WHO warns that “no country will overcome the pandemic with a booster dose”

The general director of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned this Wednesday against the illusion that it would be enough to administer booster doses to overcome the pandemic of coronavirus covid-19.

“No country will be able to overcome the pandemic with booster vaccinations and these do not mean a green light to celebrate as we had planned”, indicated Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a Geneva press conference, a few days before Christmas.

“These indiscriminate booster programs could even prolong the pandemic rather than end it, by diverting available doses to countries with high vaccination rates, thus giving the virus a better chance to spread and mutate,” stated the doctor Tedros.

“It is important to remember that the vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths have been in unvaccinated people, who have not received a booster dose”he insisted, adding: “And we must be very clear” that “the (current) vaccines are effective against both the delta variant and the omicron”.

According to the committee of experts on immunization policies of the WHO (SAGE), at least 126 countries have already given instructions to inject a booster dose, and 120 of them have already started campaigns in this regard. They are mostly rich or middle-income countries, but “no poor country has yet developed a reinforcement program,” SAGE said in a statement on Wednesday.

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