On Wednesday at a social media event, WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan said healthy young people might not get a coronavirus vaccine until 2022 because as a priority the focus will be on immunizing the elderly and other vulnerable groups first.
"Most people agree, it's starting with health care workers, and front-line workers, but even there, you need to define which of them are at highest risk, and then the elderly, and so on," Swaminathan said.
"A healthy young person might have to wait until 2022."
Despite the global push for developing COVID-19 vaccine and making it available for people as soon as possible, there are dozens of them in clinical trials and hopes for initial inoculations this year, WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan said that speedy, mass shots were unlikely.
Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca's U.S. the two vaccine candidates have paused their trials on safety concerns while manufacturing billions of doses of a successful vaccine will be a huge challenge at the same time authorities will have to make tough decisions about who gets inoculated first.
WHO earlier said that spreading the infection by developing ‘herd community’ is unethical and will cause unnecessary deaths. It has requested people to wash hands, maintain social distancing, wear masks and limit and targeted restrictions on movements to control disease spread.
"People talk about herd immunity. We should only talk about it in the context of a vaccine. You need to vaccinate at least 70% of people to break transmission,” Swaminathan said.
The WHO has also warned against any complacency in the coronavirus death rate. It said that with the increasing number of cases, mortality would also rise. While deaths globally have fallen to around 5,000 per day from April's peak exceeding 7,500, Swaminathan said caseloads were rising in intensive care units.
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Swaminathan said, "Mortality increases always lag behind increasing cases by a couple of weeks. We shouldn't be complacent that death rates are coming down."
WHO Chief Dr Tedros said the understanding if COVID-19 provides any immunity is unknown to us, thus, we cannot say if herd-community is achievable. WHO estimates less than 10% of the population has got any immunity to the coronavirus, meaning the vast majority of people across the world remain susceptible to the infection.