The Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus rebelled Thursday against any “nationalism” in terms of vaccines, pleading for the pooling of tools to enable the planet to fight COVID-19 .
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“Vaccine nationalism is not good. It’s not going to help us, ”he told the Aspen Security Forum, three days of debate that have gone virtual this year.
“There should be a global consensus to make any vaccine a common public good; (…) it is a political commitment, ”he pleaded.
For him, it is not a question of “sharing in the name of sharing”, but indeed because it is a necessity and that it will benefit everyone, including the better endowed countries: “They do not give charity. to others. They do it for themselves, because when the rest of the world recovers and opens up, they benefit as well. “
“A faster recovery is a recovery together, because we live in a globalized world. The savings are intimately linked ”. There cannot be “a few safe countries that recover. Everyone must recover together, ”he stressed.
“The damage caused by COVID-19 could be less if the countries which have the means to engage in it”, he insisted.
Some 26 candidate vaccines are at various stages of testing, including six “at a good stage, clinical trials”, for his part reaffirmed the director of health emergencies of the WHO, Michael Ryan, while again expressing a tempered hope .
“Phase 3 does not mean + we are almost there”, explained the epidemiologist. “Phase 3 means this is the first time that this vaccine has been introduced into the general population, in otherwise healthy individuals, to see if the vaccine will protect them against natural infection.”
However, “there is no guarantee that any of these six will give us the answer – and we’ll likely need more than one vaccine to do this job,” he said.
Sars-Cov-2 has killed at least 708,000 people and infected more than 18.8 million since the onset of the pandemic in China last December, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP.