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HomeNewsMetroWhole World Must Benefit From COVID-19 Vaccine – WHO

Whole World Must Benefit From COVID-19 Vaccine – WHO

The head of the World Health Organization hailed the fast advancement towards a Covid-19 immunization yet demanded Friday that each nation must receive the rewards.

“An antibody will be a fundamental apparatus for controlling the pandemic, and we’re energized by the primer aftereffects of clinical preliminaries delivered for the current week,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated, in shutting the WHO’s yearly gathering.

US drug goliath Pfizer and its German accomplice BioNTech declared Monday that their competitor antibody had demonstrated 90% powerful in continuous last stage preliminaries including in excess of 40,000 individuals, not exactly a year after the novel Covid arose in China.

“Never in history has immunization research advanced so rapidly. We should apply similar earnestness and development to guaranteeing that all nations profit by this logical accomplishment,” said Tedros.

The Covid has executed almost 1.3 million individuals worldwide while more than 52.7 million cases have been enlisted, as indicated by a count from legitimate sources assembled by AFP.

However, the tallies probably reflect only a fraction of the actual number of infections. Many countries are testing only symptomatic or the most serious cases.

Shared pathogens lab plan
Tedros said the pandemic had shown there was an urgent need for “a globally-agreed system for sharing pathogen materials and clinical samples”, to facilitate the rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics as “global public goods”.

He said the system could not wait for bilateral agreements that could take years to negotiate.

A general view of the Pfizer world headquarters in New York is seen on November 9, 2020. – Pfizer stock surged higher on November 9, 2020 prior to the opening of Wall Street trading after the company announced its vaccine is “90 percent effective” against Covid-19 infections. The news cheered markets worldwide, especially as coronavirus cases are spiking, forcing millions of people back into lockdown. (Photo by Kena Betancur / AFP)

“We are proposing a new approach that would include a repository for materials housed by WHO in a secure Swiss facility; an agreement that sharing materials into this repository is voluntary; that WHO can facilitate the transfer and use of the materials; and a set of criteria under which WHO would distribute them,” said Tedros.

The UN health agency’s director-general thanked Thailand and Italy for offering to provide materials and pioneer the new approach, and Switzerland for offering a laboratory.

WHO member states on Friday approved a resolution on strengthening preparedness for health emergencies.

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The resolution calls on countries “to prioritise at the highest political level the improvement of, and coordination for, health emergency preparedness.”

It also urges countries to continue developing their capacities for detecting infectious diseases, in compliance with the International Health Regulations.

Sounding the alarm
The regulations on global health security, approved in 2005 and entering into force two years later, notably regulate how a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) is declared.

They also include specific measures to be implemented at ports, airports and border posts in order to limit the spread of risk.

Several voices were raised questioning the effectiveness of this process in attempting to prevent or rein in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Washington accused Tedros of being too slow to declare a PHEIC over the new coronavirus. The WHO chief himself has been critical of its binary on-or-off nature, with no levels of alert in between.

The resolution adopted on Friday asks Tedros to seek possible “complementary mechanisms” that could be used to alert member states “about the severity and/or magnitude of a public health emergency in order to mobilise necessary support and to facilitate international coordination”.

He is expected to deliver his ideas at the next WHO annual meeting.

Besides discussing the pandemic, the WHO assembly agreed on a new plan to defeat meningitis by 2030; increased action on epilepsy and other neurological disorders; and a strategy to speed up the elimination of cervical cancer as a public health problem.

AFP

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