At a joint online news conference with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Ghebreyesus announced the launch of Strategy to Achieve Global COVID-19 vaccination by mid-2022, which envisages vaccinating 40% of the population by the end of 2021 and 70% - by mid-2022.
"Achieving these targets will require at least 11 billion vaccine doses," the WHO director-general said.
By the end of September, "almost 6.5 billion doses" had already been administered worldwide, he continued.
"With global vaccine production now at 1.5 billion doses per month, there is enough supply to achieve our targets provided they are distributed equally," Ghebreyesus added.
According to the official, equality in vaccine distribution will bring the end of the pandemic nearer.
In his opinion, the vaccination goals set by the WHO can be achieved only if countries that control vaccine production focus on supplies for the international COVAX mechanism and the African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT). In this regard, Ghebreyesus pointed at "horrifying inequity" in the global distribution of vaccines: high and upper-middle income countries have used 75% of all vaccines produced so far, while low-income countries have received less than half of 1% of the world’s vaccines.
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