Speaking to BBC Radio 4 Today programme, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown demanded Britain, the USA, the European Union and Japan pay an astonishing 60 percent of a suggested £22 billion fund which would pay for poor countries to jab its citizens. He wants G7 leaders to commit to the multi-billion programme at the next G7 Summit in Cornwall in June to help lift poorer countries out of the grip of coronavirus and get the world back on track. But in a shocking move, he demanded Western nations pay for more of the fund than China.
Mr Brown said: “If we can’t vaccinate in 2021, or 2022 or 2023 in the poorest countries, the disease is going to spread, it’s going to mutate, it’s going to come back to destroy lives and livelihoods in our own country.”
He added that “it’s not an act of charity to do this” but instead the fund would be “in our own national self-interest” adding “there’s economic gain and of course lives are saved.”
The former Prime Minister then suggested “what I would like to see is the richest countries coming together, they could offer 60 percent of the fund depending on their capacity to pay.”
But in a shocking moment, the Scot demanded America pays 25 percent, Europe 25 percent, Japan nearly 10 percent of the fund “then the rest of the world could come in.”
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He went on to say: “China, then Russia, then the oil states, then Scandinavia and other states could follow” in paying for the rest of the fund adding this was “a fair burden-sharing agreement.”
Brown argued the £22 billion fund would “save more money because the cost on trade being disrupted and business not happening has been massive.”
He explained how a study being carried out in Britain suggests the wealthiest nations in the world would save 500 billion dollars by 2025 if efforts were made to vaccinate the world and hold back the virus adding “it certainly makes economic sense, the cost may be in millions, the gain in trillions.”
The former Prime Minister concluded that the world “can’t rely on the global equivalent of a charity fundraiser, we can t just ask people to put up their hands and pass round the begging board.”
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Anger has mounted at China over recent months as it exerts its power in all corners of the world through military expansion and political pressure.
And last month the World Health Organisation, who had been investigating the origins of the coronavirus in China, returned a report which critics branded as “totally whitewashed” by the Chinese government.
It is understood health investigators on the trip were escorted everywhere they went and blocked from visiting certain sites they believed could hold answers to the origin of the coronavirus.
The blinkered report said the virus did not originate in a Wuhan lab as many experts believed but Western nations said the report was a cover-up by the Chinese Government and demanded a new, fully independent investigation take place imminently.
