Geneva—The World Health Organization (WHO) said Wednesday it hopes that COVID-19 and Mpox will no longer be public health emergencies in 2023 as both diseases end their most dangerous phase.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said one of the chief lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic was that countries had to respond quickly to surprise outbreaks.
On COVID-19, he said the weekly death toll was now around a fifth of what it was a year ago. “Last week, less than 10,000 people lost their lives. That’s still 10,000 too many and there is still a lot that all countries can do to save lives,” he said.
“But we have come a long way. We are hopeful that at some point next year, we will be able to say that COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency.”
The WHO’s emergency committee, which advises Tedros on declarations of public health emergencies of international concern (PHEIC), will be discussing what the end of the emergency phase might look like when they meet in January, he added.
On Mpox — formerly known as monkeypox — Tedros said the global outbreak had taken the world by surprise.
More than 82,000 cases have been reported from 110 countries, although the mortality rate has remained low, with 65 deaths.
“Thankfully, the number of weekly reported cases has declined more than 90 percent since I declared a PHEIC in July,” Tedros said.
The Department of Health (DOH) on Thursday meanwhile gave its commitment to proactively uphold accountability and transparency in the country’s COVID-19 vaccine procurements during the initial public hearing held by the Senate Committee on Accountability of Public Officers and Investigations (Blue Ribbon Committee).
The DOH, led by Officer-In-Charge (OIC) Maria Rosario Singh-Vergeire, likewise reiterated that it will continue to exhaust all efforts to ensure that vaccine wastage among national government-procured vaccines remain minimal.
Following recent reports that millions of doses of vaccines stocks have expired, the DOH noted that bulk of the wastage comes from procurements made by the private sector (44.82%) and LGUs (33.35%).
Furthermore, the DOH revealed that 10.95% of the country’s total accumulated expired vaccines was donated through the COVAX facility.
It has secured the commitment of the COVAX facility to replace expired doses with bivalent vaccines which better contribute to vaccination efforts.
The DOH emphasized that the COVID-19 vaccine procurement portfolio is extensive, requiring a broad range of highly-specialized skills exclusively carried by specific government agencies.
As such, facilitating the procurement process – from negotiations until the delivery and rollout of the procured doses – requires a whole-of-government approach, with different agencies leading different components of the process through identified task groups as specified under DOH AO 2021-0005 or the National Strategic Policy Framework for COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment and Immunization.
Moreover, the DOH clarified that it has always been willing to provide the needed information on vaccine procurement, in response to issues surrounding its alleged refusal to provide the said information to
Congress and the Commission on Audit (COA) due to the Non-Disclosure
Agreements (NDAs).
The DOH reiterated that it has, in fact, been very proactive in requesting for the conduct of a special audit for the COVID-19 vaccine procurements, as evidenced by official DOH correspondences to COA as early as 2021.