The World Health Organization’s (WHO) chief on Wednesday urged wealthier nations not to prioritize coronavirus booster shots amid a “tsunami of cases” driven by the new omicron variant.<\/p>\n
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus\u00a0during a news conference<\/a>\u00a0pressed wealthy nations to spread their share of vaccines with other countries,\u00a0arguing the coronavirus will continue to evolve and the pandemic will worsen “if we don’t improve our collective response.”<\/p>\n “Delta and omicron are twin threats that are driving up cases to record numbers,” he said. “I’m highly concerned that omicron being more transmissible [and] circulating at the same time as delta is leading to a tsunami of cases.”<\/p>\n Tedros has repeatedly knocked wealthier nations for prioritizing boosters or third shots of the vaccine,\u00a0saying last week that<\/a>\u00a0“no country can boost its way out of the pandemic.”<\/p>\n Developing countries continue to struggle to vaccinate their populations. Low- and middle-income nations have an average 20 percent vaccination rate, compared to 80 percent in wealthier countries,\u00a0according to a September update from Covax<\/a>, a collaborative initiative to share vaccines with the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The World Health Organization’s (WHO) chief...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43459,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43458\/revisions\/43459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}