Geneva.– The World Health Organization (WHO) warned Monday that there may never be a “solution” against the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the ongoing race to get a vaccine.
“There is no solution and perhaps never will be,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at an online press conference. “Clinical trials give us hope, but this does not necessarily mean that we get an effective vaccine,” he said.
“We all hope to have a number of effective vaccines that can prevent people from getting it,” added Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who insisted that halting the outbreaks in the meantime depends on respect for public health measures.
The WHO emergency committee, which met on Friday, “was very clear. When leaders work closely with the population, this disease can be controlled,” he recalled.
“We must contain the new waves”, defended the director of the WHO and for this he recalled that “they must test, isolate and treat the sick and seek and isolate their contacts”, but they must also “inform” so that According to him, the populations continue to respect the gestures of distancing and thus break the chains of transmission.
“The message to people and governments is: do all this. And continue when (the virus) is under control!” Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisted, after having recalled that in “several countries that seemed to have overcome the hardest, now they know new waves. “
The pandemic has caused 690,000 deaths since the end of December, according to a balance sheet made by the AFP on Monday at 11:00 GMT, and it infected more than 18 million people, of whom at least 10.5 million have already been cured.
The director-general of the United Nations agency also announced that the WHO mission in China completed preparatory work for its investigation into the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The WHO team that traveled to China completed its mission to lay the foundation for joint efforts to identify the origins of the virus,” said the organization’s chief.
“Epidemiological studies will begin in Wuhan to identify the potential source of infection in the first cases,” he added.
The vast majority of scientists agree that the new coronavirus originated from a bat, but that it passed through another animal before being transmitted to humans.
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