Aix-en-Provence (AFP)
Rich countries have made several "mistakes" in their international approach to the Covid-19 pandemic, which is worrying at a time when cooperation is necessary in the face of the climate emergency, said Nobel laureate in economics Esther Duflo on Sunday.
According to her, the rich countries of the Western world have missed several "opportunities to act" to get the planet out of the pandemic, in particular by not allowing poorer countries to massively vaccinate their population, she detailed on Sunday. of a debate at the Economic Meetings of Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France.
"For this reason, I am very worried about future cooperation between the nations of the world, in particular on the problems that will arise during the COP26 (the World Climate Conference scheduled for November in Glasgow, Editor's note)", added Ester Duflo.
Despite the "good decision" to invest in the production of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against Covid-19 even before their approval, rich countries chose "very early in the pandemic" to produce too small a volume of vaccines .
A "first error" of management, which today results in that only "1% of the population" of poor countries "received a first dose of vaccine," said Ms. Duflo.
In addition, according to the Nobel Prize for Economics, "no real effort" of international financial aid has been made to deal with the consequences of the pandemic on the economic level, in particular during periods of confinement.
"Rich countries were able to spend 20% of their GDP" on financial aid and fiscal measures to support their economy, against only "2% of GDP" in poor countries.
"Result: the human costs of containments (...) were so enormous" in poor countries, that "in the following waves it was not possible" to reproduce such restrictive measures, causing a "catastrophic" spread. of the epidemic, judged Esther Duflo, citing the case of India, which has seen the spread of a variant of the much more contagious virus, the Delta, and today counts more than 400,000 deaths from the epidemic.
"The missed opportunities have multiplied," said Duflo, who cited an IMF report putting the cost of immunizing 40% of the world's population in 2021 and 60% in 2022 at $ 50 billion, while the economic benefit to the world would be $ 9 trillion.
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