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The World Health Organization urged countries on Monday to continue to implement security measures to control the spread of the coronavirus, such as limiting public gatherings and protecting vulnerable groups as they try to reopen businesses and services.
“The more control countries have over the virus, the more they can open up. Opening up without having control is a recipe for disaster,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a virtual press conference from the headquarters of the United Nations health agency in Geneva. . “No country can simply pretend the pandemic is over.”
Tedros outlined “four essential things that all countries, communities and individuals must focus on to take control.” He said countries should “prevent amplification events,” which he said many countries have linked to large gatherings in stadiums, nightclubs and places of worship. He added that countries and people can find “creative ways” to socialize.
He added that countries must prevent deaths by protecting vulnerable people, including older people, people with underlying illnesses and essential workers. This will help save lives and ease the burden on countries’ health systems, Tedros said.
Tedros also said that “people must play their part” by wearing masks, social distancing and frequent hand washing. He added that governments can avoid stay-at-home orders by implementing specific responses to outbreaks through testing, contact tracing and isolation.
“If countries are serious about openness, they must get serious about suppressing transmission and saving lives,” he said. “This may seem like an impossible balance, but it is not. It can be done and has been done.”
Tedros added that WHO recently published guidance on how hotels, cargo ships and fishing vessels can safely resume operations as “part of our commitment to help all sectors reopen in the safest way possible.” .
WHO officials said the so-called new normal will include at least some mitigation measures, such as social distancing and the use of masks. The WHO has previously said that such measures will likely need to be followed in many countries even after a vaccine is finally marketed.
Dozens of vaccine manufacturers have launched trials for their coronavirus vaccine candidates, according to the WHO, and at least two have started large phase three trials. US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn said over the weekend that his agency would consider issuing an emergency use authorization for a vaccine before its phase three clinical trial is complete. .
But Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist at the World Health Organization, warned on Monday that authorizing a vaccine too early and with too little data could create a variety of problems.
“The risk of approving a vaccine prematurely for us is that it will make it very difficult to continue with randomized clinical trials in the first place,” he said. “And secondly, there is the risk of introducing a vaccine that has not been properly studied and could turn out to have low efficacy, so not doing the work of ending this pandemic or, worse, having a safety profile. which is not acceptable. ”
He added that the emergency use of a vaccine must be done “very seriously”, particularly since it could cause adverse side effects in some parts of the population. He added that the decision should be made using as much safety and efficacy data as possible.
“Scientists around the world are united in a call to agencies and companies, and most companies have supported this position that approval of a vaccine should be based on data from phase three clinical trials,” Swaminathan said.
Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, echoed Swaminathan, saying that collecting and monitoring large amounts of data is crucial as nations begin to distribute vaccines to their general population. As the vaccine is introduced to larger and perhaps more diverse parts of the population, negative side effects could emerge, underscoring the importance of collecting safety data.
“The difficulty and challenge with the vaccine is that, right now, we are going from vaccinating tens or hundreds of people to vaccinating thousands of people,” he said. “We need to get the safety and efficacy data from those studies. Because if you go too fast to vaccinate millions or hundreds of millions or billions of people, we may miss certain adverse events that you will not detect with smaller numbers, so you must keep a check. “
He added that there are strict regulations on the emergency use of vaccines and drugs in the European Union and the United States, as well as parts of Africa and India. It is crucial that governments are led by their regulatory agencies, he said.
(With contributions from agencies)
