Vaccinate at least 10 per cent of every country by September: WHO chief

A woman receives a dose of Comirnaty vaccine by Pfizer-BioNTech against Covid-19 on June 29 in Paris. Pic/AFP

Voicing concern over many countries failing to vaccinate their people, WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Thursday called for vaccinating at least 10 per cent of the population of every country by September as he described vaccination as the best way to control the pandemic and reboot the global economy.

"Vast inequities in the access to vaccines are fuelling a two-track pandemic. While some countries have reached a high level of coverage, many others don't have enough to vaccinate health workers, older people & other at-risk groups," the World Health Organisation Director General said in a virtual address to India Global Forum.

Asserting that when some countries cannot vaccinate, it's a threat to all countries, he called for a global effort to vaccinate at least 10 per cent of the population of every country by September, at least 40 pc by end of the year, and at least 70 pc by middle of next year. "Vaccine equity is not just the right thing to do. It's the best way to control the pandemic and reboot the global economy," he said warning, "until we end the pandemic everywhere, we will not end it anywhere."

UK to offer booster shots from September

The UK government is preparing to offer millions of vulnerable Britons, who have received two doses of the vaccine, a booster jab from September to ensure that protection is maintained against new variants of coronavirus before winter comes, according to media reports.

‘Delta variant to become dominant strain'

The World Health Organization has said the Delta variant of Covid-19 is now present in nearly 100 countries as per conservative estimates, and warned that in the coming months the highly transmissible strain will become the dominant variant of the coronavirus globally. In its Covid-19 Weekly Epidemiological Update, the WHO said as of June 29, 2021, "96 countries have reported cases of the Delta variant, though this is likely an underestimate as sequencing capacities needed to identify variants are limited. A number of these countries are attributing surges in infections and hospitalisations to this variant." Given the increase in transmissibility, the WHO warned that the Delta variant is "expected to rapidly outcompete other variants and become the dominant variant over the coming months." WHO chief Dr Ghebreyesus had noted that as some countries eased public health and social restrictions, there was a corresponding increase in transmission around the world.

Treatment for vaccine-related blood clots found

Canadian scientists have found a new lifesaving treatment for people suffering from rare blood clots associated with Covid-19 vaccination. Researchers at McMaster University recommend a combination of anti-clotting drugs and high doses of intravenous immunoglobulin to combat vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT). The treatment, described in The New England Journal of Medicine, has been effective in three Canadian patients who received AstraZeneca vaccine and had VITT.

3,37,163
No. of new cases reported globally in the past 24 hours

18,15,21,067
Total no. of cases worldwide

39,37,437
Total no. of deaths worldwide

Source: WHO/Johns Hopkins

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