Greta Thunberg will not work if vaccine nationalism continues

LONDON – Greta Thunberg, a teenage climate change activist, has said she will not attend the UN summit on climate change if current vaccination trends continue.

Thunberg posted on Twitter on Friday morning in response to a BBC report that he had “no plans” to attend the summit, known as COP26, to be held in Glasgow, Scotland in November.

“Of course I would love to attend COP26 in Glasgow. But not only if everyone can participate under the same conditions,” Thunberg posted on Twitter.

She said many countries were vaccinating “healthy young people” against Covid-19, to the detriment of high-risk groups and front-line workers in other countries.

Thurberg said inequality was already at the heart of the climate crisis, adding that if people could not be vaccinated and travel to the summit to be equally represented, it would be “undemocratic”.

“Vaccine nationalism will not solve the pandemic,” Thunberg said, arguing that “global problems require global solutions.”

High-income countries have been accused of vaccine nationalism after buying more than 4.6 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines, according to data released in March by the Duke Global Health Innovation Center. In comparison, low-income countries provided only 670 million doses of vaccines.

Thunberg also said on his Twitter feed that even if the COP26 summit should have been delayed due to the pandemic, this “does not mean we need to postpone the necessary urgent action” on climate change.

Sky News reported last week that the summit could be postponed for the second time due to the pandemic.

“We don’t have to wait for conferences, or anyone else or anything else to start dramatically reducing our emissions,” Thunberg said.

At the same time, the activist said that a virtual conference will be “far from optimal”, given the lack of access to high-speed internet and computers in some parts of the world, which would also limit equal representation. the summit.