The World Health Organization has warned that, despite high hopes from ongoing vaccine-development efforts, there might never be a “silver bullet” to put an end to the Covid-19 virus.
According to The WHO’s Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, stopping more coronavirus outbreaks for now comes down to “the basics of public health and disease control,” namely “testing, isolating and treating patients, and tracing and quarantining their contacts.” Ghebreyesus then specified that for individual people the most important things are social distancing, wearing a mask, washing their hands and being careful not to cough around others.
The DG shared his doubts during a Monday media briefing, saying that, although “we all hope to have a number of effective vaccines” there is still “no silver bullet at the moment and there might never be.”
He stressed that “it’s never too late to turn this Covid-19 pandemic around”, noting that several countries that previously had a high number of cases are now bringing their respective outbreaks under control.
Ghebreyesus also said that an international team is being assembled to study the viral origins of Covid-19 in Wuhan, the Chinese city considered to be its birthplace.
A number of vaccines for the novel coronavirus have already reached various clinical trial stages but, according to the WHO, only six projects have got to phase three, which is an efficacy test with thousands of human subjects. One of these is being developed in the United Kingdom, two in the United States and the rest in China.
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