A WHO official weighs in on Covid, vaccines, and mistakes that were made

The Covid-19 pandemic has entered its third year, with no end in sight, and the world is fed up to the gills. A new and even more highly transmissible variant, Omicron, has been scorching through holiday gatherings over the past couple of weeks. People who are thrice vaccinated are among the infected.

STAT asks Mike Ryan, head of the health emergencies programme at the World Health Organization, if he expected the pandemic to last as long as it has, who should make the call on whether to update Covid vaccines, and what he thinks are the main mistakes the world has made.

“What’s shocked me most in this pandemic has been that absence or loss of trust,” he said of people’s unwillingness to follow the advice of public health leaders and the containment policies set out by governments," says Ryan.

Read full interview

Source: STAT, 3 January 2022