COVID-19 Virtual Press conference 30 July 2021 Speaker key: TJ Tarik Jasarevic TAG Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus DA Dawn MK Dr Maria Van Kerkhove MR Dr Michael Ryan TO Tomo CH Christophe AN Anjali BA Dr Bruce Aylward LA Latika IS Isabelle PE Peter SA Sara 00:00:23 TJ Hello to everyone from Geneva, the headquarters of the World Health Organization. My name is Tarik Jasarevic and I welcome you to the COVID-19 press conference. Today we have with us a number of speakers; here in the room, Dr Tedros, WHO Director-General. We have also Dr Rogerio Gaspar, who is Director of Regulation and Pre-Qualification. Online we have Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, Technical Lead on COVID-19, Dr Mike Ryan, who is Executive Director, Health Emergency Programme. We also have Derek Walton, who is our Legal Counsel, and Dr Martin Friede, who works on products, vaccines and research. Journalists who are online, as always, should click on the raise hand icon to get in line to ask a question, if possible only one question so we can get as many as possible. As usual we have simultaneous interpretation in six UN languages and also in Hindi and Portuguese so journalists may use any of these languages to ask their questions. As we usually do, we will provide an audio file immediately after the press briefing and we will have a transcript posted on our website early tomorrow morning. Just before I give the floor to Dr Tedros for his opening remarks we will have to sort out a little technical detail here so we will be with you in a second. 00:02:53 Again we apologise for this delay. We had a little technical issue but I think it has been sorted thanks to our colleagues so I give the floor to Dr Tedros for his opening remarks. TAG Thank you. Thank you, Tarik. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. Earlier this week I had the honour of travelling to Bahrain and Kuwait, where WHO has opened our two newest country offices. I also had the opportunity to visit several facilities that had been set up to respond to COVID-19 in both countries and was very impressed by the innovative and comprehensive approach they used to fight the pandemic. We now have 152 country offices around the world in addition to the new ones in Bahrain and Kuwait and they're central to what WHO does, supporting countries to strengthen health systems and improve the health of their populations. Before that I was honoured to be invited to Tokyo to address the International Olympic Committee and I attended the official opening. I went to answer a question I'm often asked; when will the pandemic end? 00:04:23 My answer was that the pandemic will end when the world chooses to end it. It is in our hands. We have all the tools we need. We can prevent this disease, we can test for it and we can treat it. Yet since our last press conference cases and deaths from COVID-19 have continued to climb. Almost four million cases were reported to WHO last week and on current trends we expect the total number of cases to pass 200 million within the next two weeks and we know that is an underestimate. On average in five of WHO's six regions infections have increased by 80% or nearly doubled over the past four weeks. In Africa deaths have increased by 80% over the same period. Much of this increase is being driven by the highly transmissible delta variant, which has now been detected in at least 132 countries. WHO has warned that the COVID-19 virus has been changing since it was first reported and it continues to change. So far four variants of concern have emerged and there will be more as long as the virus continues to spread. 00:06:11 The rise is also driven by increased social mixing and mobility, the inconsistent use of public health and social measures and inequitable vaccine use. Hard-won gains are in jeopardy or being lost and health systems in many countries are being overwhelmed. The increased number of infections is creating a shortage of treatments such as life-saving oxygen. 29 countries have high and rising oxygen needs and many countries have inadequate supplies of basic equipment to protect front-line health workers. Meanwhile testing rates in low-income countries are less than 2% of what they are in high-income countries, leaving the world blind to understanding where the disease is and how it's changing. Without better testing rates globally we cannot fight the disease on the front line or mitigate the risk of new, more dangerous variants emerging. WHO is supporting countries with supplies of oxygen, with guidance to help countries better detect variants and we continue to work daily with our global networks of experts to understand why the delta variant spreads so readily. But we need more; we need stronger surveillance, we need more strategic testing to improve the global understanding of where the virus is, where public health interventions are most needed and to isolate cases and reduce transmission. 00:08:02 We need patients to receive early clinical care by trained and protected health workers with more oxygen to treat the seriously ill and save lives. We need well-trained and well-protected health workers and the systems to deliver the services and the tools to save lives. We need more research and development to ensure that tests, treatments, vaccines and other tools remain effective against the delta variant and other emerging variants. And of course we need more vaccines. Last month we announced that we were setting up a technology transfer hub for MRNA vaccines in South Africa as part of our effort to scale up production of vaccines. Today we have taken another step forward with a letter of intent that sets out terms of collaboration signed by the partners in the hub. The partners are WHO, the Medicines Patent Pool, Afrigen Biologics, the Biologicals and Vaccine Institute of Southern Africa, the South African Medical Research Council and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. 00:09:25 WHO's goal remains to support every country to vaccinate at least 10% of its population by the end of September, at least 40% by the end of this year and 70% by the middle of next year. We're a long way off achieving those targets. So far just over half of countries have fully vaccinated 10% of their population, less than a quarter of countries have vaccinated 40% and only three countries have vaccinated 70%. Almost a year ago WHO began to express concern about the threat of vaccine nationalism. In a press conference in November we warned of the risk that the world's poor would be trampled in the stampede for vaccines and at WHO's executive board meeting in January this year we said the world was on the verge of a catastrophic moral failure. 00:10:31 Yet the global distribution of vaccines remains unjust. All regions are at risk but none more so than Africa. On current trends nearly 70% of African countries will not reach the 10% vaccination target by the end of September. Around 3.5 million to four million doses are administered weekly on the continent but to meet the September target this must rise to 21 million doses at the very least each week. Many African countries have prepared well to roll out vaccines but the vaccines have not arrived. Less than 2% of all doses administered globally have been in Africa; less than 2%. Just 1.5% of the continent's population are fully vaccinated. This is a very serious problem if we're going to fight this pandemic and end it. In response to the delta surge today the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator is launching the Rapid ACT-Accelerator Delta Response or RADR, issuing an urgent call for US$7.7 billion for tests, treatments and vaccines. In parallel we will need additional financing this year for COVAX to exercise its options to purchase vaccines for 2022. This investment is a tiny portion of the amount governments are spending to deal with COVID-19. 00:12:22 The question is not whether the world can afford to make these investments; it's whether it can afford not to. Tarik, back to you. TJ Thank you very much, Dr Tedros. Before we open the floor for questions just to note that we are also joined by Dr Bruce Aylward, Senior Advisor to the Director-General and the Lead on the ACT Accelerator. First question goes to Dawn Kopecki from NBC. Dawn, unmute yourself, please. DA Hi, thank you for taking my question. My question is, in the United States US health officials have said that the delta variant behaves differently from previous strains, it's definitely more contagious but there's also some evidence that it may be not necessarily more deadly but lead to higher hospitalisations, more severe illness. My question is, is it different enough to warrant a new strain name, are we at the point where the strains have mutated enough to justify COVID-20 or COVID-21 and if not when do we come to that point? TJ Thank you, Dawn. Maybe we will ask Maria to start. Dr Van Kerkhove. 00:13:55 MK Thanks, Tarik. Yes, I can start and perhaps others may want to come in.