Dr Soumya Swaminathan said at a media conference on Monday that these are critical countries and that their population will maintain strict social distance and other outbreak control measures in the foreseeable future. In recent weeks, Britain, the US, France, Canada, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands and other millions of their citizens have been vaccinated against the coronavirus.
“Even if vaccines start to protect the most vulnerable, by 2021 we will not reach any levels of population immunity or herd immunity,” Swaminathan said. “Even if it happens in a few pockets, in a few countries, it will not protect people around the world.”
Scientists usually estimate that a vaccination rate of about 70% is required for herd immunity, where the entire population is protected against a disease. But some fear that the highly contagious nature of COVID-19 may require a significantly higher threshold.
Dr Bruce Aylward, an adviser to the WHO’s director general, said the UN’s health agency hoped to start coronavirus vaccinations later this month or in February in some of the poorer countries in the world and called on the world community to do more to ensure all countries. have access to vaccines.
“We can not do this on our own,” Aylward said, noting who in particular needed the cooperation of vaccine manufacturers to start immunizing vulnerable populations. Aylward said the WTO intended to have an ‘implementation plan’ setting out which developing countries might start getting vaccinated next month.
Yet the majority of the world’s COVID-19 vaccine stock has already been purchased by rich countries. The UN-backed initiative, known as COVAX, which aims to deliver shots to developing countries, has no vaccines, money or logistical assistance as donor countries scramble to protect their own citizens, especially in the aftermath of COVID-19 variant in Britain. and South Africa, which blames many officials for increasing proliferation.
WHO, however, said that most recent increases in the transfer were due to ‘the increasing mixing of people’ rather than to the new variants.
Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead on COVID-19, says the increase in cases in many countries was detected before the new variants were identified. Van Kerkhove noted that COVID-19 cases during the summer in most countries in Europe amount to single digits.
“We lost the battle because we changed our mixing patterns during the summer, in the fall and especially around Christmas and the new year,” she said, explaining that many people had multiple contacts with family and friends during the holidays. “This has had a direct impact on the exponential growth you have seen in many countries,” she said, describing the increase in the number of cases in some places as “vertical”.
Dr Michael Ryan, the WHO’s emergency chief, said although there was evidence that variants could accelerate the spread of COVID-19, “there is no evidence that variants affect any seriousness.” He said the variants should not change the strategies of countries to combat outbreaks.
“It does not change what you do, but it does give the virus new energy,” Ryan said.
___
AP Medical writer Maria Cheng reported from Toronto.
Copyright © 2021 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved.