Ammon News -

HRH Prince El-Hassan bin Talal, the Honorary President of the World Refugee & Migration Council (WRMC), has called for equitable supply and distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine by "moving from a policy crafted and implemented on the status-based approach towards a policy crafted and implemented on equal basis and with an eye towards alleviating vulnerability."

In a Zoom-powered seminar organized last week by the WRMC under the title "Vaccine Equity for the Forcibly Displaced", Prince El-Hassan said: "If the disease knows neither borders nor boundaries, then why should the cure?".

Prince Hassan indicated that the world must benefit from the lessons learned from this pandemic to develop for the better, stressing that the issue must be addressed from a perspective that goes beyond the individual scope of a particular country to a regional and global scale.

"The issue is not that the vaccines are scarce, but that the vaccines have been made scarce – "supply-constrained conditions," as in the words of the World Health Organization’s report," His Royal Highness added.

His Highness said: "When talking about the Mashreq, regional integration and cooperation must be strengthened away from looking at the benefit of each country without the other, as we are all affected by each other," warning that "if the situation continues as it is, instead of disparities in rates of disease and death – fault-lines will take on further disparities of the socio-economic kind: greater poverty, insecurity, and injustice."

His Highness noted that Jordan is working hard to reconcile economic pressures and human needs to include host and affected communities.

His Highness referred to the need to achieve vaccine equity, away from exclusion, pointing out that the Palestinian people was not able to obtain "sufficient" quantities of the vaccine compared to what Israel obtained.