While many countries and states within the United States are now lifting safety protocols, mask mandates, and other protections, proclaiming that the pandemic is under control or ending, World Health Organization Executive Director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had a different message, speaking Feb. 18 at the Munich Security Conference, Business Insider reported. The last speaker on a panel titled “Get Well Soon, Finding a Way out of the Global Pandemic,” Dr. Tedros pointed to the “dangerous narrative that the pandemic is over” being driven by the success of vaccinations and the fact that Omicron has turned out to be a less severe variant. But, he warned, this is not true. “Not when 70,000 people a week are dying from a treatable and preventable disease…. Not when 83% of the population of Africa is yet to receive a single dose of vaccine. Not when health systems continue to strain and crack under the caseload. Not when we have a highly transmissible virus circulating almost unchecked, with too little surveillance to track its evolution.” And, he continued, conditions are ideal for the emergence of “more transmissible, more dangerous variants,” and the world should prepare for this.
The tools and knowhow exist to bring an end to the pandemic as a global health emergency this year, he said, but it will take action. Immediately needed are $16 billion to finance vaccines, tests, treatments and ensure that PPE is provided everywhere. That $16 billion is “frankly peanuts,” he said, compared with the cost of another year of economic turmoil. Ending the pandemic must remain the focus, he underscored, but at the same time “we must learn the lessons it’s teaching us.”
