The World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the world passed the tragic milestone of four million recorded Covid-19 deaths on Wednesday, reported NDTV News.
During a media briefing on COVID-19 on Wednesday, the WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that the world is at a perilous point in the global coronavirus pandemic.
“We have just passed the tragic milestone of 4 million recorded COVID-19 deaths, which likely underestimates the overall toll,” Dr. Tedros said.
He added that some countries with high vaccination coverage were now relaxing as though the pandemic is already over. The governments have lifted public health social measures and are also planning to roll out booster shots.
But the WHO Chief said that there are many countries across the world that were witnessing sharp spikes in cases and hospitalization, due to fast-moving virus variants and inequitable vaccine production and distribution.
“This is leading to an acute shortage of oxygen, treatments and driving a wave of death in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America,” Tedros said.
The WHO chief said that the ongoing vaccine nationalism, where a few of the richer nations have access to the majority share of available vaccines, is morally indefensible and is an ineffective public health strategy to fight against a respiratory virus that is mutating quickly and becoming increasingly effective at moving from human to human. He said that the fact that millions of health and care workers have still not been vaccinated is abhorrent.
Tedros added that the rapidly mutating coronavirus variants were currently outpacing vaccines due to the inequitable distribution of available doses, which he said was also adversely affecting the global economic recovery from the Covid-19 crisis.
Stressing on a global effort to vaccinate the world population, the WHO head said that at least 10 percent of the population in all countries must be vaccinated by September and that the number should rise to 40 percent by the end of 2021.
