The world must unite to ‘end the pandemic’ by 2022

The head of the World Health Organization called on Monday for the world to come together and make the difficult decisions necessary to end the Covid-19 pandemic over the next year.

“2022 must be the year we end the pandemic,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in Geneva.

As the end of the year festivities approach, the head of the UN health agency acknowledged that “we all want to spend time with friends and family. We all want to get back to normal.”

But, he said, to get back to normal, we must now protect ourselves as cases, driven by the fast-spreading Omicron variant, the surge.

Since it was first reported in South Africa in November, Omicron has been identified in dozens of countries, dashing hopes that the worst of the pandemic has passed.

Despite the indications, it is not more serious than the Delta variant, which is still the dominant strain, it has been shown in the first data that Omicron has a higher transmissibility and a worrying resistance to vaccines.

With cases increasing rapidly, Tedros emphasized that it was better to cancel events “now and celebrate later than to celebrate now and cry later.”

“We have to focus now on ending this pandemic.”

Tedros insisted that it was possible to stop the pandemic, but said that it would be necessary to use all the tools at our disposal, from vaccines to the use of masks and physical distancing.

And perhaps most importantly, the world needed to end the glaring inequality in access to vaccines.

“If we are going to end the pandemic in the next year, we must end inequity,” he said.

(AFP)