The WHO on Wednesday called for a moratorium on Covid-19 vaccine booster shots until at least the end of September to address the drastic inequity in dose distribution between rich and poor nations.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged the countries and companies controlling the supply of doses to change course immediately and prioritise less wealthy states. The UN health agency has for months raged against the glaring and growing imbalance, branding it a moral outrage.
Israel last month began rolling out a booster shot for the over-60s, while Germany said Tuesday it would start offering third doses of the two-shot Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines from September.
Tedros told a press conference that he understood why countries wanted to protect their citizens from the more transmissible Delta variant of the virus, which was first identified in India.
"But we cannot accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it, while the world's most vulnerable people remain unprotected," he said.
"We need an urgent reversal, from the majority of vaccines going to high-income countries, to the majority going to low-income countries."
