WHO: No country can get out of the pandemic with booster doses of anti-covid vaccines

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned today that one should not cultivate the illusion that it is enough to give the population booster doses of vaccines to get out of the Kovid-19 pandemic.

"No country can get out of a pandemic with booster doses and booster doses are not the green light to celebrate as predicted," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference in Geneva.

Indiscriminate booster-dose programs have every chance of prolonging the pandemic rather than ending it by diverting available vaccine doses to countries that already have high vaccination rates, giving the virus more opportunities to spread and mutate, Tedros said.

"It is important to remember that the vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths are among people who were not vaccinated, not those who did not receive a booster dose," he said.

"And we should be very clear about the fact that the vaccines remain as effective against the delta strain as they are against the omicron strain," he said.

According to the WHO Committee of Experts on Vaccination Policy (SAGE), at least 126 countries have already given instructions to give a booster dose of the vaccine, or for additional vaccination, for example of children, and 120 of them have already started campaigns in this sense.

The vast majority are rich or middle-income countries, while not a single poor country has yet introduced an additional vaccination program, said the WHO committee in a statement published today.