COVID-19: World Health Assembly, focus on ending pandemic

GLOBAL health organisation has said stakeholders would brainstorm on how to urgently find innovative solutions to end the biting coronavirus pandemic and work towards averting similar outbreak anytime soon.

  Stakeholders would on Monday gathered to kick off the 74th session of the World Health Assembly, the World Health Organisation’s highest decision-making body, the focus would be on how to achieve global health security and pandemic preparedness.

  The event, which would also open to associate members, observers, invited representatives of the United Nations and other participating inter-governmental organisations, non-state actors, is usually held physically, and holds between May 24 and June.

  Speaking ahead of the event, the WHO’s Director-General, Tedros Ghebreyesus, said; “A crisis often brings out the best in people and organisations. From the WHO Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan to our technical guidance, the Solidarity Trial, the UN Supply Chain Task Force, the OpenWHO.org learning platform and initiatives like the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, including its COVAX partnership and the Solidarity Response Fund, WHO has given countries effective and evidence-informed tools to prevent infections, save lives and maintain essential health services.”

  He, however, noted that the pandemic is far from over and the global response is at a critical phase.

  According to the WHO chief, this was why ending the pandemic and helping countries recover was made the focal point of this year’s gathering.

  He further stated that the pandemic took the world by surprise, revealing a global failure to invest in pandemic preparedness stressing that the scientists who are to looked upon to find a cure had little time and a lesser margin for error.

Ghebreyesus, noted that despite a global effort to curb the spread of the disease including the development of life-saving vaccines at record time and several safety measures, many nations including India, Germany and the U.S. are still nowhere out of the woods with fast spreading new variants of the disease.

  The latest global resurgence of infections, currently threatening vaccination efforts across the globe and further exposes inequalities in distribution.

  According to WHO, over 75 per cent of the doses have been administered in only 10 countries while the low-income nations have dispensed less than half a per cent of global vaccines.

  As of Sunday afternoon, about 167,058,502 infections have been recorded across the globe leading to the death of 3,468,938 people.