GENEVA
Globally, the number of vaccines against COVID-19 has now surpassed the number of reported diseases, but more than three-quarters of vaccines in just 10 countries, the head of the World Health Organization said Friday.
“In a sense, that is good news and a remarkable achievement in such a short time,” WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said at a twice-weekly webinar from the health body’s headquarters in Geneva.
The remaining 75% of these vaccines in just 10 countries make up nearly 60% of global GDP.
He said about 130 countries, with 2.5 billion people, have not given a single dose.
Tedros did not release any figures for jabs numbers, but Johns Hopkins University of Medicine said more than 105 million COVID-19 cases worldwide have been diagnosed with nearly 2.29 million deaths.
The WHO leader said that all governments must protect their people and that some countries have had large proportions of their population at lower risk of serious disease or death.
“But once vaccinated countries have their own health workers and the elderly, the best way to protect the rest of their population is to share vaccines so that other countries can do the same, ”said Tedros.
“That’s because the longer it takes to vaccinate those most at risk everywhere, the more chances we have of the virus to suffocate and avoid vaccines,” ”He said.
Tedros warned that if the world did not spread the virus everywhere, “we could go back to square one. ”
On Wednesday, he said that COVAX which aims to release coronavirus vaccines published a novel to predict the distribution of doses to participating countries.
“This is a very exciting time. Countries are ready to leave, but the vaccines are not. We need countries to share doses once they are ready to vaccinate health workers and the elderly, ”said Tedros.
“But we also need a big increase in output,” said the WHO chief.
Last week, Tedros said that French pharma company Sanofi announced it would build its manufacturing infrastructure to support US-German Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine production.
“We urge other companies to follow suit,” said Tedros.
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