The Diplomat
The executive vice president of Fundación Alternativas, Diego López Garrido, warned last week, during the annual meeting of Think Tanks from around the world, that the G-7 should push for “mass vaccination against COVID-19 in the five continents, without discrimination.”
“As long as there are countries with low vaccination rates, none of them will be safe from contagion or serious diseases,” said López Garrido during his speech at the meeting, held on December 6 and 7 in Manama, capital of the Kingdom of Bahrain, where Fundación Alternativas represented all the Western European Think Tanks.
According to López Garrido, “Western Europe is well protected against the virus, with between 60 and 70% of its population fully vaccinated, while America has only 37%, Asia 27% and Africa 7%”, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO). This difference, he warned, could lead not only to an “increase in transmission and infections”, but also to the new variant being more “aggressive”.
For this reason, he said, the G7 (Group of Seven, formed by the seven most economically advanced countries in the world: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) should adopt measures to achieve “mass vaccination against COVID-19 on all five continents, without discrimination”. “COVID-19 is a global problem that requires full international cooperation, based on multilateralism and solidarity,” added the former MP and former Secretary of State for the EU between 2008 and 2011.
According to López Garrido, two of the main collateral damages of the pandemic have been the increased vulnerability of women during confinement, in which cases of gender violence have skyrocketed, and the increase in cases of “mental illnesses”, such as depression or anxiety. Apart from this, denialism has created a “political space exploited by populisms and their partisan strategies”, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, which has reached the other side of the Atlantic, creating a “powerful movement that rejects health recommendations”.
The executive vice-president of Alternativas also warned that politicians must act as soon as possible in the face of the “new wave of infections of the Omicron variant”, a new mutation of the virus discovered in South Africa and which could become “dominant”, for which reason “there is no time to lose”. He also stated that governments must increase their investment in health research into mental illnesses and cancer, which have been slowed down by the fight against the coronavirus.
Regarding the role of the Think Tanks in the fight against the pandemic, López Garrido stressed the need to “convey to the population the recommendation to get vaccinated, denounce the messages of the negationist groups and remember that vaccination is not just a personal decision”. In his opinion, it is very important to “dismantle conspiracy theories and promote cooperation through science and technology”.
