A 13-year-old girl receiving a dose of the Covid-19 vaccine in New York City on May 13, 2021. – Anthony Behar / Sipa USA / SIPA
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus calls on world leaders to be as united as possible in the fight against the spread of the coronavirus. The WHO boss on Friday called on countries to give up immunizing children and adolescents against Covid-19. The doses thus released can thus be given to the Covax system in order to redistribute them to underprivileged countries.
The Director-General of the WHO also recalled that we should not let our guard down. He stressed that the way things are going, the second year of the pandemic would be “much more deadly” than the first. According to him, it is therefore important to form a united front.
A shortage of available doses
“I understand why some countries want to vaccinate their children and adolescents, but I ask you to think about giving it up and instead give the vaccines to Covax”, the international system set up to guarantee equitable access to vaccines, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. For months, he has denounced vaccine nationalism, which in view of the shortage of available doses deprives many countries of being able to protect, including the most vulnerable people and healthcare workers, when the European Union or the United States promise to vaccinate a vast majority of their population by summer.
Noting that many countries were still plagued by explosive infection rates, such as India but also Nepal, Sri Lanka or even certain countries on the American continent, the Director General stressed that “the Covid-19 has already claimed the lives of more than 3.3 million people ”.
The Covax system has been deprived of a significant proportion of the vaccine it thought it could distribute in the 2nd quarter of this year, with India – where the bulk of doses for Covax are manufactured – having banned their export to fight the disease. explosion of the pandemic in the country. WHO therefore called on countries to donate the doses they had. France has thus made it possible to distribute 500,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine through Covax, as has Sweden and Switzerland, which may soon authorize the donation of one million doses of this vaccine.