North Korea is one of the only nations that has not administered any coronavirus vaccines
said Tomás Ojea Quintana, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on North Korean human rights. In a recent report, Quintana said the country’s “covid restrictions, including border closures, appear to have prevented an outbreak inside the country, though likely at considerable cost to the wider health situation and further exacerbating economic deprivation.
”No one is clear on the exact situation inside the country, however, because North Korea’s retreat inward in the pandemic has restricted remaining channels of information — with diplomats, humanitarian aid groups and tourists no longer able to enter. In light of the impending crisis, Quintana urged the international community to find some way to get the needed 60 million doses into the country to immunize its population of 25 million.nearly 3 million doses of China’s Sinovac vaccine, saying shipments should go to other countries that need them more. North Korea also rejected 2 million doses of the AstraZeneca-Oxford University vaccine out of apparent concerns about potential side effects. North Korean officials have privately indicated that they would prefer mRNA vaccines, such as Pfizer or Moderna, according to aby a panel of experts convened by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. The panel concluded that North Korea probably would be interested in a high-volume offer of an mRNA vaccine. With no vaccines at all, North Korea risks becoming the epicenter of new variants as a result of the population’s low immunity to the virus, the panel found.“It is inevitable that they will have to reopen the border, and when they do, the best way to protect their population — which is what they’re already interested in — is to vaccinate the population as much as possible, which they are capable of doing,” said Kee Park, a global health expert at Harvard Medical School who has worked on health-care projects in North Korea. “They have to take a different strategy at this point. Zero covid strategy is starting to crumble,” Park said. Officials at the North Korean Mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment on whether the country intends to accept vaccines or what it hopes to see before moving forward on an immunization program. North Korea and Eritrea are now the only two countries in the world that have not administered vaccines.The Gavi Alliance, part of the Covax initiative that aims to deliver vaccines to the world’s most vulnerable people, said this month that it no longer has vaccine doses allocated for North Korea but that they could be made available again if the country changes its mind and starts an immunization program and meets technical requirements.
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