WHO warns fears of omicron could spark new vaccine hoarding

GENEVA – The World Health Organization expressed concerns Thursday that affluent countries spooked by the emergence of the omicron variant could measurement up the hoarding of COVID-19 vaccines and strain planetary supplies again, complicating efforts to stamp retired the pandemic.

The U.N. wellness agency, aft a gathering of its adept sheet connected vaccination, reiterated its proposal to governments against the wide usage of boosters successful their populations truthful that well-stocked countries alternatively tin nonstop doses to low-income countries that person mostly lacked entree to them.

“What is going to unopen down illness is for everybody who is particularly astatine hazard of illness to go vaccinated,” said Dr. Kate O’Brien, caput of WHO’s section of immunization, vaccines and biologicals. “We look to beryllium taking our oculus disconnected that shot successful countries.”

Months of abbreviated supplies of COVID-19 vaccines person begun to easiness implicit the past 2 months oregon so, and doses are yet getting to needier countries — specified arsenic done donations and the U.N.-backed COVAX programme — and WHO wants that to continue. It has agelong decried “vaccine inequity” by which astir doses person gone to radical successful affluent countries, whose leaders locked down large stockpiles arsenic a precautionary measure.

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“As we caput into immoderate the omicron concern is going to be, determination is hazard that the planetary proviso is again going to revert to high-income countries hoarding vaccine to support — successful a sense, successful excess — their accidental for vaccination, and a benignant of ‘no-regrets’ benignant of approach,” O’Brien said.

“It’s not going to work,” she added. “It’s not going to enactment from an epidemiological perspective, and it’s not going to enactment from a transmission position unless we really person vaccine going to each countries, due to the fact that wherever transmission continues, that’s wherever the variants are going to travel from.”

Some affluent governments privation to permission nary chromatic unturned to get their populations arsenic adjacent to afloat vaccination arsenic possible. Many questions stay astir the severity, transmissibility and absorption to vaccines of the caller omicron variant, which emerged past period successful confederate Africa and has shown aboriginal signs of spreading faster than the wide and deadly delta variant driving the pandemic now.

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O'Brien urged a “rational, planetary perspective” astir “what’s really going to unopen down this pandemic.”

“We person the tools astatine hand, we person the choices we tin make, and the adjacent days and weeks are truly going to find what absorption the satellite decides it’s going to spell in, connected omicron,” she said.

Nevertheless, WHO says individuals successful affluent countries should travel the policies of their governments, immoderate of which are enticing radical to get boosters, which are further doses aimed to subordinate up immunity from earlier jabs that wanes implicit time.

“An idiosyncratic successful a country, their dose is not going to get shipped to different state due to the fact that they they don’t instrumentality the dose,” O'Brien said. "It is state governments, not individuals, who are making decisions that could power the equitable organisation of vaccines to different countries.”

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