ON ROAD TO ENDING PANDEMIC, NUMBER OF COVID-19 JABS EXCEEDS INFECTION: WHO

Sat 06 February 2021:

The number of vaccinations against COVID-19 has now overtaken the number of reported infections globally, but more than three-quarters of vaccinations are in just 10 countries, the World Health Organization chief Tedros said on Friday.

“In one sense, that’s good news and a remarkable achievement in such a short timeframe,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus at a twice-weekly webinar from the health body’s headquarters in Geneva.

Despite the landmark data, it remains unclear how long it will take to vaccinate the world. Many of those vaccinated have received only one of two doses required.

The more 75% of those vaccinations in just 10 countries account for almost 60% of global GDP.

He said that around 130 countries, with 2.5 billion people, have not administered a single dose.

Tedros did not spell out any figures for numbers of jabs, but the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine said more than 105 million COVID-19 cases worldwide have been confirmed with nearly 2.29 million deaths.

The WHO chief said all governments must protect their people and that some countries had already vaccinated large proportions of their population who are at lower risk of severe disease or death.

“But once countries with vaccines have vaccinated their own health workers and older people, the best way to protect the rest of their own population is to share vaccines so other countries can do the same,” said Tedros.

“That’s because the longer it takes to vaccinate those most at risk everywhere, the more opportunity we give the virus to mutate and evade vaccines,” he said.

Tedros warned that unless the world suppresses the virus everywhere, “we could end up back at square one.”

On Wednesday, he said COVAX that aims to distribute novel coronavirus vaccines equitably published its forecast for distributing doses to participating countries.

“This is a very exciting moment. Countries are ready to go, but the vaccines aren’t there. We need countries to share doses once they have finished vaccinating health workers and older people,” said Tedros.

“But we also need a massive scale-up in production,” said the WHO chief.

Last week, Tedros said the French pharma company Sanofi announced it would make its manufacturing infrastructure available to support the US-German Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine production.

“We call on other companies to follow this example,” said Tedros.

A total of 104.9 million vaccine doses have been administered, according to University of Oxford-based Our World in Data and the latest data on Wednesday from the US-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The total vaccinated now exceeds the 104.1 million Covid-19 cases of infection in a Reuters global tracker.

Covid-19 infections are still rising in 44 countries and the virus has killed at least 2.26 million people globally, according to the Reuters tracker. Health experts are racing to vaccinate as many as possible in the face of new variants that are more contagious.

Israel leads the world, having administered enough vaccine doses for 28% of its population, assuming every person needs two doses, according to Our World in Data.