Switzerland: Suspend COVID vaccine boosters to allow poorer countries to catch up - WHO

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World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for a moratorium on COVID-19 vaccine booster jabs until poorer countries can catch up with vaccinations, on Wednesday in Geneva.

“WHO is calling for a moratorium on boosters until at least the end of September, to enable at least 10 percent of the population of every country to be vaccinated,” said Ghebreyesus.

Ghebreyesus also criticised wealthier countries over an uneven distribution of vaccines and urged them to change the supply situation rapidly.

“More than 80 percent have gone to high- and upper-middle income countries, even though they account for less than half of the world’s population,” he said, “we cannot accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it, while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected.”

“We need an urgent reversal, from the majority of vaccines going to high-income countries, to the majority going to low-income countries,” he stressed.

At the end of July, Israel became one of the first countries in the world to start offering booster jabs to fully vaccinated older people, as part of a campaign to curb the spread of the Delta variant. Germany is set to start offering additional jabs to elderly and at risk people in September, while the move is also under discussion in other countries.

According to information collected by Our World in Data, just 1.1 percent of the population in low-income countries has received at least one dose of a vaccine, compared to over 70 percent of the EU’s adult population.

In total out of over four billion doses administered around the world only 11.03 million doses have been administered in low income countries, per Our World in Data information.
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