WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told attendees at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that vaccinations and the fact that Omicron has turned out to be a far less severe variant are "driving a dangerous narrative that the pandemic is over."
"But it's not. Not when 70,000 people a week are dying from a preventable and treatable disease," Ghebreyesus added.
"Not when 83% of the population of Africa is yet to receive a single dose of vaccine," he continued. "Not when health systems continue to strain and crack under the caseload. Not when we have a highly transmissible virus circulating almost unchecked, with too little surveillance to track its evolution."
Ghebreyesus also warned that the world should prepare for the potential of more variants to arise.
"In fact, the conditions are ideal for more transmissible, more dangerous variants to emerge," he said.
According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, more than 65% of the total population of the United States is fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, meaning either two doses of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the COVID-19 vaccine for those age 5 and up.
