‘Conditions ideal for more variants’: WHO boss warns against talk of COVID ‘endgame’

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‘Conditions ideal for more variants’: WHO boss warns against talk of COVID ‘endgame’

Geneva: The head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) is warning that conditions remain ideal for more coronavirus variants to emerge and says it’s dangerous to assume Omicron will be the last one.

While agreeing the acute phase of the pandemic could end this year, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus advised against thinking that “we are in the endgame.”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.Credit: AP

Tedros, WHO’s Director-General, said that while other challenges like reducing tobacco use, fighting resistance to anti-microbial treatments and managing the impact of climate change on human health were important, ending the pandemic should remain the priority.

“There are different scenarios for how the pandemic could play out and how the acute phase could end, but it’s dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant or that we are in the endgame,” he told the start of a WHO executive board meeting on Monday in Europe.

“On the contrary, globally, the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge.”

He insisted the world could unite to end COVID-19 as a global health emergency in 2022, but said the key WHO target of vaccinating 70 per cent of the population of each country by the middle of the year would be crucial.

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Focus, he reiterated, should be on people who are at the highest risk of COVID-19 and on improving testing and sequencing to track the virus and its variants.

Tedros said the world would need to learn to live with the virus for the foreseeable future, but “learning to live with COVID cannot mean that we give this virus a free ride,” he said. “It cannot mean that we accept almost 50,000 deaths a week from a preventable and treatable disease.”

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In stark terms, Tedros also appealed to member states to help strengthen WHO and increase funding for it to help stave off future health crises.

“Let me put it plainly: if the current funding model continues, WHO is being set up to fail,” he said. “The paradigm shift in world health that is needed now must be matched by a paradigm shift in funding the world’s health organisation.”

AP

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