North Korea recently rejected nearly 3 million doses of the vaccine developed by the Chinese biotech company Sinovac that was offered to it under the COVAX program, which aims to ensure access to vaccines for the most countries. poor. According to a spokesperson for Unicef, an organization that is helping distribute vaccines as part of the program, the North Korean Ministry of Health said the doses offered should have been sent to other countries hit hardest by the pandemic, citing limited supplies of vaccines.
Although it seems unlikely, the authorities of North Korea have always maintained that no coronavirus infection has ever been confirmed in the country since the beginning of the pandemic. According to data from a recent report from the World Health Organization, more than 37,000 people have been tested for coronavirus in North Korea in the last week, including health workers and people who had shown flu-like symptoms. and all of them would have been negative.
North Korea was one of the first countries to close its borders and introduce particularly strict restrictions since the start of the pandemic, and among other things, it announced last April that it would not send its athletes to the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. to protect them “from the global health crisis caused by COVID-19″.
At the end of June of this year, the dictator Kim Jong-un had denounced an unspecified “serious accident” related to the coronavirus pandemic, which had caused “a great crisis” for the safety of the population. While it is unclear whether Kim was referring to a coronavirus outbreak, it was the second time in a few weeks that he had spoken publicly – and in a particularly unusual way – about the country’s troubles: on June 15 he had made an appeal to the Central Committee. of the Workers’ Party, the only party allowed in North Korea, to solve the problem of food shortages caused by limited agricultural production and the blocking of imports due to the pandemic.
In any case, the state media carried out extensive propaganda against vaccines, highlighting various examples of allegedly harmful side effects to people’s health, referring to some administrations in the United States and Europe. In May, for example, the country’s main newspaper said that “the vaccine does not [era] a cure for all problems “.
However, this wouldn’t even be the first time North Korea has refused coronavirus vaccines.
According to a South Korean think tank that has contacts with the country’s intelligence, quoted by BBC, North Korea rejected about 2 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine in July, citing alleged side effects. At the same time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also said he had offered North Korea the Sputnik V vaccine produced in Russia on several occasions. It is unclear whether Russia’s offers were accepted or not.
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