WHO: COVID-19 vaccine distribution is a “global failure”

The Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, lamented the “global failure” that occurs when it comes to sharing vaccines against Covid-19 to the poorest countries.

“We value the vaccines given by the G7 and the commitment of countries, like the United States, to share vaccine doses in June and July, but we ask others to follow these examples. We need vaccines to save lives», Underlined the leader of the organization.

Ghebreyesu clarified that more than half of the world’s high-income regions already have enough doses be able to vaccinate their populations and only 3 of 79 low-income states have reached similar levels

The WHO director warned that “many” Latin American countries have experienced “increased” levels of coronavirus transmission and, at the same time, In Africa, COVID-19 infections increased by 52% last week, deaths by 32%. “We hope it will only get worse, we need vaccines,” he said.

The consequences of the Delta variant

Delta variant of coronavirus, first detected in India and found in more than 70 countries, is on track to be dominant globally due to its greater transmission capacity, warned this Friday the chief scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO), Soumya Swaminathan.

This variant “is becoming more and more important and dominant in some parts and this is of concern given the information we have on its transmissibility“Added the director of Health Emergencies of the WHO, Mike ryan.

Experts agreed that the pandemic situation is still very dynamic, due to the variants circulating, and they claimed that will need more data from studies of the different vaccines used in each country to be able to determine their effectiveness against these new strains.

The delta variant is a 60% more transmissible than alpha (first detected in the UK), which in turn was a 50% more contagious than the original strain.

Experts recalled that reducing public health restrictions or declaring an untimely victory against the pandemic could contribute to the spread of this variant.

Why the Delta variant is more contagious

Viruses are mutating all the time. Most variants are insignificant, but some can make a virus more contagious. “The virus has machinery to multiply, that is, produce many copies of itself. This viral machinery It is very simple and that is why it makes mistakes when copying. Every mistake is a mutation. It’s a probabilistic question, pure mathematics. The more the virus circulates in the world, the more copies there will be, that is to say there will be more viruses with errors or mutations that can increase its “conformity”. Thus, the virus can be more infectious, more contagious or even do more damage “, he recently assured in his account of Twitter the scientist Andréa Gamarnik, head of the molecular virology laboratory of the Foundation of the Leloir Institute (FIL) and principal investigator of the CONICET from Argentina.

In a few words, the B.1.617 variant is a transformation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19 disease. It was first detected in India, in December 2020. However, this variant was reported as soon as March 24, after the Indian Ministry of Health declared that the L452R and E484Q mutations they had not been detected until December in the analysis of the samples.

According to this research, receiving two doses of Pfizer / BioNTech protects an 96% against hospitalizations due to the Delta variant, while Oxford / AstraZeneca offers 92% efficiency.

For its part, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) has indicated that its vaccine Sputnik V is most effective against the variant Delta of coronavirus, as found after a recent scientific study.

(With information from EUROPA PRESS)

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