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COVID-19 Virtual Press Conference 12 February 2021

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COVID-19 Virtual Press Conference 12 February 2021 COVID-19 Virtual Press conference 12 February 2021 Speaker key: FC Fadela Chaib TAG Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus RO Robin PBE Dr Peter Ben Embarek PA Paulina TR Translator SS Dr Soumya Swaminathan MK Dr Maria Van Kerkhove HE Helen MR Dr Michael Ryan ME Megan MA Professor Marion Koopmans SI Simone DA David SO Sophie BA Dr Bruce Aylward SH Shoko DO Donato 00:00:48 FC Good afternoon, everyone. This is Fadela Chaib speaking to you from WHO headquarters in Geneva and welcoming you to our global COVID-19 press conference today, Friday 12th February. Simultaneous interpretation is provided in the six official UN languages plus Portuguese and Hindi. Let me introduce to you the participants at this press conference. Present in the room are Director-General of WHO, Dr Tedros, Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director, Health Emergencies, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, Technical Lead for COVID-19, Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist, Dr Bruce Aylward, Special Advisor to the Director-General and Lead on the ACT Accelerator. Joining us remotely are Dr Kate O'Brien, Director, Immunisation, Vaccines and Biologicals and Dr Janet Diaz, Team Lead, Healthcare Readiness. We also have present in the room a member of the international team to China, Dr Peter Ben Embarek. He's also an expert at WHO on food safety and zoonosis and team lead of the international team. Joining remotely is Professor Marion Koopmans, Head of the Department of Viroscience at the University of Rotterdam. Now without further delay I would like to hand over to Dr Tedros for his opening remarks. Dr Tedros, please, you have the floor. 00:02:37 TAG Thank you. Shukran, Fadela. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. As you know, the independent expert team to study the origins of the COVID-19 virus has completed its trip to China. This was an international team comprising experts from Australia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Qatar, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Vietnam. The team also included experts from WHO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Organization for Animal Health. I want to start by thanking all members of the international team for their work. This has been a very important scientific exercise in very difficult circumstances. The expert team is working on a summary report which we hope will be published next week and the full final report will be published in the coming weeks. We look forward to receiving both reports which will be released publicly. When the summary report is published we will hold a further press conference with the full international team. 00:04:04 Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded. Having spoken with some members of the team I wish to confirm that all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and studies. Some of that work may lie outside the remit and scope of this mission. We have also said that this mission would not find all the answers but it has added important information that takes us closer to understanding the origins of the virus. The mission achieved a better understanding of the early days of the pandemic and identified areas for further analysis and research. And we will continue working to get the information we need to answer the questions that still need to be answered. Today we're joined by two members of the international mission, Dr Peter Ben Embarek, the Team Lead of the international mission, and Professor Marion Koopmans, Head of the Department of Viroscience at the University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Dr Ben Embarek and Professor Koopmans will be available to answer your questions. Meanwhile the number of reported cases of COVID-19 globally has declined for the fourth week in a row and the number of deaths also fell for the second consecutive week. These declines appear to be due to countries implementing public health measures more stringently. 00:06:03 We should all be encouraged but complacency is as dangerous as the virus itself. Now is not the time for any country to relax measures or for any individual to let down their guard. Every life that's lost now is all the more tragic as vaccines are beginning to be rolled out. Alongside traditional public health measures how quickly we can collectively expand vaccine manufacturing and roll out vaccines to all countries will determine how soon we can control this pandemic. At the beginning of the year I issued a global challenge to ensure that vaccination of health workers and older people is underway in all countries within the first 100 days of 2021. Next Friday marks day 50. Today I'm inviting everyone to join me in a call to action to accelerate production and share technology so we can produce enough vaccines for the world and share them equitably. 00:07:28 Some people didn't think it was possible to produce a vaccine so quickly but it was and very historic. Never in the history of the world had we actually developed vaccines in less than a year after the emergence of a new virus. Now some people say that vaccinating the world is not possible. They are dead wrong. As Nelson Mandela, Madiba, said, it always seems impossible until it's done. So join me; wherever you live or work sign on to the new declaration and let's build a movement to make history together. It's everybody's responsibility. Vaccines are vital not only for saving lives but also for preventing the long-term effects of COVID-19, which we're only beginning to understand. WHO's work in this area focuses on three key needs for these patients; recognition, research and rehabilitation. Earlier this week WHO held a global meeting of patients, clinicians and other stakeholders to advance our understanding of what is officially called post- COVID condition or long COVID, discussed with very distinguished colleagues and people. This was the first in a series of meetings and focused on working towards an agreed clinical description of the condition, which will be important for clinicians to diagnose and treat it. 00:09:38 This illness affects patients with both severe and mild COVID-19. Part of the challenge is that patients with long COVID can have a variety of different symptoms that can be persistent or can come and go. Earlier this week WHO released a case reporting form that will allow more data to be collected on long COVID in a standardised way. This will help to improve the understanding, surveillance and clinical management of the condition. Given the scale of the pandemic we expect many people to be affected by post-COVID-19 condition or by long COVID and of course the best way to prevent long COVID is to prevent COVID-19 in the first place. Finally yesterday was the International Day of Women and Girls in Science and I would like to pay tribute to all of the incredible women scientists who work for and with WHO all over the world, including those at this press conference, Janet, Kate, Maria, Mariangela, Soumya and Marion and also all colleagues; Gabi, Fadela, Aurora and others. 00:11:23 I want to say to all of you that you're an inspiration to me and I hope you are an inspiration to many girls and boys around the world. Finally, finally I would like to wish everyone who observes it a very happy lunar new year. Fadela, back to you. FC Thank you, Dr Tedros. I will now open the floor to questions from members of the media. I remind you that you will need to raise your hand via the raise your hand icon in order to be able to ask your question. I will start by giving the floor to AFP, to Robin Millar, Agence France Press, to ask the first question. Robin, can you hear me? RO Yes, hello. Thank you, Fadela. A question for Peter Ben Embarek; now that you've returned from visiting Wuhan do you think that if you'd been allowed to go much earlier you would have found more evidence and more conclusive evidence? Thank you. PBE Thank you for the question. It would have been difficult to go there much earlier. If you remember, last year in February it would have been impossible to be in Wuhan because Wuhan was in total lock-down and in the middle of fighting the disease. 00:13:08 It took a few months before the city was reopened and business returned to normal. During the summer we then were in China and developed plans for working in Wuhan later on and we then engaged with the international community to identify an international team of experts, identify a Chinese team of experts and then planned the current visit we just achieved. So it took [inaudible] to analyse and look at this time took months to conduct. Many of these studies have involved thousands of people and researchers in China to conduct and if we had gone much, much earlier we wouldn't have had the same material to look at. It was not a mission to go and chase an animal in a market or chase a patient somewhere or looking for that type of evidence. It was a totally different mission than what you somehow imply could have been done. In that case, if we had done that kind of investigation on the ground, chasing the first animals and the first patient that would have been something that could have been done perhaps back in December when the outbreak was detected.
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