COVID-19: WHO warns world cannot ‘boost its way out’ of pandemic

The World Health Organization chief has warned that the rush in wealthy countries to roll out additional COVID vaccine doses was deepening the inequity in access to jabs that is prolonging the pandemic.

“No country can boost its way out of the pandemic,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a new South African study, along with data on hospitalisations and deaths in the country’s fourth wave of COVID infections, suggest that the risk of severe disease is lower with Omicron than with previous variants, a top scientist has said.

The United Kingdom has recorded 106,122 new daily coronavirus infections, the highest total of the pandemic and the first time the figure has topped 100,000.

In Nigeria, authorities have destroyed about one million expired doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine even as the West African country’s vaccination rate has almost doubled in the last one week amid a spike in confirmed infections.