World Health Organisation (WHO) has assured that nobody needs to panic about Covid-19 vaccine because everyone who wants one, will get one. "The UN Health agency has been working to ensure that all population, across countries, will get access to Coronavirus vaccine," Mariangela Simao, Assistant Director-General at WHO, said in an online event on Wednesday.
Simao added that, so far, 50 countries have started the processes of vaccination amongst which are 40 high-income countries. WHO co-led Covax facility aims to secure vaccination for 20 per cent of the population in each participating country by the end of this year with funding covered for 92 lower and lower-middle-income economies involved. As apart of this vaccination effort, Covax has already made agreements with five manufactures for two billion vaccine doses.
Based on WHO's overview of candidate vaccines, 64 have been tested on humans and 22 have reached the final-stage mass testing. Besides, 173 candidates are being developed in laboratories with an aim to eventual human trails.
Soumya Swaminathan, WHO Chief Scientist welcomed this range of vaccines noting the importance of having numerous vaccines with different properties. Pfizer-BioNTech, validated by WHO, requires ultra-cold storage. She acknowledged that this would be a problem for many countries. Vaccines which require single injection or nasal-inhaled vaccine will be more affordable than which are already in use.
"There may be many vaccines that have an advantage over the first generation. Some vaccines do not stop infection but prevent it. At this point in time, we are still waiting to see the results of the studies to know which of the Covid vaccines are actually going to prevent infection successfully. Hopefully, they should," Soumya Swaminathan viewed.