In light of the COVID-19 outbreak along with the vaccine rollout, Paddy Crumlin, President of ITF warned that still too many countries are ignoring WHO advice to prioritise transport workers for Covid-19 vaccination.
According to ITF, it’s a hard and undeniable fact that transport workers have had neither the recognition nor the support they deserve.
Every day throughout the pandemic, transport workers have risked their lives to keep the world moving. This has not come without a price.
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One might think seafarers would be safe in the relative isolation out at sea, but the opposite has been and still is the case. Many have found themselves in a wrenching physical and emotional dilemma as travel and border restrictions have prevented them from signing off ships even after their scheduled duty, barring them from returning home month after month. In extreme cases seafarers have been onboard for nearly two years in a form of forced imprisonment.
At the peak, there were over 400,000 crew stranded and even after the impact on the global economy became clear, there are still around 200,000 seafarers trapped onboard vessels globally.
People in transport must be respected and acknowledged for their sacrifices as key workers in our global economy. Special provisions for their movement between countries must be allowed. It is clearly a civil and human inalienable right to have that protection in an international workforce. Yet many governments have been slow or unwilling to act.
….Paddy Crumlin added.
The failure to support transport workers is essentially a failure of health policy itself. With the roll-out of vaccines underway in some countries, the ITF is continuing to assert advocacy on behalf of transport workers to be prioritised in vaccination programmes, after health workers.
This is the only functional and effective approach and is in line with the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) roadmap for prioritising vaccine use, which puts transport workers in the second highest priority group. Last month, WHO and four other UN organisations called for seafarers and aircrew to be vaccinated as a priority.
Singapore is one country leading the way, having prioritised frontline transport workers for vaccination. Very soon, people will be able to use any part of Singapore’s transport system knowing that the people who work in it are vaccinated.
The ITF is calling on all countries to look closely at the benefits of prioritising vaccination for transport workers — for their economies, their health strategies and on humanitarian grounds.
We strongly oppose vaccine nationalism and are agitating that big pharma companies share their technology to increase production, distribution and access to vaccines beyond wealthy countries and economic and social elites. Patenting in essence is profiteering, access to all vaccines must be regulated as a fundamental human right.
…as Paddy Crumlin concluded.
