Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), believes that the ideal conditions exist for the appearance of a more dangerous variant of Covid-19, as he declared this Friday during his speech at the Munich Security Conference (Germany).
“The high vaccination rates in some countries, combined with the lower severity of omicron, it is pushing a dangerous narrative that the pandemic is over,” he explained. “But that’s not the case, not when 70,000 people a week are dying from a preventable and treatable disease,” he added.
In this way, recalled that 83% of the population in Africa have not yet received a single dose of a drug against the disease, while health systems continue to struggle with the number of cases while the highly transmissible virus “circulates almost uncontrollably” and its evolution is difficult to track.
“We have the tools”
“In fact, the conditions are ideal for more transmissible and more dangerous variants to emerge,” continuous. “But we can end the Covid-19 pandemic as a global health emergency this year. We have the tools. We have the knowledge,” he asserted.
For all this, Ghebreyesus called on all countries to fill the urgent $16 billion funding gap for the Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) so that vaccines, tests, treatments, and personal protective equipment are available everywhere.
“Compared to the costs of another year of economic turbulence, $16 billion is downright peanuts,” he pointed out, while stressing the need to end this pandemic and learn the lessons it is leaving us.
“Strengthen the role of WHO”
The head of the WHO considers that to improve global health security three things are necessary: Increase cooperation and collaboration; strengthen systems and tools to prevent, detect and rapidly respond to epidemics and pandemics; and secure stronger funding.
In Ghebreyesus’ view, any effort to strengthen the global health security architecture can only be successful if it also strengthens the role of the WHO at its core, rather than creating more mechanisms that would only create further fragmentation and make the world a lesser place. sure.
“When will the Covid-19 pandemic end? It will end when we decide to end it. Because in the end it is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice”, concluded the director general of the World Health Organization.