WHO warns of the “dangerous narrative” that the pandemic is coming to an end

The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned on Friday against the “dangerous narrative” that the pandemic is coming to an end due to the high vaccination rate in some countries and the lower severity of the omicron variant.

“The pandemic has not passed when there are 70,000 people dying a week from a disease that is treatable, when 83% of the population of Africa has not yet received a single vaccine,” he stated at the Security Conference that started today in Munich, in southern Germany.

The WHO director general warned that current conditions, with the health systems of many countries saturated and with little surveillance of the evolution of the virus, are favorable to the development of “more contagious and dangerous” variants.

However, although the pandemic is not yet near its end, Tedros stressed that it is possible to control the health emergency that is being experienced on a global scale if there is the will to do so.

Tedros quantified the price of putting an end to said emergency at US$60 billion, an amount that he said is nothing compared to the social and economic impact of the pandemic.

In addition, the director general of the WHO listed three pillars in his opinion that are crucial to improve the situation: an improvement in global governance, more funding for the international health architecture and the development of more robust tools and systems to detect and respond quickly to pandemics. and epidemics.

Tedros spoke during a debate on the routes out of the pandemic in which the philanthropist Bill Gates, the foreign ministers of Sweden and Canada, Ann Linde and Mélanie Joly, and the president of the NGO International Crisis also participated. Group, Comfort Ero.

In his speech, Gates warned of the danger posed by conspiracy theories and misinformation, which he said are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

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