WHO warns of ideal conditions for the development of Covid-19 variants

The general director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom, warned this Friday against The “dangerous narrative” that the pandemic is coming to an end due to the high vaccination rate in some countries and the lower severity of the Omicron variant.

«The pandemic has not passed when There are 70,000 people dying every week from a disease that is treatable“when 83% of the population in Africa has not yet received a single vaccine,” he said at the Security Conference which started today in Munich, southern Germany.

In this regard, the Director General of the WHO warned that current conditionswith the health systems of many countries saturated and with little surveillance of the evolution of the virus, are in favor of the development of “more contagious and dangerous” variants.

However, although the pandemic is not yet close to its end, Tedros stressed that it is possible to control the health emergency which is experienced on a global scale if there is the will to do so.

Tedros quantified the price of ending the emergency at $60 billionan amount that he said is nothing compared to the social and economic impact of the pandemic.

In addition, the Director General of the WHO He listed three pillars that he believes are crucial to improving the situation.: an improvement in global governance, More funding for international health architecture and the development of more robust tools and systems to rapidly detect and respond to pandemics and epidemics.

Tedros spoke at the course of A debate on the routes out of the pandemic which was also attended by philanthropist Bill Gates, the Foreign Ministers of Sweden and Canada, Ann Linde and Mélanie Joly, and the President of the NGO International Crisis Group, Comfort Ero.

In his speech, Gates warned of the danger posed by conspiracy theories and misinformationwhich he said are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.