Geneva – The World Health Organization on Wednesday called on countries to avoid giving additional COVID-19 strokes until the end of the year, pointing to the millions of people around the world who have not yet received a single dose.
“I will not be silent when companies and countries that control the global supply of vaccines think that the world’s poor should be satisfied with the leftovers,” WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.
In statements from the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Tedros urged rich countries and vaccine manufacturers to prioritize getting the first blows to health workers and vulnerable populations in poorer nations than the promoters.
“We don’t want to see widespread use of reinforcements for fully vaccinated healthy people,” he said.
The WHO last month called for a moratorium on vaccines to boost the Covid-19 vaccine by the end of September to address the drastic inequity in dose distribution between rich and poor countries.
But Tedros acknowledged Wednesday that “there have been few changes in global situations since.
“So today I call for an extension of the moratorium until at least the end of the year,” he said.
High-income countries had pledged to give more than a billion doses of vaccine to the poorest countries, he said – “but less than 15 per cent of those doses have materialized.
“We don’t want any more promises,” he said. “We just want the vaccines.”
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Washington backed down against the call for a moratorium, saying President Joe Biden has “the responsibility to do everything possible to protect people in the United States.”
“We are doing both, we believe we can do both and we will continue to do both,” said Jen Psaki, White House press secretary.
Vaccine inequality
Despite the call for a moratorium, some countries have advocated reinforcements not only for vulnerable people but also for the general population, citing signs of declining vaccine effectiveness against the highly transmissible Delta variant.
The WHO has acknowledged that it could be an additional dose necessary for immunocompromised people, but stresses that, for healthy people, vaccines still seem very effective, especially to prevent serious illness.
“There is no compelling case to move forward with a widespread recommendation for booster doses,” WHO head of vaccines Kate O’Brien told the news conference.
The UN health agency has set a global goal of seeing all countries vaccinate at least 10% of their population by the end of this month and at least 40% by the end of this year.
He wants to see at least 70 percent of the world’s population vaccinated by the middle of next year.
But Tedros complained that while 90% of rich countries have reached 10% and more than 70% have already reached 40%, “not a single low-income country has achieved either goal.”
He expressed outrage over a statement from a pharmaceutical industry organization that the seven richest countries in the world, known as the G7, now had enough vaccines for all adults and adolescents – and to offer boosters to at-risk groups. , so the focus should shift to dose sharing.
“When I read this, I was dismayed,” he said.
“In fact, manufacturers and high-income countries have had the ability to vaccinate not only their own priority groups, but to simultaneously support the vaccination of these same groups in all countries.”
While Tedros spoke in Geneva, the WHO’s regional director for Africa said that for a variety of reasons, including the deployment of reinforcements in other places, the continent “would receive 25% fewer doses than we anticipated. at the end of the year “.
Scientists do warned for months that if the rich nations of the world do not ensure efficient vaccination of the rest of the planet, it will prolong the pandemic, costing the world economy a lot and leaving the coronavirus a long time and fertile ground to mutate into possibly more deadly strains.