The World Health Organization is calling for a moratorium on booster shots of coronavirus vaccines through at least September as poorer countries struggle to access the shots, even for high-risk populations such as health-care workers and the elderly.
“We cannot and we should not accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a Wednesday news conference.
He said the world is not on track to meet the health organization’s previously stated goal of 10 percent vaccination coverage in every country by the end of September.
As the coronavirus continues to infect and kill at alarming rates across the Global South, where vaccination levels remain catastrophically low, the decision by wealthy countries to give booster shots to their own people rather than donating those doses to poorer nations is highly controversial.
Advocates and experts, including at the World Health Organization, have called the move immoral.
The small but growing group that is planning additional shots for the fully immunized includes some of Europe’s richest and most populous countries, possibly setting a precedent and marking a new phase of the vaccination campaign. WHO officials said Wednesday that they want to urge countries considering the use of booster shots to hold off.
More than 80 percent of vaccine doses globally have gone to high and upper-middle income countries that represent less than half of the world’s population, Tedros said Wednesday. He urged “concrete” commitments to global vaccination goals and said that leaders of the G-20 countries, which include the United States, where nearly half the population is fully vaccinated, will determine the course of the pandemic.
“We need everyone’s cooperation,” he said.