Covid can end this year if world joins hands: WHO

NEW DELHI: The world entered the new year of 2022 and subsequently third year of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The Director General of World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, however, said that he was confident that the pandemic could end this year if all the countries collectively work towards ending inequality.

“As we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I'm confident that this will be the year we end it - but only if we do it together,” the WHO chief said, according to foreign media.

Tedros said, “While no country is out of the woods from pandemic, we have many new tools to prevent and treat Covid-19. The longer inequity continues, the higher the risks of the virus evolving in ways we can’t prevent or predict. If we end the inequity, we end the pandemic.”

Without taking any names, the WHO chief said that “narrow nationalism” and “vaccine hoarding” by some countries were the reason that undermined equity, and created the ideal conditions for the emergence of the Omicron variant.

Stressing on the fact that Covid-19 was not the only health threat that the world was currently undergoing, he said that millions of people have missed out on routine vaccination, services for family planning, treatment for communicable and non-communicable disease.

He further said that the WHO has recommended broad use of the world's first malaria vaccine, which if introduced widely and urgently, could save tens of thousands of lives every year.