WHO Chief Sets Goal of Vaccinating More than 1 Billion People — 5.5 Million Daily — by July

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Tuesday said his organization stood by its goal of vaccinating 70 percent of the globe against Covid-19 by the end of June, a target that will require vaccinating approximately 5.5 million people daily for the next six months.

“We have 185 days to the finish line of achieving 70 percent by the start of July 2022,”  Ghebreyesus said at a media briefing. “When we say 70 percent in each and every country — if all the at-risk groups, the older, the senior citizens, people with comorbidities, and health workers and others are included in that 70 percent, then we can see minimized hospitalizations and deaths to the minimum,” he added, saying the dynamic “could lead us into the end of the acute phase of the pandemic.”

The WHO chief’s ambitious goal requires vaccinating a little more than a billion people over the next six months, equivalent to 5.5 million daily. A total of 4.53 billion have been partially vaccinated to date, according to data compiled by the University of Oxford, or 59 percent of the world’s population.

Ghebreyesus didn’t specify whether his organization’s definition of “vaccinated” would evolve to require the second dose or third-shot boosters developed by Pfizer and Moderna. Seventy-three percent of Americans had been partially vaccinated as of Dec. 29, according to health data, though just 62 percent of citizens had shown up so far for a second dose of the vaccines.

Cases of Covid-19’s Omicron variant propelled the virus to a new record this month, exceeding 265,000 daily infections a little more than a year after the first vaccines were made public.

“I am highly concerned that Omicron, being more transmissible, circulating at the same time as Delta, is leading to a tsunami of cases,” Ghebreyesus added. “This is and will continue to put immense pressure on exhausted health workers and health systems on the brink of collapse.”

Watch above via Newsweek.