WHO warns of “dangerous narrative” that the pandemic would be at an end

Tedros Adhanom, diretor-geral da Organização Mundial da Saúde (OMS)

Large numbers of deaths and the existence of pockets of unvaccinated people in various parts of the world show that the pandemic is still going on.| Photo: Salvatore di Nolfi/EFE

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

“The pandemic is not ends while 70 a thousand people a week die from a disease treatable, while 39% of Africa’s population has not yet received a single vaccine”, he argued at the Security Conference that opened in Munich, in southern Germany.

The WHO chief warned that current conditions, with health systems in many countries overburdened and with little monitoring of the evolution of the virus, are conducive to the development of “more contagious and dangerous” variants.