Covid in China: WHO calls for vaccination in the face of explosion of cases

The number of Covid cases in China continues to skyrocket and the World Health Organization is alarmed. “Very concerned” about the situation in the country, the institution said it needed to obtain “more details on the severity of the disease, hospitalizations and the need for intensive care units” in order to “move to a full risk assessment,” WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday. He stressed that the WHO had come “to support China to focus its efforts on vaccinating those most at risk.”

Since 2020, the Chinese government has imposed strict medical restrictions in the name of the so-called “zero Covid” policy. But he canceled most of those measures without notice in early December amid growing popular discontent and a significant impact on the economy. Since then, the number of cases has skyrocketed, raising fears of high mortality among the very elderly, who are particularly vulnerable.

Dr Michael Ryan, WHO’s head of health emergencies, has long been pushing for the need for more shots. “We have been saying for weeks that this highly contagious virus has always been very difficult to completely stop with public health and social measures alone,” recalled Dr. Ryan.

Numbers below reality

“We really need to focus on vaccination. However, over the past few weeks, China has made significant progress in distributing vaccines,” he continued. “Vaccination is a way out of the Omicron wave,” he said. This variant of the original virus, which appeared just over a year ago, is the most contagious.

The vaccination campaign in China was mainly carried out using two vaccines distributed by the Chinese laboratories Sinovac and Sinopharm. “While we are not involved, we believe there are negotiations between the Chinese authorities and at least one of the mRNA manufacturers to license their vaccines and manufacture them in China,” said Dr. Ryan, who supported the talks. mRNA vaccines made by US companies Moderna and Pfizer have proven to be extremely effective in reducing the severity of the disease.

There have been almost 650 million cases of Covid infection worldwide and more than 6.6 million deaths, according to the WHO, but the WHO believes these numbers are much lower than reality. Dr. Tedros on Wednesday again asked China to share information about the origin of the virus, first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, in order to better understand its origin.

“We remain hopeful that China will share the data and conduct the research that we have requested and continue to request. As I have repeatedly said, all hypotheses about the origin of this pandemic remain on the table,” he said. Since the beginning of the pandemic, disputes have raged between experts seeking to unravel the mystery of the origin of the virus. Research has concluded that the virus has a very likely animal origin. A scenario questioned by supporters of the Wuhan lab leak theory.