Share COVID jabs instead of inserting children, WHO calls for Coronavirus pandemic News

The WHO expects more countries to follow France and Sweden by firing on COVAX after inoculating priority populations.

The World Health Organization has called on rich countries to reconsider their plans to include children and, instead, to provide COVID-19 shots to the COVAX scheme it shares with poorer countries.

The WHO hopes that more countries will continue to shoot France and Sweden at COVAX after injecting priority populations to help bridge the gap in vaccination rates.

Canada and the United States are among the countries that have allowed teen vaccinations in recent weeks. However, a WHO official said talks to share doses with Washington were underway.

“I understand why some countries want to vaccinate their children and teenagers, but right now they are asking me to rethink and vaccinate #COVAX,” WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a virtual meeting in Geneva on Friday.

“In low- and middle-income countries, the supply of the COVID-19 vaccine has not been sufficient to include health workers, and hospitals are overcrowded with people in urgent need of life-saving care,” he added.

COVAX, which has so far delivered about 60 million doses, has made efforts to meet supply targets in part due to the export restrictions of the AstraZeneca vaccine in India, due to the growing epidemic.

To date, approximately 1.26 trillion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered worldwide.

Tedros also said the second year of the pandemic would be more deadly than before, as India was in dire straits.

“Saving lives and livelihoods with a combination of public health measures and vaccines – neither one nor the other – is the only solution,” Tedros said.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised the alarm on Friday when the coronavirus spread across India’s vast countryside due to the official number of infections. cross More than 24 million and 4,000 people died on the third day in a row.

According to a Johns Hopkins University report, at least 161 million people have been reported to be infected with coronavirus worldwide and more than 3.3 million have died.

Infections have been reported in more than 210 countries and territories first cases were identified in China in December 2019.

WHO officials called for caution in lifting measures containing transmission, such as wearing a mask, and warned that more variants needed to be detected.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised fully embedded people could avoid wearing masks outside and in most places they could avoid wearing them indoors.

“There are very few countries at the moment to repeal these measures,” said WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan.