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UNITED NATIONS: UN chief Antonio Guterres told the all-virtual Davos forum on Monday (Jan 17) that the world must vaccinate everybody against COVID-19 to ensure a way out of the pandemic.
The face-to-face gathering of political and corporate power players in the Swiss Alps is online for the second year in a row due to a pandemic that shows no sign of abating.
“The last two years have demonstrated a simple but brutal truth – if we leave anyone behind, we leave everyone behind,” said the United Nations Secretary-General.
“If we fail to vaccinate every person, we give rise to new variants that spread across borders and bring daily life and economies to a grinding halt.”
Guterres said the international community needs to “confront the pandemic with equity and fairness.”
He noted that the World Health Organization unveiled a strategy last autumn to vaccinate 40 per cent of the planet’s population by the end of 2021 and 70 per cent by the middle of this year.
“We are nowhere near these targets,” Guterres told the World Economic Forum.
“Vaccination rates in high-income countries are, shamefully, seven times higher than in African countries. We need vaccine equity, now,” he added.
Guterres said pharmaceutical companies should “stand in solidarity with developing countries by sharing licenses, know-how and technology so we can all find a way out of this pandemic.”
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Linette Lai Political Correspondent
Updated 17 Jan 2022, 8:05 pm SGT
SINGAPORE – Many countries around the world, including Singapore, are taking steps towards living with Covid-19.
But as recently as Jan 11, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned against treating the virus as endemic, especially since the Omicron situation has not yet stabilised.
What explains this apparent difference in views?
The main reason is that the world as a whole is not yet ready to live with the virus, said Professor Teo Yik Ying, dean of the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health.
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“The WHO fears countries deciding to emulate this posture and lift most of the social and community measures before the vaccination uptake and hospital resources can be readied for it,” Prof Teo said. “This will lead to a lot more infections and a lot more deaths.”
Since the highly transmissible Omicron variant emerged late last year, Covid-19 cases have shot up to an all-time high worldwide. On Saturday (Jan 15), the seven-day rolling average of daily new confirmed cases per million people stood at 374.13.
This is more than three times higher than the previous global peak when the Delta variant was on the rise, said Associate Professor Alex Cook, vice-dean of research at the Saw Swee Hock School.
“However, the dominance of Omicron and high vaccination rates… have combined to make the severity substantially less for the typical person getting infected, and the total severity across the global population less than in previous, smaller waves,” he said.
Professor Laurent Renia, who specialises in infectious diseases at the Nanyang Technological University’s Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, said the WHO’s advice on how countries should treat the virus stems from the agency’s need to take a broader perspective.
This article has been edited to reflect the correct school Professor Laurent Renia comes from.
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