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. “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. Allowing Covid to spread unabated in some places dramatically increases the chance of new, more dangerous variants emerging, it argues. 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. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO lead on the Covid pandemic, stressed that people now know what they need to do, from wearing masks to physical distancing.

Source: Punch December 23, 2021 02:20 UTC