Montreal, Canada:
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson desires the upcoming Group of Seven summit to attain agreement on Covid-19 vaccine passports and to open talks on a “world treaty” to prepare for future pandemics.
“We need to have agreements on issues such as vaccine passports, Covid status certification and the rest,” Johnson mentioned in an interview broadcast Sunday by Canadian public channel CBC.
“There has to be some sort of agreement then, at the G7 level to start, on how travel and passports are going to work.”
Johnson was speaking ahead of a June 11-13 summit of the G7 financial powers (US, Canada, Japan, Britain, France, Germany and Italy) which he will host in Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of England.
“What we need, I think, is a global treaty on pandemic preparedness,” he mentioned, adding that 2020 had been a “terrible year for humanity.”
To date, the pandemic has killed more than 3.5 million individuals worldwide. Britain was amongst the hardest-hit nations, although it has been recovering considering the fact that starting vaccinations.
Johnson mentioned it was also a undesirable time “for believers in global cooperation, because the world simply became balkanized,” with lots of nations slow to share stocks of protective gear, medicines and vaccines.
“We’ve got to do better than this,” the prime minister added.
“Vaccination has got to be a global enterprise,” Johnson mentioned in the interview taped Friday.
He mentioned it was vital that creating nations get vaccine supplies as immediately as achievable.
Rather than the objective set by some of vaccinating the world by 2024 or 2025, Johnson set a more ambitious target, saying, “We need to get this done by the end of next year.”
As to the debate more than the origins of the pandemic — which flared up lately when President Joe Biden ordered a new intelligence report on the trouble — Johnson mentioned he nonetheless leaned to the theory that it had spread from wild animals to humans, not leaked from a Chinese laboratory.
“But,” he added, “I’m not going to exclude any possibility.”
Johnson, who himself was hospitalized last year with a severe case of Covid, has faced sharp criticism in Britain for his early handling of the pandemic there.
The G7 summit will be an in-particular person affair. The group was set to meet last summer time in the US, but Covid issues led to the meeting’s cancellation.
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