The World Health Organization’s chief cautioned on Wednesday that wealthier countries’ hurry to distribute additional Covid vaccine doses was exacerbating imbalance in access to vaccines, which was extending the pandemic.
The focus, according to WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, must remain getting vaccines to vulnerable individuals everywhere, rather than administering additional doses to those who have previously been vaccinated.
He told reporters, “No country can boost its way out of the pandemic.”
The United Nations’ health agency has long highlighted the huge discrepancy in Covid vaccination access.
Allowing Covid to spread unchecked in some locations, he believes, dramatically increases the chance of new, more lethal strains emerging.
“Blanket booster programs are more likely to prolong the epidemic than to terminate it,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters. “By diverting supply to countries that already have high levels of vaccination coverage, the virus will have more opportunities to spread and evolve.”
Tedros urged for a halt on booster doses to vaccinated, healthy people months ago, but it was ignored until at least 40% of people in all nations had received a first jab.
On Wednesday, he noted that while enough vaccines had been provided to individuals worldwide this year to meet the aim, global supply disruptions meant that just half of the world’s countries had done so.
According to UN figures, about 67 percent of people in high-income countries have had at least one vaccine dose — but not even 10 percent in low-income countries.
“It’s frankly difficult to understand how a year since the first vaccines were administered, three in four health workers in Africa remain unvaccinated,” said Tedros.
His comments came as the Omicron variant’s lightning dash around the globe since it was first detected in South Africa last month dampened hopes the worst of the pandemic was over.
The new variant is spreading at unprecedented speed and has already been detected in 106 countries, the WHO said.
Early data indicates that it could be better at dodging some vaccine protections, spurring the rush to provide boosters.
But Tedros insisted Wednesday that “the vaccines we have remain effective against both the Delta and Omicron variants.”
“It’s important to remember that the vast majority of hospitalisations and deaths are in unvaccinated people, not un-boosted people,” he said.
The WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunisation also recommended Wednesday against blanket booster programmes, insisting additional doses should be “targeted to the population groups at highest risk of serious disease and those necessary to protect the health system”.
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.
As case numbers surge, the UN health agency also called on countries and individuals to take all necessary precautions to halt the spread of the virus heading into the Christmas holidays.
“Boosters cannot be seen as a ticket to go ahead with planned celebrations,” Tedros said.
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.
But she acknowledged the frustration of changing holiday plans.
“There are very difficult decisions that need to be had in terms of making sure that we keep ourselves safe,” she said.
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