HYDERABAD: Though scientific achievements were outstanding when it came to the global fight against Covid-19, the world fell short on vaccine equity and a global coordinated and harmonised way of approaching the pandemic, World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Soumya Swaminathan said on Thursday.
"The science was amazing but the solidarity was lacking," Swaminathan said during a virtual panel discussion 'Two years into the pandemic: Challenges, successes and what next?,' conducted on the opening day of BioAsia 2022 in which EU chief scientific advisor for epidemics Dr Peter Piot, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, Bharat Biotech CMD Dr Krishna Ella, Biological E MD Mahima Datla and DBT secretary Rajesh S Gokhale also participated.
"Though WHO did put out a framework for equitable access to health products that were going to be developed...countries did not play by that rule. Each country was trying to look after itself...that has resulted in this situation today where you have over 70% of people in high income countries fully vaccinated as opposed to less than about 10% now currently on the African continent," Swaminathan said.
Pointing out that sharing of samples was another thing that always ran into hurdles, she said these are some of the key issues that the world needs to tackle as countries discuss a framework for a pandemic treaty that will have some kind of binding principles on how countries must act.
Listing out the scientific achievements during the Covid era, she said the fact that we had Covid-19 vaccines in less than a year and a lot of progress also on diagnostics, self-test kits, antivirals, the technology and genomic surveillance, which allowed us to track the evolution of the virus, was outstanding.
"We saw how South Africa was banned as soon as they announced that they had discovered a new variant of concern of concern- the Omicron. It doesn't help in a pandemic to have these kind of uncoordinated actions by countries," she said.
