The health organization expects the public emergency to finally end, thanks to sustained progress in global vaccination.
The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was optimistic about the evolution of the covid-19 pandemic in the first press conference of 2023 and assured that “if it works correctly, this will be the year in which the public emergency officially ends.
Covid-19 was declared an international emergency on 30 January 2020 (even before the disease was named) and a WHO emergency committee meets every three months to take stock of this situation, which for now has remained at due to the high number of cases still in all regions of the planet.
“We are entering the fourth year of the pandemic with a world that is in a much better situation than a few years ago, thanks to clinical care and the management of vaccines and treatments,” the Ethiopian expert assessed today.
“For most of 2022, covid was on the decline, vaccination was on the rise, and steady progress was made in low- and middle-income countries’ access to vaccines that had been forgotten in 2021 due to “nationalism of vaccines,” he added.
Tedros recalled that last week the WHO approved for the first time two generic drugs against covid (nirmatrelvir and ritonavir), produced by an Indian pharmaceutical company, which will increase access to treatment in less developed countries.
The WHO chief insisted that despite the progress “covid-19 continues to be a dangerous virus for our health, our economies and our societies”, as around 10,000 people continue to die each week in the world at cause of this disease.
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