So far, he said, more than 5.5 billion doses of vaccines have been administered on the planet, but nearly 80 percent of them are in high-income and upper-middle-income countries.
The WHO’s priority is to ensure that 10 percent of each country’s population is immunized by the end of September, 40 by the end of 2021, and 70 citizens by mid-2022.
And he reiterated the position of the international body to stop vaccination with booster doses until the end of this year at least.
We don’t want the use of boosters for healthy people to become widespread, he said, while many health workers and people at risk around the world are still waiting for their first dose.
“The stark inequality in the global distribution of vaccines is a stain on our collective conscience,” said the director of the World Health Organization.
The director recently stated that nearly 90 percent of high-income countries have already reached the target of vaccinating 10 percent of their population and even more than 70 or 40, but none of the low-income countries have achieved either goal.
We do not want more promises, we want vaccines, said the head of the global health entity, denouncing that there is a lot of talk about equality, but very little action has not been taken.
“Rich countries have promised to donate more than a trillion doses, but have given less than 15 percent of what has been offered,” he said.
He stressed that those unfulfilled promises are precisely one reason why the Covax Mechanism, a WHO initiative for equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines, announced on Wednesday that only about 1.4 billion doses would be available by the end of the year.
The number is well below the 2 billion people pledged, and with that, it will barely be able to vaccinate 20 percent of the population in the 92 poor countries that injections should reach in 2021.
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