At least 115,000 overall health and care workers have died from Covid-19 due to the fact the starting of the pandemic, the WHO chief stated Monday, calling for a dramatic scale-up of vaccination in all nations.
At the opening of the World Health Organization’s major annual assembly, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hailed the sacrifices made by overall health workers about the world to battle the pandemic.
“For almost 18 months, health and care workers all over the world have stood in the breach between life and death,” he stated.
“They have saved countless lives and fought for others who, despite their best efforts, slipped away.
“Many have themselves turn into infected, and whilst reporting is scant, we estimate that at least 115,000 overall health and care workers have paid the ultimate value in the service of other people.”
He said many health workers have since the start of the crisis felt “frustrated, helpless and unprotected, with a lack of access to individual protective gear and vaccines.”
And they are not alone. He described the overall inequity in access to vaccines as “scandalous”, warning it was “perpetuating the pandemic.”
More than 75 percent of all Covid-19 vaccines have gone to just 10 countries.
“The quantity of doses administered globally so far would have been sufficient to cover all overall health workers and older men and women if they had been distributed equitably,” he said.
“There is no diplomatic way to say it: that compact group of nations that make and purchase the majority of the world’s vaccines manage the fate of the rest of the world.”
He urged those countries that have large stocks of vaccines to share them, and greater cooperation to scale up production and distribution of the jabs.
The WHO and others have created Covax, a global vaccine-sharing programme, but it remains severely underfunded and has faced significant supply shortages, delaying efforts to roll out jabs in poorer countries.
“We have shipped each single one of the 72 million doses we have been capable to get our hands on so far to 125 nations and economies,” Tedros said.
But he lamented that those doses were only enough to barely cover one percent of the combined populations in those countries.
The WHO chief stressed the need to urgently fix the imbalance.
“Today, I’m calling on member states to help a enormous push to vaccinate at least 10 % of the population of each nation by September,” he stated, calling for the coverage to be expanded to 30 % by the finish of the year.
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