Dictatorships and misinformation: why the last vaccine reservations in the world have avoided Covid’s footage

North Korea fell ill with two million cases of fever on Friday as Kim Jong-un faces harsh choices over whether to avoid foreign aid to protect his image of a strong man or accept foreign aid to prevent what health experts point out. catastrophic loss of lives and Covid-19.

North Korea and Eritrea – both impoverished and ruled by brutal authoritarians – are the only countries in the world to refuse to vaccinate their populations, putting some 32 million people at greater risk for serious illness and death from mutated versions of Covid.

In both isolated countries, it is said that the ruling elites have already been vaccinated, but on the foreign policy scene they have refused to participate in global vaccine-sharing initiatives.

Eritrea, the roughly six million repressive country in the Horn of Africa, with one of the worst human rights records in the world, is said to be full of misinformation claiming that the WHO-led Covax program is a Western tool for destroying Africa.

North Korea, which sealed its borders at the start of the pandemic, is said to have rejected millions of doses of AstraZeneca, China’s Sons and Russia’s Sputnik V for fear of side effects and demands for international monitoring.

The United States and neighboring South Korea were among many countries repeat vaccination aid offers and help manage the current outbreak but they were met with silence from Pyongyang.

“This has been the subject of endless conversations in salons in Seoul,” said John Delury, a professor at South Korea’s Yonsei University.

“The constant analysis was that beggars could be pickers and that North Koreans wanted only the best. They wanted Modern and Pfizer, two injections plus amplifiers for the entire population, and they waited until they got that, ”he said.