He said Secretary-General António Guterres was extremely grateful to the US Government for the inclusion of UN personnel and Member States delegates serving in the US, in its national vaccination programme, "and for the generous offer to provide vaccines for United Nations frontline personnel serving in the most challenging and dangerous locations around the world." It was “absolutely ridiculous” that some countries were still unable to protect their key workers amid “escalating epidemics” even though vaccines had been available for six months, he said.īriefing reporters in New York on Friday, the UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric welcomed the announcement made by the Biden administration that it will be sharing millions of vaccine doses with both the COVAX facility as well as bilaterally with countries in particular need. “That’s an important start (but) we need many other countries to be joining and important for the US, crucially, is they said these doses are going to come in June.” He noted that on Thursday the United States had helped to kickstart the appeal and bolster the UN-partnered equitable vaccine distribution scheme COVAX with the announcement that it intended to donate up to 80 million doses, including an initial 25 million shots, this month. “The call is for a quarter of a billion doses through the period through end of September, to be donated, at least 100 million of those in June and July - that’s what we need to get the system going.” 80 million doses from the US Aylward explained, in an urgent appeal for 250 million doses to protect frontline workers and the most vulnerable people. This had led increasingly to “a two-track recovery”, characterised by the successful rollout of vaccines to high-risk populations and even younger populations in higher income and vaccine-producing countries.īy contrast, “in the lower income countries, they’re still struggling to get sufficient product just to be able to vaccinate the health care workers, older populations, who are really the key to getting out of the health, societal and economic crisis that we’re in the midst of”, Dr.
This trio “account for about 60 per cent of those doses”, said Dr Aylward, speaking via Zoom, adding that “at the other end of that spectrum” only about “point five per cent of doses” had reached the lowest income countries, which account for about 10 per cent of world population. Aylward, who is also Senior Advisor to the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noted that of those two billion doses, “over 75 per cent” had gone to just 10 countries, notably China, the US and India. ? - World Health Organization (WHO) June 4, 2021ĭr. Promoting healthy, sustainable food systems is part of WHO’s prescription for healthy recovery from #COVID19 and delivering #HealthForAll, well-being and equity around the ? /PBuejrb7B4