Ken Shuttleworth (Letters, December 25) says all foreign aid should be spent on Covid vaccines for the developing world. But there is already a global system for this called Covax, coordinated by the Global Vaccine Alliance (GAVI), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The problem with spending all aid targeting just one virus, however, is that other diseases are killing more people, mainly children, in the poorest countries of the world. During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the disruption to treatment for malaria caused more deaths than Ebola itself. Malaria has killed ten times as many people as Covid in Africa this year. But the biggest killers of children in Africa remain the entirely preventable diseases of pneumonia and diarrhoea.

Read more: 'Time for our country to lead once again'

Although it’s a nice idea to put all of our funding into addressing one problem, it’s not how the world works because that’s not how people live their lives. That’s why all the countries of the world agreed the UN Global Goals: 17 targets for people and planet, heath and education, gender and disability, so that no one would be left behind.

Richard Darlington,

Ashland, Milton Keynes