The representatives of 194 countries will debate for three days a structural reform of the organization that allows it to face future pandemics with guarantees
Starting this Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) will hold an exceptional meeting in Geneva to try to design strategies in the fight against new strains of the coronavirus and the hypothetical next pandemics. This extraordinary summit of the World Health Assembly – the supreme decision-making body that brings together its 194 members – will last three days at a time when Europe is experiencing the fifth wave of the covid-19 pandemic and when the appearance of the Omicron strain is a cause of concern around the world.
The mutation detected in South Africa seems more transmissible than those that circulated before by the plan, WHO said this Saturday. Its rapid increase in the number of cases can put different health systems under unbearable pressure. In the opinion of the experts, it would be very dangerous to underestimate its spread due to the distortion of data caused by countries with the ability to analyze the sequencing of the virus.
The meeting, which coincides with the two years since the start of this pandemic that has already cost millions of lives, will also serve to analyze the management of covid, which has shown the limits of the WHO and the inconveniences that an international community divided at the time to combat these critical situations. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the best way to provide the organization with a legal framework to better face a future crisis, whether in the form of an international treaty or some other formula.
The International Health Regulations that have guided WHO’s work since 2005 are not designed to deal with crises of the magnitude of COVID, says Jaouad Mahjour, the organization’s deputy director of emergency preparedness. Its CEO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is clearly in favor of a treaty to avoid the vicious cycle of “we do nothing and then we panic.” “The chaos caused by this pandemic only highlights why the world needs a foolproof international agreement that sets the standards,” he said.
“It is feasible to develop a vaccine very quickly”
The British scientist who led the research on the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine said yesterday that “it is feasible to develop a new one against the Omicron variant very quickly.”
Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, considered that it is “highly unlikely” that this new variant will spread strongly into the population already inoculated, “as was seen last year” with the Delta variant.
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