United Nations's video: Number of vaccinations has overtaken number of reported infections-WHO Press Conference 5 Feb 2021

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, today (05 Feb) announced that “globally, the number of vaccinations has now overtaken the number of reported infections,” which he said was a remarkable achievement in such a short timeframe.” Nevertheless, Tedros cautioned, “more than three quarters of those vaccinations are in just 10 countries that account for almost 60percent of global GDP,” and “almost 130 countries, with 2.5 billion people, are yet to administer a single dose.” Tedros said, “all governments have an obligation to protect their own people. But once countries with vaccines have vaccinated their own health workers and older people, the best way to protect the rest of their own population is to share vaccines so other countries can do the same." The WHO Director-General said “we need countries to share doses once they have finished vaccinating health workers and older people. But we also need a massive scale-up in production.” WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme Executive Director, Dr Mike Ryan, said, “this virus still has a huge amount of energy. It is a massive force of infection still associated with this virus. This is like a flood of water. And just because the floodwaters have dropped an inch or two, it doesn't mean the flood is going to go away because it's still raining upstream.” He added, “the virus isn't going away by itself and it won't. It will go away when we put it away." WHO’s Assistant Director-General for Access to Medicines and Health Products, Dr Mariângela Simão, said, “and actually, let me make it very clear, because we only received the dossier from The Serum Institute (of India) on the 15th of January. So, we didn't have this data for a long time. We received a full dossier for the India production in January 15. And last week, I think on the 29th of January, we received the last data for the AstraZeneca/SKBio. So, there's a lot of, what we have is this rolling submissions. So, this data only came to WHO a few weeks ago. Just to make this very clear. What we had beforehand was the AstraZeneca core data." For her part, WHO’s COVID-19 Technical lead, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, said, “currently, we haven't made a recommendation on the use of ivermectin, but we're closely following the research that is ongoing related to this drug, which has shown some promising results in some trials for the treatment of COVID-19. We are aware that there's currently data available of about 1500 study patients, just slightly less than that from 11 studies. And there's data expected from up to more than 7000 patients in 56 studies. And these studies are of varying quality. So, we have a WHO steering committee that is tracking these studies and closely looking at them in order to trigger the guidance. And when we have enough information to look at guidance and updating our guidance to change policy. This may begin in the coming weeks.