Equity in vaccination is one of the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.
On Friday, the boss of the WHO reminded countries to give up vaccinating children and adolescents against Covid and to donate the doses thus released to the Covax system in order to redistribute them to underprivileged countries.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed that the way things are going, the second year of the pandemic would be "much more deadly" than the first, during a press briefing.
For months, he has denounced vaccine nationalism which, given the shortage of available doses, prevents many countries from protecting even the most vulnerable people and healthcare workers, while the European Union or the United States promise to vaccinate a large majority of their population by summer.
The Covid-19 has already claimed the lives of more than 3.3 million people
Noting that many countries were still plagued by explosive infection rates, such as India but also Nepal, Sri Lanka and some countries on the American continent, the WHO Director General stressed that “the Covid-19 has already claimed the lives of more than 3.3 million people and at the rate things are going the second year of the pandemic will be much deadlier than the first.
The Covax system has been deprived of a significant proportion of the vaccine it thought it could distribute in the second quarter of this year, with India - where the bulk of doses for Covax are manufactured - having banned their export to combat the disease. explosion of the pandemic in the country.
WHO therefore called on countries to donate the doses they had.
France has thus made it possible to distribute 500,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine through Covax, as have Sweden and Switzerland, which could soon authorize the donation of one million doses of this vaccine.