Qatar''s commitment, support to help build a healthier future: WHO chief

(MENAFN - The Peninsula) Doha: The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has expressed optimism that Qatar’s continued commitment and support would help building a healthier future for African region and the world.  ''With the continued support of Qatar, we can build a healthier, safer and fairer future for the people of Africa and people of the world,” he said while addressing the opening session of Qatar Economic Forum powered by Bloomberg, yesterday. The session titled ‘Leadership in a Post-Pandemic World’ included conversations about COVID-19, vaccination equity and public-private partnership in healthcare.  ''Until recently Africa has not seen the devastation of COVID-19 like some other regions. But Africa is now seeing an increase of cases and deaths and it is facing without vaccines,” said Dr. Ghebreyesus. ''With the support of COVAX, 52 countries in Africa have now started vaccinations. But by now only 40 million vaccine doses are available,” he said. According to Dr. Ghebreyesus, to end the pandemic WHO’s target is to vaccinate each country’s 10% of population by September this year, 40% by end of the year and 70% by June 2022.  ''WHO and its partners are working day and night to access more doses of vaccine to meet this target. But it’s clear that in a crisis Africa cannot totally depend on imports of vaccines from rest of the world,” said Dr. Ghebreyesus. ''We must build that capacity not only for COVID-19 vaccine but other vaccines and medical products,” he said.  The next conversation of the session was on ‘The Future of Vaccines in Africa’ and it discussed about a groundbreaking public-private partnership, between The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) and Mastercard Foundation to produce its own vaccines. John Nkengasong, Director, Africa CDC and Reeta Roy, President and CEO, Mastercard Foundation shared details about the unique collaboration.  ''This collaboration will help strengthening Africa’s core capabilities and competences,” said Nkengasong.  He highlighted that the collaboration with Mastercard Foundation will help Africa being prepared for the future by developing research, manufacturing vaccines and medicine not only for COVID-19 but for other diseases as well.  During the conversation on ‘New Age of Nationalism’ Noubar Afeyan, founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, in reply to a question about dealing with the pandemics said, ''My confidence in dealing with the current pandemic is increasing my confidence about next pandemic is awaiting important commitments.” Noubar Afeyanalso, the co-founder and chairman of Moderna, said that public-private partnerships played a key role in manufacturing and testing and distributing COVID-19 vaccines. ''Partnerships are always good, but in this case they were essential,” said Afeyan.   MENAFN22062021000063011010ID1102323460