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00:00A lot of people saying that this is a wakeup call that we need to get the rest of the world vaccinated because otherwise we'll continue to see these new variants of the pandemic will continue. We should be awake before this stuff. I mean this is this has been a risk both ethical and medical that I mean that was well flagged. Or we should have been awake a long time ago. You know from a relatively early stage of the pandemic we were told that vaccines were highly likely to be coming through. And they came through actually form putting into people's arms last December. But there was never really a strategy about how you would get that out equitably to everyone. And one of the key recommendations our panel made was that there needs to be a pre negotiated platform for universal access. They needed to have end to end solutions a term well known in the technology world where from the very beginning it design for availability and access. That was never done. So what happened with the vaccines came was high income countries like mine and yours. We grab what there was and then we've sat on it. We afforded it. We even got rid of vaccines we couldn't use. And meantime in sub-Saharan Africa it's struggling to even reach six per cent vaccination levels. So you know all the signs were there that we could do this better but we didn't. So why has progress been so slow on the recommendations of the panel when quite clearly the threat and not just the threat but the materialization of the threat has been so real. So some things have moved. The wheels grind slowly. For example we did recommend a new legal instrument being negotiated and the World Health Assembly this week did agree to begin negotiations. They haven't agreed anything about content at all nor what the form of the legal instrument would be. And in my opinion the timetable is the table is excruciatingly slow. They want to bring a new legal instrument to the World Health Assembly in May 2024. That'll be more than four years after a pandemic was declared. So it's not speed of lightning but particularly taking into account that these are not diseases are coming at us faster and faster. We could have another pandemic next month next year whatever and we still won't have the right legal instruments to to deal with it. So that's a concern. The World Health Assembly next May will look at the WTO strengthening recommendations that we and other bodies have made. There's quite a lot of traction on getting a UN General Assembly special session which would aim to negotiate a political declaration around the whole reform package governance finance support for the treaty. And so so. So that's not so discouraging to me. What has been discouraging is the immediate recommendations we make and many others have made to get the vaccines out there equitably to redistribute the surplus stocks to scale up the manufacturing particularly in the global south. Rep is not happening fast enough. Prime Minister Clark do you feel when speaking to all of these policymakers and experts around the world the same sense of urgency that we had at the beginning of the pandemic right now years later because there is a concern that that crisis mentality may fade. So I think it comes in waves. One of the very disappointing things has been to see a number of high income countries and let's be blunt Europe among them and I guess that to some extent the US reach a level of vaccination which isn't satisfactory and then declare you know you don't have to do this or that anymore. In effect some have completely abandoned public health measures. Now what that creates is an environment in which Delta or Army prone or whatever is going to walk right back in through. In my own country New Zealand we are sitting pretty comfortably for a 90 percent vaccination rate of all adults for all 12 plus by by Christmas. Even so we are retaining many public health measures around masking and physical distancing and vaccine mandates and so on. Because we don't want to give opportunities for this to threat. We don't want the Kiwi variant of Covid to emerge. So. So that's the disappointment to me that high income countries that do have the capacity to do more vaccination and to maintain public health measures are not showing the leadership they could. How much of a global understanding is there right now that these variants are keep emerging. Probably come from these nations that can get their populations vaccinated. Is that an understanding that inequality is actually exacerbating the problem. Oh yes it definitely is exacerbating the problem at the global level and also in our own societies because when you look at who has missed out on vaccination of course we have the militant anti vaccines and we have the hesitant but we also have populations who are not in shall we say the broad mainstream of society. They may be people who use drugs then maybe the homeless. They may be those who are low so poor they can't put their head above the parapet from from day to day. So inequalities in our own societies. But I really feel for the African countries which have now had them the measures taken against them because of only crime emerging. And South Africa rightly says that we were over we were transparent. And then you then you wake up. There's a huge feeling of injustice that they couldn't get the vaccines. And then when the inevitable happens. And let's face it the inevitable because if you let transmission rip you will get more mutations and then possibly more transmissible and lethal lethal variants. Then they get measures taken against them. So there's a huge feeling of injustice here. Yeah so much anger and understandably when so many people were desperately calling for more vaccines across the continent. Right. Closer to home though the Burnett Institute for one has said there's 19 developing nations that run the risk of seeing this pandemic for the next 10 years of not seeing full vaccination until 2030. What should Australia and New Zealand both the drug manufacturers and the governments be doing to ensure that that doesn't happen. It's horrifying isn't it. And it's entirely possible. I mean I've seen W8 show senior people say that the failure to equitably distribute the vaccine will attract the pandemic by at least a year. But you know what the Burnet Institute is saying is also entirely within the realm of possibility. Much of Africa surely won't be vaccinated before 2023. Eighty two countries will miss the W H O target of 40 per cent of populations vaccinated by the end of the century. So we can't meet the 70 per cent by mid next year. As Dr Ted Ross was was aiming for. So what we have to do is please get a grip on ourselves. High income countries. We have surplus doses. We have orders. We're not going to get them out there. I never want to see another headline from the UK or wherever that says we. We had to trash vaccines we couldn't use. There are countries screaming out for them. Get your own supply chains. High income countries into order. You've got enough to share. And also you need to put pressure on the manufacturers to get that capacity for manufacturing out to far more countries. This is going to be an ongoing wicked problem. We're probably going to need to do that. The six monthly annual boosters for the foreseeable future. So it's not that this is a one off vaccination manufacturing effort. It's got to go on and on and on. We need not many more centres of vaccine manufacturing.

Former New Zealand PM Clark: Vaccine Inequity Remains Grave Concern

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and co-chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response discusses inequalities revealed by the pandemic. Clark also expresses her concerned that a global push to settle a new pandemic treaty is progressing too slowly. She speaks in "Bloomberg Daybreak: Asia" with Haidi Stroud-Watts and Shery Ahn.

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