The United Nations declared on Monday the world was "at war" against COVID-19, as India's death toll passed 300,000 and Japan opened its first mass vaccination centers.
But just two months ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, the United States on Monday advised its citizens against travelling there.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged governments to apply wartime logic to stark inequalities in the response to the pandemic.
Despite rapidly advancing vaccination rollouts in wealthy parts of the world, the crisis was far from over, he warned.
"Unless we act now, we face a situation in which rich countries vaccinate the majority of their people and open their economies, while the virus continues to cause deep suffering by circling and mutating in the poorest countries."
However, Hong Kong warned Tuesday it might soon have to throw away coronavirus vaccine doses because they were approaching their expiry date and not enough people have signed up for the jabs.
Hong Kong is one of the few places in the world fortunate enough to have secured more than enough doses to inoculate its entire population of 7.5 million people.
But swirling distrust of the government as it stamps out dissent – combined with online misinformation and a lack of urgency in the comparatively virus-free city — has led to entrenched vaccine hesitancy and a dismal inoculation drive.
Health workers pay 'ultimate price'
Speaking alongside Guterres at the World Health Organization's main annual assembly in Geneva, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he wanted 10 percent of every country's population vaccinated by September.
He paid tribute to the estimated 115,000 health and care workers who have died from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.
"They have saved countless lives and fought for others who, despite their best efforts, slipped away," he said. Medical workers lost to the pandemic had paid "the ultimate price in the service of others."
Many medics have felt "frustrated, helpless and unprotected, with a lack of access to personal protective equipment and vaccines," he added.
If the vaccine had been distributed equitably, there would have been enough for all health workers and vulnerable, older people, he argued.
But more than 75 percent of all COVID vaccines have gone to just 10 countries.
Israel's health ministry meanwhile, which has overseen one of the fastest vaccination rollouts, said Sunday that it had proposed lifting all virus restrictions on June 1, except for travelers arriving from abroad.
Deadly outbreaks in India, Brazil and elsewhere have pushed the global death toll past 3.4 million people, even as vaccination programmes in rich countries such as the United States, Britain and Israel have allowed them to ease restrictions.
India has witnessed horrific scenes in recent weeks with severe shortages of oxygen at hospitals and crematoriums overwhelmed, although the number of new daily infections has fallen in big cities.
But experts say the real numbers of deaths and infections in India—fueled by a new coronavirus variant and "superspreader" events such as religious festivals—are probably far higher than the official figures.
"We are seeing the bodies along the river Ganges, which don't seem to be recorded as Covid deaths but are very likely to be Covid deaths," Ashoka University biology professor Gautam Menon told AFP.
India has administered close to 200 million vaccine shots, but experts say the programme needs to be ramped up significantly to bring the virus under control. AFP
Japan ramps up vaccination
Another Asian country criticized for its slow inoculation rate is Japan, where the first mass vaccination centers opened on Monday.
"It's wonderful. I can rest easy now," Hideo Ishikawa, 73, told reporters after he got the shot.
Japanese authorities are trying to speed up their vaccination drive with just two months until the postponed Tokyo Olympics begin.
But the US State Department on Monday warned its citizens against travelling there.
The decision was based mainly on government health advice, but also "commercial flight availability, restrictions”¯on US citizen entry", and the difficulty of getting fast Covid test results, the advisory said.
Just two percent of Japan's 125 million population has been fully vaccinated, compared with around 40 percent in the United States and 15 percent in France.
Hong Kong warning
On Tuesday a member of the government's vaccine task force warned that Hong Kongers "only have a three-month window" before the city's first batch of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines go out of date.
"The vaccines all have expiry dates," Thomas Tsang, a former controller of the Center for Health Protection, told RTHK radio.
"They cannot be used after the expiry date and the community vaccination centers for BioNTech will, according to present plans, cease operating after September."
Tsang said it was "just not right" that Hong Kong was sitting on an unused pile of doses while the rest of the world "is scrambling for vaccines".
And he warned new doses were unlikely to be delivered.
"What we have is probably all we have for the rest of the year," he said.
Hong Kong bought 7.5 million doses each of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and China's Sinovac.
The latter has yet to be approved by the World Health Organization but was fast-tracked for use by city health regulators.
It also pre-ordered 7.5 million doses of AstraZeneca jabs but scrapped that deal earlier in the year, with authorities saying they planned to use the money for second-generation vaccines next year.
Medical worker resistance
So far just 19 percent of Hong Kong’s population has received one dose of either vaccine, while 14 percent has received two doses.
Hesitancy is common even among the city's medical workers. Earlier this month, the city's Hospital Authority revealed only a third of its staff had taken the opportunity to be vaccinated.
On Tuesday, authorities announced the first major expansion of the vaccine programme to non-residents. Some 40,000 Chinese mainlanders with travel permits as well as some 13,000 refugee claimants will now be eligible.
There are currently hundreds of thousands of unused Pfizer-BioNTech shots, which must be stored at ultra-low temperatures and have a six-month shelf life.
A total of 3,263,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines have been shipped to Hong Kong at different stages so far but only 1,231,600 have been administered.
Around 1 million doses were also put to one side after packaging problems, and it is not clear how many were replaced by suppliers.
Dogs sniff for COVID
In Saudi Arabia, authorities have tightened the screws on coronavirus vaccine sceptics, barring anyone not vaccinated from pilgrimages, overseas travel and some public spaces.
The rollout remains painfully slow in Brazil, one of the hardest-hit countries in the world, where its far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has been widely condemned for his coronavirus skepticism and pandemic management.
Haiti too, is suffering, the authorities there declaring a week-long state of emergency Monday after detecting two of the more virulent variants of the virus, the ones first identified in Brazil and Britain.
Haiti is one of the last countries still waiting to receive its first doses of the Covid vaccines.
