WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency 'is deeply concerned about the impact of the virus on Indigenous peoples in the Americas, which remains the current epicentre of the pandemic'
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends a news conference at the WHO headquarters, in Geneva, Switzerland, on July 3, 2020.Indigenous communities comprising half a million people around the world are especially vulnerable to the new coronavirus pandemic due to often poor living conditions, the World Health Organization warned on Monday.
“Indigenous peoples often have a high burden of poverty, unemployment, malnutrition and both communicable and non-communicable diseases, making them more vulnerable to COVID-19 and its severe outcomes,” he told a virtual briefing from the UN agency’s headquarters in Geneva.“WHO is deeply concerned about the impact of the virus on Indigenous peoples in the Americas, which remains the current epicentre of the pandemic.
The WHO boss urged nations to take all necessary health precautions, with special emphasis on contact tracing, to try and curb the COVID-19 disease’s spread. “We do not have to wait for a vaccine. We have to save lives now,” he said. The WHO welcomed news that AstraZeneca’s experimental vaccine was safe and produced an immune response in early-stage clinical trials in healthy volunteers.
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