July 5, 2021: The World Health Organization (WHO) warned that coronavirus variants are moving faster than the global vaccine roll out, while urging leaders to increase the pace or risk being overwhelmed.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO, noted that the highly-contagious Delta variant, first identified in India, is “outpacing” vaccinations. “The Delta variant is dangerous and is continuing to evolve and mutate, which requires constant evaluation and careful adjustment of the public health response, delta has been detected in at least 98 countries and is spreading quickly in countries with low and high vaccination coverage.” He also said that by July 2022, 70% of people in every country should be vaccinated, the Guardian reported.
Some developed countries are around that threshold already, but most of the world is nowhere near. Experts say that the longer large groups of people go unvaccinated, the more likely the virus is to mutate into still-worse variants. Widespread vaccination is “the best way to slow the pandemic, save lives and drive a truly global economic recovery, and along the way prevent further dangerous variants from getting the upper hand,” Ghebreyesus concluded.
Daily new case numbers are climbing sharply in countries like Portugal, Russia, and the UK. British health officials said this week that cases of the Delta variant had increased fourfold in less than a month. Confirmed cases on Friday were up 46% on the previous week. The Delta variant is also widespread in the US and has been detected in all 50 states with Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, Nevada, and Utah are the states that are most vulnerable to the variant.
More than 605,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University. Around 47% of the total US population was fully vaccinated.
Another problem is Vaccine distribution with rich nations are sharing vaccines with low-income countries too slowly to prevent the spread of the Delta variant of Covid, risking millions of lives, the head of the WHO has warned.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO, said the sharing of vaccines was “only a trickle, which is being outpaced by variants”, after it emerged that the Delta variant is now present in at least 98 countries. Ghebreyesus said world leaders must ensure that at least 10% of people in all countries should be vaccinated by the end of September, so that vulnerable people and health workers were protected.
“The Delta variant is dangerous and is continuing to evolve and mutate, which requires constant evaluation and careful adjustment of the public health response,” Ghebreyesus said. “Delta has been detected in at least 98 countries, and is spreading quickly in countries with low and high vaccination coverage.
“The world must equitably share protective gear, oxygen, tests, treatments and vaccines.” By next July, 70% of people in every country should be vaccinated, he added. “This is the best way to slow the pandemic, save lives and drive a truly global economic recovery, and along the way prevent further dangerous variants from getting the upper hand.”
Last week, the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization joined the WHO in calling for “urgent action” to increase vaccine supplies. They also asked the G20 group of nations to accelerate efforts to reach vaccination targets.
Scientists have emphasised the urgency of vaccinating the world, because the current vaccines are already less effective against the Delta variant than other variants, and Delta is substantially more transmissible.
David Bauer, group leader of the RNA Virus Replication Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, said: “From a virology perspective, it’s very very clear, the Delta variant is going to displace all the other variants that currently exist. It took about eight weeks to displace Alpha in the United Kingdom, it’s well on its way to displacing Beta in South Africa, and you see similar exponential trends in the United States.
“We should be vaccinating everybody as quickly as possible and then identifying groups that need booster vaccinations the most.The UK just missed the deadline, as it were if this variant had come along just a month or two later, we would be in a different place in terms of having people definitely vaccinated. We need everybody vaccinated now. We are not all protected until the whole world is protected. It can come across as idealism, but it’s not, there’s a cold-hearted, self-interested motivation behind all of it.”
His warning came as Dame Sarah Gilbert, the Oxford professor who led the team behind the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, called for caution over proposals to vaccinate children in the UK. “We have to balance what we think about vaccinating children in high-income countries with vaccinating the rest of the world because we need to stop transmission of this virus globally, we’re not completely out of the woods. And that’s why I’m very worried about getting vaccines around the rest of the world because we need to stop the virus being transmitted and continuing to evolve. That could give us a new variant that is going to be really difficult to deal with.”
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