Greta Thunberg To Skip COP26 Conference Citing Unfair Vaccine Rollouts

COP26 conference: The 18-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg has said on Friday, April 9, that she has planned to skip the COP26 Climate Summit in November taking place in Glasgow, Scotland.

She said that the uneven rollout of Covid-19 vaccine campaigns means that countries cannot participate on even terms.

Thunberg has said that richer countries would be vaccinating younger people by November which is placing people of other parts of the world at a risk. In places like Africa, Asia, Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands are receiving lesser amounts of vaccines as compared to the developed countries of the world.

In an interview with AFP, the young climate activist said that if the development of vaccine distribution remains inequitable, she shall not attend the COP26 conference.

She also said if everyone could not attend the conference on the same terms, it should be postponed. The said conference has already been postponed once as it was scheduled to take place in November of 2020.

"Inequality and climate injustice is already at the heart of the climate crisis," Thunberg posted on Twitter.

She said that she would love to attend the conference but she would not do it unless the vaccine distribution is equal around the world, and everyone can take part in it on the same terms. She said that she could revise her decisions if the conditions are changed.

Greta called out the nations that denied sharing their vaccines with countries that have less access to them and said that it is undemocratic if people cannot be vaccinated equally and it would worsen the problem even more.

Greta Thunberg got the public's attention in 2018 as she began a solo protest outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm against increasing global warming. She skipped her Friday class at school and went to demand the government of Sweden to take actions against climate change.

In the time of one month, from 135 countries, about two million students joined Thunberg's "School Strike for the Climate" campaign, setting up their own picket lines.

Thunberg earned Amnesty International's top Human Rights Prize and Swedish Right Livelihood Award at the age of 15 in 2018, for campaigning against climate change.

In the year 2019, Greta Thunberg was named Person of the Year by Time Magazine.