“We will only overcome this health emergency if we accelerate equal access to safe, effective, quality-assured and affordable Covid-19 vaccines,” said a statement on Friday at the end of a digital meeting of the Asia-Pacific business community APEC.
US President Joe Biden, China’s head of state and party Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin also took part in the extraordinary summit, to which New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had invited at short notice. New Zealand holds the APEC chairmanship this year.
“This is the biggest health and economic crisis in living memory,” said Ardern afterwards to journalists. It is now important to overcome any vaccination nationalism, so Ardern. “Nobody is safe from this virus until everyone is safe.”
The Pacific countries agreed, among other things, to “double efforts to expand vaccine production and delivery (…) and to promote the voluntary transfer of technologies for manufacturing vaccines on mutually agreed terms”. Another topic was the development of travel channels between individual countries. The world must prepare now for further pandemics in the future, it said.
In addition to the USA, the 21 APEC member states include China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Peru, New Zealand and Thailand. The alliance was founded in 1989. It represents around 2.9 billion people.
