The plan with which the WHO and the UN assure that the acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic will end

The World Health Organization (WHO) today presented a plan to vaccinate 40% of the world’s population before the end of the year, which would end the acute phase of the pandemic and for which rich countries should fulfill their promises of dose donations and accept that the Pharmaceutical companies with which they have signed contracts serve other countries in greatest need first.

The plan presented by the heads of both organizations also indicates that 8,000 million dollars are required for countries where vaccination coverage against Covid-19 is very low – the vast majority in sub-Saharan Africa – to develop logistics and personnel capacities they require to vaccinate their populations.

Not collaborating with the objective of vaccinating 40% of the population of each country “would not only be immoral, but also stupid,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said at a press conference.

In this line, it is expected to achieve 70% of global vaccination coverage, considered the minimum rate to achieve herd immunity, by mid-2022.

Guterres recalled that if the virus continues to spread around the world and infect more people, there will be more variants and at some point one will appear that will escape the immunity offered by vaccines, with which all the effort that has been made to accelerate vaccination it will have been in vain.

The general director of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that failure may be inevitable if science is not made available to everyone, since behind the large figures – such as 6.4 billion doses of administered vaccines and a third of the world population completely vaccinated – hides the reality “of a horrendous inequality.”

In 56 countries less than 10% of the population has been vaccinated and in a good part of Sub-Saharan Africa less than 5%.

Rich and middle-income countries account for 75% of vaccines used.

For this reason, the goal set by the WHO for the end of last September could not be met, which consisted of at least 10% of the population in all the countries of the world being vaccinated.

Tedros said that the problem of inequality in access to vaccines is not in their production, since so far 11,000 million doses have been produced (compared to 7,800 of the world population) and the monthly rate of manufacture rises currently at 1.5 billion doses.

“The problem is not the production capacity, but knowing where these vaccines are”, the head of the WHO Immunization Department, Kate O’Brien, commented in an intervention at the same press conference.

According to the new plan launched by the WHO, all countries will update their national vaccination plans and the required doses will be defined in order for this to serve as a guide for investments made in production and redistribution.

Another pillar of this plan falls on the will of the developed countries, where most of the population is protected and which have agreements to receive even more doses. To them the WHO asks them to give priority to the COVAX mechanism (created to give access to vaccines to the poorest countries) and to agree to get behind in the waiting line.

Likewise, countries that have promised to share their dose reserves are urged to comply with this commitment as soon as possible, and those where vaccines or vaccine ingredients are produced to lift any export restrictions.

India is one of the countries from which a positive response to this appeal is expected since the AstraZeneca vaccine is manufactured there thanks to an agreement with a national laboratory that was supposed to supply COVAX, but it was not fulfilled because the government ordered that all this production served to address the crisis caused by the strong wave of cases and deaths from covid-19 in the second quarter of this year.