Blanket booster to prolong pandemic,rather than ending it-WHO

The World Health Organization chief warned that the rush in wealthy countries to roll out additional Covid vaccine doses was deepening the inequity in access to jabs that is prolonging the pandemic. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisted that the priority must remain to get vaccines to vulnerable people everywhere rather than giving additional doses to the already vaccinated. "No country can boost its way out of the pandemic," he told reporters.

The UN health agency has long decried the glaring inequity in access to Covid vaccines."Blanket booster programmes are likely to prolong the pandemic, rather than ending it, by diverting supply to countries that already have high levels of vaccination coverage, giving the virus more opportunity to spread and mutate," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday. He pointed out that while enough vaccines had been given to people globally this year to reach that target, distortions in global supply meant that only half the world's countries had done so. "It's frankly difficult to understand how a year since the first vaccines were administered, three in four health workers in Africa remain unvaccinated," said Tedros.

According to UN figures, about 67 percent of people in high-income countries have had at least one vaccine dose -- but not even 10 percent in low-income countries. Meanwhile, the new  Omicron variant is spreading at unprecedented speed and has already been detected in 106 countries, the WHO said. Tedros insisted that "the vaccines we have remain effective against both the Delta and Omicron variants." "It's important to remember that the vast majority of hospitalisations and deaths are in unvaccinated people, not un-boosted people," he said.