World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
Covid-19 will end in 2022, WHO predicts
World Health Organisation (WHO) Director General, Tedros Ghebreyesus, has expressed optimism that COVID-19 pandemic will end in 2022.
The DG said at a press briefing on Wednesday that it was two years ago, as people gathered for New Year’s Eve celebrations, that a new global threat emerged.
Tedros said he believed the pandemic will end next year because, two years into the situation, “we know the virus very well and we have all the tools [to fight it].”
Since then, 1.8 million deaths were recorded in 2020 and 3.5 million in 2021, but the actual number is much higher. There are also millions of people dealing with long-term consequences from the virus.
The UN health agency has long decried the glaring inequity in access to Covid vaccines.
Allowing Covid to spread unabated in some places dramatically increases the chance of new, more dangerous variants emerging, it argues.
The World Health Organization chief warned Wednesday that the rush in wealthy countries to roll out additional Covid vaccine doses was deepening the inequity in access to jabs that is prolonging the pandemic.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisted that the priority must remain to get vaccines to vulnerable people everywhere rather than giving additional doses to the already vaccinated.
“No country can boost its way out of the pandemic,” he told reporters.
“2022 must be the end of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, speaking Wednesday at the organisation’s last planned briefing of the year on the coronavirus.
Tedros said he believed the pandemic will end next year because, two years into the situation, “we know the virus very well and we have all the tools [to fight it].”
The UN health agency has long decried the glaring inequity in access to Covid-19 vaccines.
Allowing Covid-19 to spread unabated in some places dramatically increases the chance of new, more dangerous variants emerging, it argues.
“Blanket booster programmes are likely to prolong the pandemic, rather than ending it, by diverting supply to countries that already have high levels of vaccination coverage, giving the virus more opportunity to spread and mutate,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.
Months ago, Tedros called in vain for a moratorium on booster doses to vaccinated, healthy people until at least 40 percent of people in all countries had received a first jab.
