Geneva:
The World Health Organization known as Wednesday for nations to keep away from providing out additional Covid jabs till year-finish, pointing to the millions worldwide who have however to obtain a single dose.
“I will not stay silent when the companies and countries that control the global supply of vaccines think the world’s poor should be satisfied with leftovers,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists.
Speaking from WHO’s headquarters in Geneva, Tedros urged wealthy nations and vaccine makers to prioritise acquiring the initially jabs to well being workers and vulnerable populations in poorer nations more than boosters.
“We do not want to see widespread use of boosters for healthy people who are fully vaccinated,” he mentioned.
The WHO known as last month for a moratorium on Covid-19 vaccine booster shots till the finish of September to address the drastic inequity in dose distribution involving wealthy and poor nations.
But Tedros acknowledged Wednesday that there had “been little change in the global situations since then.
“So today I am calling for an extension of the moratorium till at least the finish of the year,” he said.
High-income countries had promised to donate more than one billion vaccine doses to poorer countries, he said — “but significantly less than 15 % of these doses have materialised.
“We don’t want any more promises,” he mentioned. “We just want the vaccines.”
“Appalled”
Despite the contact for a moratorium, some nations have been arguing for booster jabs not only for vulnerable individuals but also for the wider population, citing indicators of waning vaccine effectiveness against the very transmissive Delta variant.
The WHO has acknowledged that an added dose could be required for immunocompromised individuals, but stresses that for healthier individuals, the vaccines nevertheless appear incredibly productive, in particular in stopping extreme illness.
“There is not a compelling case to move forward with a generalised recommendation for booster doses,” Kate O’Brien, the WHO’s vaccines chief, told Wednesday’s news conference.
The UN well being agency has set a worldwide target of seeing each nation vaccinate at least 10 % of its population by the finish of this month, and at least 40 % by the finish of this year.
It desires to see at least 70 % of the world’s population vaccinated by the middle of next year.
But Tedros lamented that though 90 % of wealthy nations have hit the 10-% mark, and more than 70 % have currently reached 40-%, “not a single low-income country has reached either target”.
He expressed outrage at a statement by a pharmaceutical sector organisation that the world’s seven wealthiest nations, identified as the G7, now had sufficient vaccines for all adults and teenagers — and to offer you boosters to at-threat groups — and so the focus should really shift to dose sharing.
“When I read this, I was appalled,” he mentioned.
“In reality, manufacturers and high-income countries have long had the capacity to not only vaccinate their own priority groups, but to simultaneously support the vaccination of those same groups in all countries.”
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