Spain to donate two million Covid vaccines to refugees

AT LEAST two million Covid vaccines will be donated for use in refugees, Spain's president Pedro Sánchez has announced.

Working closely with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the huge batch of immunisations due to be set aside will be directed towards where they are 'most needed', Sánchez explains.

He made this pledge during the commemorative act in Madrid for the 70th anniversary of the Geneva Convention of 1951, which lays out the guidelines and obligations signatory countries commit to in terms of asylum-seekers and refugee resettlement.

It states that everyone on earth has the right to apply for asylum, even where their criteria is extremely unlikely to be accepted, meaning there is no such thing as an 'illegal asylum-seeker' or a 'fake refugee'.

A person is granted 'refugee status' if their asylum application is accepted, or if the circumstances they are in already make it clear they would qualify – such as those fleeing the conflict in Syria, who are automatically referred to as 'refugees' before they seek asylum anywhere.

A lack of safe corridors and legal border crossings mean huge numbers of displaced families and individuals remain trapped in makeshift camps in southern Europe, with some of them having spent the last decade under canvas.

But in practice, and according to the UNHCR's figures, over 85% of refugees are taken in by the world's poorest countries, and typically, the nation right next door to the one they left.

In refugee camps, whether in the third world or in Europe, access to basics such as education, medical attention and general care and support are, if not completely absent, at least sparse, meaning people living in them are almost certain to have limited or no access to inoculation against Covid-19.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, praised the 'solidarity' of Spanish society in the face of the pandemic, recalling that the country began donating hundreds of thousands of vaccines to the developing world, particularly poorer parts of Latin America, 'before it had even immunised 50% of its own population'.

In fact, Spain is now one of the top 10 countries on earth in terms of vaccines donated, in round numbers and as a percentage of its population and vaccine supply, and is the second-largest donor for the Latin America and Caribbean region.

Pedro Sánchez said he was 'very conscious of the fact' that humanitarian cooperation and vaccine donations were 'not managing to reach everyone in the world', and that refugees 'had particularly suffered' through the pandemic as they were frequently displaced and 'trapped' in 'extremely precarious areas', leaving them 'out of the loop of any conventional healthcare service network'.

Spain's president reiterated the need to reach the target of 70% of the world's inhabitants fully vaccinated by mid-2022, as pledged by the G20 at its recent summit in Rome – a target which, Sánchez says, is 'perfectly possible' and 'achievable if 'the whole of humanity pulls together'.