UN chief declares ‘war’ on Covid as India toll tops 300,000

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The UN chief on Monday declared the world “at war” against Covid-19, as India’s death toll crossed 300,000 and Japan opened its first mass vaccination centres — just two months before the start of the Olympics.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged governments to apply wartime logic to stark inequalities in the response to the pandemic, warning the crisis was far from over despite rapidly advancing vaccination rollouts in wealthy parts of the world.

“Unless we act now, we face a situation in which rich countries vaccinate the majority of their people and open their economies, while the virus continues to cause deep suffering by circling and mutating in the poorest countries,” he said.

Deadly outbreaks in India, Brazil and elsewhere have pushed the global death toll past 3.4 million, even as rich countries such as the United States, Britain and Israel have eased restrictions.

India has witnessed horrific scenes in recent weeks with severe shortages of oxygen at hospitals and crematoriums overwhelmed, although the number of new daily infections has fallen in big cities. However, experts say the real numbers of deaths and infections in India — fuelled by a new coronavirus variant and “superspreader” events such as mass religious festivals — are probably much higher than the official figures.

“We are seeing the bodies along the river Ganges which don’t seem to be recorded as Covid deaths but are very likely to be Covid deaths,” Ashoka University biology professor Gautam Menon told AFP.

India has administered close to 200 million vaccine shots, but experts say the programme needs to be ramped up significantly to bring the virus under control. Another Asian country that has faced criticism over a slow inoculation rate is Japan, where the first mass vaccination centres opened on Monday.

“It’s wonderful. I can rest easy now. For a long time, a year and a half, I was feeling rather anxious and tense,” Hideo Ishikawa, 73, told reporters after he got the shot. Japanese authorities are trying to speed up their vaccination drive with just two months until the postponed Tokyo Olympics begin. Just 2% of Japan’s 125 million population has been fully vaccinated, compared with around 40% in the United States and 15% in France.

Speaking alongside Guterres at the World Health Organization’s main annual assembly in Geneva, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he wanted 10% of every country’s population vaccinated by September. He also paid tribute to the estimated 115,000 health and care workers who have died from Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.

“They have saved countless lives and fought for others who, despite their best efforts, slipped away,” he said, describing the medical workers lost to the pandemic as having paid “the ultimate price in the service of others”.

He said many medics have felt “frustrated, helpless and unprotected, with a lack of access to personal protective equipment and vaccines”.

“The number of doses administered globally so far would have been enough to cover all health workers and older people if they had been distributed equitably,” Tedros added. More than 75% of all Covid vaccines have gone to just 10 countries.

The health ministry of Israel, one of the nations with the most successful vaccination rollouts, said Sunday that it had proposed lifting all virus curbs on June 1, although restrictions on travellers coming into the country will remain.

In sharp contrast, the rollout remains painfully slow in Brazil, one of the hardest-hit countries in the world. Its far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has been widely condemned for his coronavirus scepticism and pandemic management, with Brazil’s death toll topping 450,000. But he has remained defiant, leading a motorbike rally through Rio de Janeiro on Sunday as throngs gathered to cheer him on despite the coronavirus risk.