A day after data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that nearly half of the adult population in the country has been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, the head of the World Health Organization on Monday sharply criticized the “scandalous inequity” of global vaccine access and said no single nation can assume it’s safe from the virus until all are.
“Almost 18 months into the defining health crisis of our age, the world remains in a very dangerous situation,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in his opening remarks to the organization’s annual assembly of health ministers. Underscoring the danger, the WHO said in a report last week that the global death toll from Covid-19 is likely two to three times higher than officially reported, claiming the lives of as many as eight million people thus far.
“No country should assume it is out of the woods, no matter its vaccination rate.”
—Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHODespite a downtown in Covid-19 cases and deaths over past three weeks, Tedros warned that the situation is still “fragile.”
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“No country should assume it is out of the woods,” he said, “no matter its vaccination rate.”
Among the concerns Tedros laid out is that the constantly changing nature of the virus could mean that current vaccines will be ineffective against new variants.
“We must be very clear,” he said. “The pandemic is not over, and it will not be over until and unless transmission is controlled in every last country.”
Key to making that happen is for nations to share vaccines with COVAX, the WHO-led global initiative, said Tedros. Right now, he said, COVAX is facing a “vastly inadequate” supply of doses.
Some wealthy nations like the U.S., meanwhile, have a surplus of vaccine doses.
“The ongoing vaccine crisis is a scandalous inequity that is perpetuating the pandemic,” Tedros said. “More than 75% of all vaccines have been administered in just 10 countries.”
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