WHO urges countries to donate vaccines
The World Health Organization urged countries on Friday to donate COVID-19 vaccine doses to inoculate the most vulnerable in 20 poorer nations after India, an integral supplier to the agency's COVAX vaccine-sharing programme, said it had been prioritising local needs.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the COVAX programme, run with the GAVI vaccine alliance, needed 10 million doses immediately to inoculate healthcare staff and older people as a good stop-gap measure.
"COVAX is ready to deliver but we can't deliver vaccines we don't possess. Bilateral discounts, export bans, vaccine nationalism and vaccine diplomacy possess caused distortions in the market with gross inequities in source and demand," Tedros advised a news conference.
"Ten million doses is not much and it's really not practically enough," he said.
India, the world's biggest vaccine maker, explained on Friday it could make domestic inoculations important. The move will hit COVAX supplies as some of AstraZeneca's vaccine is usually made by the Serum Institute of India.
Tedros thanked India for its exports so far and said the approach was first "understandable" given rising infections. He added that talks with India were underway to locate a balance between local and international necessities.
Up to now COVAX has delivered 32 million vaccine doses to 61 countries, but 36 countries even now await vaccines to start out inoculations, he said.
Tedros has said countries should work together to make sure COVID-19 vaccinations get started everywhere across the world within the first 100 days of 2021, or by April 10.
WHO senior adviser Bruce Aylward said that talks with well-supplied countries about donations were underway and that some people had expressed "confident interest", without naming them.
Meanwhile a long-awaited report in to the origins of the novel coronavirus, carrying out a WHO team visit to Wuhan, China in January and February, will be released within the next few days, team innovator Peter Ben Embarek said. WHO's member states will receive it earliest before it really is made open public, he said.
