The change we need will never come from the G7

It’s long past time that this outdated, neo-colonial piece of global governance was abandoned.

Boris Johnson went into this weekend’s G7 summit promising to “vaccinate the world”. But by Sunday night it was clear that even the much anticipated – and completely insufficient – pledge to donate one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses by the middle of next year would not be met. Neither was there any radical announcement on climate change or on cancelling Southern debt. In the words of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the summit would “go down as an unforgivable moral failure”. Vaccines dominated this G7, unsurprisingly given the stark inequality in the vaccine rollout globally. While G7 nations are vaccinating their citizens at a rate of 4.6 million people a day, low-income countries can only manage 63,000. The G7 will have vaccinated almost all of its citizens by the end of the year while, at current rates, low-income countries would be waiting 57 years. That is why the global South is demanding rich countries support a waiver on intellectual property rules to allow countries around the world to ramp up production as quickly as possible. But with the very important exception of US President Biden, and occasionally promising noises from French President Macron, the G7 has largely sided with the big pharmaceutical corporations in protecting the right to profit no matter what the cost in lives. These leaders wanted to use the G7 summit to prove they could help the global South while leaving Big Pharma’s profits intact. On Friday, one billion doses were put on the table. This would only have been sufficient to immunise about 10 percent of the globally unvaccinated population. By Sunday, this number had fallen to 870 million, of which only about 600 million were genuinely “new”, most of which would not be offered until next year, and some of which seem closer to exports (they will need to be paid for) rather than donations.