蜜芽传媒

The former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for an emergency airlift of the West's unused vaccines, saying there's no excuse for letting them go to waste.

With only 5% of people in Africa vaccinated, Mr Brown, who's now an adviser to the World Health Organization, says the USA, the EU, Canada and the UK should use their militaries to get the vaccines to African countries 'within weeks'. He says research shows that otherwise 120 million of the vaccines could go to waste by the end of the year as they pass their use-by dates.

Mr Brown made his plea to world leaders ahead of a global vaccine summit on Wednesday.

"We've trebled the production and will have quadrupled it by the end of the year. So the issue is not really a shortage of vaccines - that was an excuse that could be used a few weeks or months ago. The issue is are we distributing these vaccines equitably? And clearly, having made promising to vaccinate the whole world, we in the West are not honouring them."