease in 2021 because rich nations have bought more jabs than they need. (ANI/Sputnik)