WHO warns that “the vaccine alone will not be enough” to defeat the pandemic

The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned today that a vaccine “alone will not be enough” to defeat the covid-19 pandemic.

“A vaccine will complement the other tools we have, it will not replace them,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a WHO Executive Council meeting, which he attended in person after completing quarantine for being in contact with a person. whose test for infection with the new coronavirus was positive.

The WHO Director-General, as well as several UN agency experts, moderated the optimism created last week about the proximity of an effective vaccine against covid-19, when pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech announced that the Preliminary data from clinical trials of III showed vaccine efficacy of 90%.

“Initially, the quantities will be limited and therefore health workers, the elderly and people at risk will have priority and we hope this will reduce the number of deaths and allow for resilience of health systems,” said the WHO director-general.

“But this will still leave much room for the virus to act,” warned Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, calling for measures to control the expansion of covid-19 to be stopped prematurely, in particular through testing, quarantine and monitoring of contact cases. .

The pandemic has re-emerged in force in many countries of Europe, forcing the authorities to take further steps to try to control the spread of the disease and new cases are increasing exponentially in many states of the United States of America.

The covid-19 pandemic has already caused more than 1.3 million deaths worldwide since December last year, including 3,381 in Portugal.