Covid-19 deaths will exceed those of 20 …

The World Health Organization (WHO) opened its annual meeting with the Covid-19 pandemic even more active than last year. Infections recorded so far in 2021 have already surpassed those recorded throughout 2020, while in the next three weeks The same will be true of the death toll, which already stands at 3.4 million in total. In this context, to date, three out of four vaccine doses have been inoculated in only ten countries.

The positive data are, overall, a third consecutive week of decrease in cases is observedBut “the situation in the world is very fragile and no country can say that it is safe,” warned the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“We need to be clear that the pandemic has not ended and will not be until transmission is brought under control in all countries, finished Ghebreyesus and called for a global effort to ensure that 10% of the population of each country has been vaccinated against the coronavirus by September.

“We are at war with a virus. We need the logic and urgency of a war economy to increase the capacity of our weapons“, Assured the Secretary General of the UN, Anotonio Guterres, in Geneva, at the opening of the annual meeting of the UN health body.

The figure of 3.4 million deaths actually reaches around 6 to 8 million, according to the WHO, if we add the indirect victims. The number of jobs lost due to the pandemic stands at 500 million and the deceased health workers reach 115,000.

These numbers might not be the worst-case scenario should new, more aggressive variants of the virus emerge. The WHO chief clarified that, for the moment, none of the variants from the original coronavirus causing the pandemic have affected the vaccines or treatments used, but stressed that no one can guarantee that he will continue to do so. “The virus is constantly evolving and this could make our tools ineffective”, Held.

Unequal access to vaccines

In this context, the head of the WHO called for an end to inequalities in access to vaccines, that threatens to perpetuate the pandemic. “A small number of countries that manufacture and buy most vaccines control the fate of the rest of the world,” he said.

According to WHO estimates, if the administration of vaccines had been fairer from the start, the 1.5 billion doses inoculated to date would have served to protect all health workers and groups at risk on the planet. .

“We could be in a much better situation“lamented Tedros, who pointed out that countries that have started immunizing children and people at low risk” are doing so at the expense of health workers and vulnerable people in other countries.

Faced with this situation, Ghebreyesus raised the new objectives that the WHO will have: By September, we will claim to have vaccinated at least 10% of the population of all countries on the planet, and that this percentage reaches 30 percent by the end of the year. “This means that by September, we need vaccines to immunize an additional 250 million people in low- and middle-income countries,” Tedros said.

The Director-General pointed out that the COVAX program, with which WHO and other organizations are trying to provide access to vaccines to countries with fewer resources, has distributed 72 million doses in 125 countries. “However, these doses were only sufficient to immunize about one percent of the population of these countries,” said the head of the WHO.

In order to achieve the targets, he called on developed country members of WHO to continue giving doses of COVAX so that none are wasted, and on pharmaceutical companies to commit that half of their production annual vaccine is donated to this solidarity distribution program.