“No country can get out of the pandemic with booster doses”

The WHO boss warned on Wednesday that giving booster doses would be enough to get out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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“With the booster shots no country will come out of the pandemic and the reminders will not be the green light to celebrate as expected,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanam Ghebreas told a news conference in Geneva. , A few days before Christmas.

“Indiscriminate booster programs have the potential to prolong the epidemic by diverting available doses to countries with already high vaccination rates, thereby giving the virus more opportunities to spread and spread,” Dr. Tedros pointed out.

“It is important to remember that the vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths are people who have not been vaccinated without a booster dose,” he stressed: “And we must be very clear that vaccines are effective against .Delta variants like Omicron.”

According to the WHO Expert Committee on Immunization Policy (SAGE), at least 126 countries have already provided indications for booster dose injection or additional vaccine (for example children) and 120 of them have already launched campaigns in this direction. Most of them are rich or middle-income countries, but “no poor country has yet introduced a recall program,” SAGE said in a press release issued Wednesday afternoon.