As Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, believes, failure to pass the pandemic test means that even countries with high vaccination rates may be Back to March 2020 status.
Ghebreyesus has long advocated for high-income countries to help fill inequalities in healthcare by sharing vaccine doses with the most vulnerable populations in other countries. Focusing on a country’s own people rather than the world’s population will lead to more virus mutations, and in the global world, a deadly variant of one place poses a threat to all places.
Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday: “The more spread, the more variants will appear, and they may be more dangerous than the Delta variants that are causing this damage now.” “And the more variants, one of them evades the vaccine and brings us all back.” The greater the possibility of the origin.”
Wealthy countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and all European countries, have successfully vaccinated more than 50% of their population, and some are even close to 70%, which is the minimum threshold required for herd immunity. However, countries across Africa and the Middle East are even struggling to vaccinate their high-risk groups (such as health care workers and the elderly).
Ghebreyesus called it a kind of “moral outrage” that some countries talk about the possibility of boosting injections when other countries cannot protect hospital staff. If the distribution of vaccines is “more equitable,” Ghebreyesus said, the pandemic may be “under control now.”
The mutation only occurs when the virus has a chance to spread. This is how the Delta variant is produced. Fortunately, the vaccine has proven to be effective for people infected with Delta, despite breakthrough cases, and those who test positive usually do not get seriously ill or die.
However, experts like Ghebreyesus have long warned that not all variants will follow the same path.In January of this year, when the most vulnerable people in the United States were being vaccinated, Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health Twitter A world where the United States is vaccinated and other countries are not vaccinated may result in a variant that needs to be updated and all Americans are vaccinated again.
“This is an endless pandemic nightmare,” Jia said.
For a long time, vaccines have been regarded as the key to countries getting out of the epidemic. With nearly 70% of Americans vaccinated, restrictions on wearing masks and gatherings have been lifted across the United States. In places like the United States, it is considered the beginning of the end of the pandemic, and people have begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Ghebreyesus said that those who think the pandemic is over because their country is reopening are “living in a fool’s paradise”, adding that “unless all of us are safe, we will not be safe.” If With the emergence of vaccine-evading variants, countries with high vaccination rates may have to shut down again until a new vaccine is developed.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, more than 191 million people worldwide have been infected with COVID-19. Although the focus is on 2020, more deaths will be reported in 2021. The number of deaths in the second year of the pandemic was more than double the number seen in the world. In the first year, the virus claimed more than 4 million lives.
To prevent a more devastating wave of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, Ghebreyesus calls on the world to work together. By September, at least 10% of the population in each country will be vaccinated, 40% by the end of the year, and 70% in the middle of next year. If this happens, he believes the pandemic will end.
“I said at the beginning, I am often asked when the pandemic will end. This is everyone’s question,” Ghebreyesus said. “My answer is equally simple: when the world chooses to end the pandemic, it will end. It is in our hands.”
Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via The Associated Press, file
