Sharjah 24 – AFP: The World Health Organisation condemned Wednesday the rush by wealthy countries to provide Covid vaccine booster shots, while millions around the world have yet to receive a single dose.
Speaking before US authorities announced that all vaccinated Americans would soon be eligible to receive additional doses, WHO experts insisted there was not enough scientific evidence that boosters were needed.
Providing them while so many were still waiting to be immunised was immoral, they argued.
"We're planning to hand out extra life jackets to people who already have life jackets, while we're leaving other people to drown without a single life jacket," WHO's emergency director Mike Ryan told reporters, speaking from the UN agency's Geneva headquarters.
"The fundamental, ethical reality is we're handing out second life jackets while leaving millions and millions of people without anything to protect them."
Earlier this month, the WHO called for a moratorium on Covid vaccine booster shots to help ease the drastic inequity in dose distribution between rich and poor nations.
That has not stopped a number of countries moving forward with plans to add a third jab, as they struggle to thwart the Delta variant.
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