Former prime minister Helen Clark is calling on rich nations, like New Zealand, to address the “disgraceful” Covid-19 immunisation rates of poorer countries, such as Papua New Guinea, by supplying them with more vaccine doses.

Clark, who was the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme from 2009 to 2017 after serving three terms in Aotearoa's top job, said on Tuesday that the vaccine “needs to be a gift to the world”.

“It is critical for donor countries to see the bigger picture, to see that this really is a time not to profit but to be stepping up to support all countries to come through [the pandemic].”

She wanted the Trips (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement to be waived on principle, during Covid and any future pandemics, to make vaccines cheaper and more accessible to poorer countries.

Clark made the comments at the Council for International Development’s annual conference, which was attended by Samoan Prime Minister Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown.

She added that high-income countries had ordered twice as many doses of Covid-19 vaccines as they needed: “This needs to be redistributed.”

In the Pacific, Papua New Guinea was most in need, Clark said. There the level of vaccination was on par with parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, which was “shocking”.

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“We’ve heard the saying all through Covid, ‘None of us are safe until all of us are safe,’ and haven’t we seen that in our own country? The same is true globally. If we let the disease run away in poor countries, we will not get on top of Covid,” Clark said.

New Zealand has previously supplied doses of the Pfizer vaccine to realm countries, including the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau.

Speaking at the conference, Clark also raised concerns about changing the original mandate of the Five Eyes security arrangement.

Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Clark said it used to be a “behind-the-scenes intelligence exchange” but had become a tool for power houses like the US to influence other countries.

“This is a huge threat to New Zealand’s foreign policy. [Five Eyes] shouldn’t be used like that,” Clark said.

She was also critical of Aukus – a security pact between Australia, the US and the UK for the Indo-Pacifc region.

Clark said the fact that this arrangement did not include any countries in the Indo-Pacific region had offended “everybody”.

“That’s a club you definitely don’t want to be in.”