Covid-19: WHO, UNICEF appeal for vaccine solidarity
The World Health Organisation, WHO and UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF have made an urgent appeal for vaccine solidarity, noting that Covid-19 has shown that our fates are inextricably linked.
The heads of WHO, Tedros Ghebreyesus, and UNICEF, Henrietta Fore, made the call in a joint statement posted on WHO website.
According to them, in the Covid-19 vaccine race, we either win together or lose together.
Ghebreyesus and Fore, however, called on leaders “to look beyond their borders and employ a vaccine strategy that can actually end the pandemic and limit variants.
“Of the 128 million doses administered so far, more than three-quarters of vaccinations have been in just 10 of the wealthiest nations,” they said.
This is a “self-defeating strategy” that will cost lives and livelihoods, the UN officials said, before warning that it would also give the virus the chance “to mutate and evade vaccines”, while also undermining economic recovery.
“So that vaccine rollouts can begin in all countries of the world in the first 100 days of 2021,” the WHO and UNICEF chiefs said.
“It was imperative that health workers who have been on the frontlines of the pandemic in lower and middle-income settings should be protected first.”
They also called for the Covid response initiative, known as Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator, ACT, to be fully funded, to help developing countries to deploy vaccines.
“If fully funded, the ACT Accelerator could return up to $166 for every dollar invested,’’ the UN officials stated.
In a related development, WHO expert panel countered concerns over the efficacy of the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine on Wednesday, insisting that “it’s the right thing to do” to use it – even in countries where variants had surfaced.
“Even if you have the circulation of a variant in a country, there is no reason that we see for now, not to use the AstraZeneca vaccine as indicated.
“There is no reason not to use it to be able to reduce the levels of severe disease in that population,” said Dr Alejandro Cravioto, Chair of the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunisation, SAGE.
The development follows the recent release of data from a study in South Africa indicating that the AstraZeneca jab provided little protection against a variant of the new coronavirus among older people.
NP/Confidence Okwuchi
