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The acute corona vaccine shortage in poorer countries threatens the entire world, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Ahead of the G20 summit, the WHO is therefore calling on the 20 major industrialized and emerging countries to act as quickly as possible. Providing care to the poorest is solely a matter of will, Bruce Aylward, on the WHO’s leadership team for vaccination issues too constantly, said in Geneva. “Because these 20 countries control the vaccine supply.”
The G20 summit takes place this weekend in Rome. The WHO warns that in countries with low vaccination rates, new virus variants can develop that are so dangerous that previous vaccines and drugs are ineffective against them.
In 82 countries around the world, higher vaccination rates failed solely because of a lack of vaccines, Aylward said. Those countries needed 550 million doses of vaccine to reach the goal of vaccinating 40 percent of the population by the end of the year. “This is a very solvable problem; the numbers are not scary,” he said. Three billion vaccine doses would still be produced worldwide by the end of the year, so only 10 days’ production would need to be made available to those countries, he said. The G20 would have to come up with a plan this weekend on where the 550 million doses would come from.
The uneven distribution of vaccines and medicines so far is preventing the Corona pandemic from ending soon, the WHO said. That increases the risk of new and more dangerous variants of the Sars-CoV-2 virus developing, against which previous vaccines and drugs are not effective enough.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has often called it a moral failure that rich countries are stockpiling vaccines and using them for booster shots while millions of people worldwide are still waiting for their first dose. “If the 6.8 billion doses of vaccine that have been administered had been fairly distributed, we would have already reached the goal of vaccinating 40 percent of the population in every country,” he said.
- source: diepresse.at/picture:pixabay-com
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