WHO Bolsters Covid-19 Vaccine Task Force, Patient Care Guidelines

The World Health Organization (WHO) has updated its patient care guidelines to include interleukin-6 receptor blockers, a class of medicines that are lifesaving in patients who are severely or critically ill with Covid-19. These patients often suffer from an overreaction of the immune system, which can be very harmful to their health. Interleukin-6 blocking drugs - tocilizumab and sarilumab - act to suppress this overreaction.

This comes after heads of the WHO, World Bank Group, International Monetary Fund, World Health Organization, and World Trade Organization released a joint statement about the formation of a Covid-19 Task Force created with the intention of  tracking, coordinating and advancing delivery of Covid-19 health tools to developing countries experiencing a third wave of the outbreak.

"As many countries are struggling with new variants and a third wave of Covid-19 infections, accelerating access to vaccines becomes even more critical to ending the pandemic everywhere and achieving broad-based growth. We are deeply concerned about the limited vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and support for deliveries available to developing countries. Urgent action is needed now to arrest the rising human toll due to the pandemic, and to halt further divergence in the economic recovery between advanced economies and the rest," the statement read.

As of July 8, 2021, a total of 5,777,227 cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed across the continent of which 148,713 proved fatal and 5,006,365 resulted in recovery.