WHO predicts COVID-19 will end in 2022
World Health Organisation (WHO) Director General, Tedros Ghebreyesus, has expressed optimism that COVID-19 pandemic will end in 2022.
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The DG said at a press briefing on Wednesday that it was two years ago, as people gathered for New Year’s Eve celebrations, that a new global threat emerged.
Tedros said he believed the pandemic will end next year because, two years into the situation, “we know the virus very well and we have all the tools [to fight it].”
Since then, 1.8 million deaths were recorded in 2020 and 3.5 million in 2021, but the actual number is much higher. There are also millions of people dealing with long-term consequences from the virus.
The UN health agency has long decried the glaring inequity in access to Covid vaccines.
Allowing Covid to spread unabated in some places dramatically increases the chance of new, more dangerous variants emerging, it argues.
The World Health Organization chief warned Wednesday that the rush in wealthy countries to roll out additional Covid vaccine doses was deepening the inequity in access to jabs that is prolonging the pandemic.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisted that the priority must remain to get vaccines to vulnerable people everywhere rather than giving additional doses to the already vaccinated.
“No country can boost its way out of the pandemic,” he told reporters.
“2022 must be the end of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, speaking Wednesday at the organisation’s last planned briefing of the year on the coronavirus.
Tedros said he believed the pandemic will end next year because, two years into the situation, “we know the virus very well and we have all the tools [to fight it].”
The UN health agency has long decried the glaring inequity in access to Covid vaccines.
Allowing Covid to spread unabated in some places dramatically increases the chance of new, more dangerous variants emerging, it argues.
“Blanket booster programmes are likely to prolong the pandemic, rather than ending it, by diverting supply to countries that already have high levels of vaccination coverage, giving the virus more opportunity to spread and mutate,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.
Months ago, Tedros called in vain for a moratorium on booster doses to vaccinated, healthy people until at least 40 percent of people in all countries had received a first jab.
He pointed out Wednesday that while enough vaccines had been given to people globally this year to reach that target, distortions in global supply meant that only half the world’s countries had done so.
According to UN figures, about 67 percent of people in high-income countries have had at least one vaccine dose — but not even 10 percent in low-income countries.
“It’s frankly difficult to understand how a year since the first vaccines were administered, three in four health workers in Africa remain unvaccinated,” said Tedros.
Early data indicates that it could be better at dodging some vaccine protections, spurring the rush to provide boosters.
But Tedros insisted Wednesday that “the vaccines we have remain effective against both the Delta and Omicron variants.”
“It’s important to remember that the vast majority of hospitalisations and deaths are in unvaccinated people, not un-boosted people,” he said.
The WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunisation also recommended Wednesday against blanket booster programmes, insisting additional doses should be “targeted to the population groups at highest risk of serious disease and those necessary to protect the health system”.
So far, 120 countries have begun implementing programmes to administer booster vaccines or additional doses, it said but none of them are low-income countries.
Early on, the director-general acknowledged that beating the new health threat would require science, solutions, and solidarity.
While elaborating on some successes, such as the development of new vaccines, which he said “represent a scientific masterclass”, the WHO official lamented that politics too often triumphed over solidarity.
“Populism, narrow nationalism and hoarding of health tools, including masks, therapeutics, diagnostics and vaccines, by a small number of countries undermined equity, and created the ideal conditions for the emergence of new variants,” he said.
Moreover, misinformation and disinformation, have also been “a constant distraction, undermining science and trust in lifesaving health tools”.
He highlighted as a case in point that huge waves of infections have swept Europe and many other countries causing the unvaccinated to die disproportionally.
The unvaccinated are many times more at risk of dying from either variant.
As the pandemic drags on, new variants could become fully resistant to current vaccines or past infection, necessitating vaccine adaptations.
For Ghebreyesus, as any new vaccine update could mean a new supply shortage, it is important to build up local manufacturing supply.
One way to increase production of life-saving tools, he said, is to pool technology, as in the new WHO Bio Hub System, a mechanism to voluntarily share novel biological materials.
He also pointed to the new WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, based in Berlin, Gerrmany.
The WHO chief called for the development of a new accord between nations, saying it would be “a key pillar” of a world better prepared to deal with the next disease.
“I hope to see negotiations move swiftly and leaders to act with ambition,” he said.
