Tony Blair has claimed that the whole world has to get vaccinated “fast” before vaccine-resistant mutations occur, and that it could all be done by the end of 2021.
After failing to stop Brexit, the former Labour prime minister has sought to reinvent himself this year as a leading figure in Britain’s Chinese coronavirus response, reportedly advising the health secretary on the government’s proposals. He also called for “radically accelerated” plans on “health passports” from late December, just weeks after the UK approved its first vaccine.
Mr Blair has now set his sights on the whole world being vaccinated, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday: “The single biggest risk we have right now is not the absence of vaccination in the UK, because we’re doing well on vaccination. The single biggest risk we have is that unless the world gets vaccinated fast, then we run the risk of further mutations and getting a mutation eventually that we find the vaccines aren’t effective against.”
“We [the Tony Blair Institute] will produce a report in the next few weeks showing how we could, if the world got its act together, vaccinate the entire world in 2021 — really ambitious, but it’s really necessary,” Blair added.
The globalist-progressive former leader has claimed in recent months that the Chinese virus could “be with us probably for some years” and had pushed Prime Minister Boris Johnson to use the UK’s leadership of the G7 to create a “Global Covid Travel Pass”, alleging on the matter that “the UK faces a choice: lead or be led.”
As Britain prepared to unveil plans for releasing lockdown following a successful vaccination campaign, Blair’s think tank, the Tony Blair Institute, insisted in February that Johnson retain the tiered system, allowing for “both regional and local variation in restrictions” rather than the government’s nationwide measures.
Despite his irrelevancy in matters related to the UK’s association with the EU, Mr Blair has managed to find a reason to tie his favourite topic of Brexit into his new passion of mass vaccination, in blaming the UK’s exit from the bloc for Europe’s failed inoculation programme.
Blair remarked in March that had the UK not left the EU, Britain would have effectively saved the bloc from itself by rejecting plans to centralise vaccine procurement and put it solely under the control of the European Commission.
“You know that I am an avowed opponent of Brexit. It is and will remain a terrible strategic mistake for my country,” Blair could not help but mention in his interview with European media while crediting Brexit Britain for its solo swift response in developing vaccines.
He went on to claim that “we could have done all of this within the EU. Conversely, I find it rather interesting what the EU is missing out on because Great Britain is no longer a member of the EU.”
Continuing: “If we British were still in the EU, the procurement of the vaccine would not have been taken out of the hands of the nation-states. Any British government would have insisted on that.
“That is the only reason why Europe is now ten weeks behind.”
Despite the UK’s success, Blair went on to criticise national governments planning their own pandemic response, saying that countries should coordinate with “the whole world”, suggesting that successful vaccine nations should prioritise others above their own citizens by stating that such global coordination should entail “how we distribute the vaccine to everyone”.
While now positioning himself as a pandemic guru, sections of Blair’s 2011 autobiography, which resurfaced last month, had revealed he admitted to doing “the minimum” to prepare for a suspected 2005 flu outbreak, which he labelled at the time as a “panpanic”.