The executive director of the World Health Organization (WHO) emergency program, Mike Ryan, speaks at a press conference on the new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
Covid-19 is likely to be “here to stay with us,” as the virus continues to mutate in unvaccinated countries around the world and previous hopes of eradicating the virus diminish, global health officials said Tuesday.
“I think this virus is here to stay with us and it will evolve like the flu pandemic viruses, it will evolve to become one of the other viruses that affect us,” said Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program. .
World health agency officials have already said vaccines do not guarantee the world would eradicate Covid-19 as if it had other viruses. Several leading health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House, and Stephane Bancel, CEO of vaccine maker Covid Moderna, have warned that the world will have to live with Covid forever, just like the flu.
“People have said we will eliminate or eradicate the virus,” Ryan said. “No, we are not, very, very unlikely.
If the world had taken initial steps to stop the spread of the virus, the current situation could have been very different, WHO officials said.
“We had a chance at the beginning of this pandemic,” Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical manager at Covid-19, said on Tuesday. “This pandemic didn’t need to be that bad.”