WHO: don't wait on a vaccine to save lives

The World Health Organisation welcomed positive early signs in a possible UK vaccine

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Don’t wait for a vaccine in order to save lives, the head of the World Health Organisation said as the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases rose by one million in the last week.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus welcomed the positive early signs from a recent UK vaccine test but said that more can be done now with the tools already available.

"We do not have to wait for a vaccine. We have to save lives now,” he said. The WHO boss urged nations to take all necessary health precautions, with special emphasis on contact tracing.

Global infections stand at more than 14.5 million, with more than 600,000 deaths.

Mike Ryan, head of the WHO's emergencies programme, welcomed news that AstraZeneca's experimental vaccine developed with Britain's Oxford University was safe and produced an immune response in early-stage clinical trials in healthy volunteers.

"We congratulate our colleagues for the progress they have made," Mr Ryan said. "This is a positive result, but there is a long way to go ... We now need to move to large-scale trials."

Mr Ryan told a media briefing in Geneva there were 23 potential vaccines in development with three making data available for examination by other scientists in peer reviews.

US drugmaker Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech also provided additional promising data, Mr Ryan said.

But again, Mr Tedros and Mr Ryan warned that politicians need to commit to a fair distribution of Covid-19 vaccines as they see a worrying pattern of some countries moving in the other direction to corner markets and protect domestic supplies of vital drugs.

Mr Ryan warned that even when a vaccine becomes available, there will be supply issues.

“There is not a mechanism, at it presently stands, that is going to be able to supply a vaccine for everybody on the planet,” he said. “We are going to have to prioritise who gets what vaccine at the beginning, depending on which vaccine becomes available. And we’re going to have to have some policy and priorities around the best use of those vaccines.”

Mr Tedros also warned about the impact of the virus on indigenous communities in the hard-hit Americas as well as the rapid rises seen across Africa. The US and Brazil lead the world for confirmed cases.

He said that as of July 6, there were more than 70,000 cases reported among indigenous peoples in the Americas, with more than 2,000 deaths.

"Indigenous peoples often have a high burden of poverty, unemployment, malnutrition and both communicable and non-communicable diseases, making them more vulnerable," Mr Tedros said, adding that those in current epicentre the Americas were of particular concern.

He said South Africa's growing epidemic should be an alert to the rest of the continent to strengthen disease surveillance. South Africa reported a surge of 13,373 new cases on Saturday, the fourth largest globally.

Botswana, Kenya, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe also reported significant increases in cases over the past week, Mr Ryan told a news conference.

"Even though the numbers in those other countries are smaller I think what we starting to see is a continued acceleration of transmission in a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa," he said. "South Africa may, unfortunately, be a precursor, it may be a warning for what will happen in the rest of Africa. So, I think this isn't just a wake-up call for South Africa ... we need to take what is happening in Africa very, very seriously.

The rate of the infection spread is still speeding up around the world, having taken months to reach one million and weeks to double again, it is now increasing by around a million every few days.

This is partly due to increases in testing capacity in many countries that were initially slow to begin mass screening, but the WHO says that it is also due to spreading clusters of the disease.

Without applying basic outbreak-control methods, “there is only one way this pandemic is going to go,” Mr Tedros previously cautioned.