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Press release on WHO Director-General's decision to rescind Covid-19's designation as a pandemic

6 May 2023 13:00
877-06-05-2023

On May 5, Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Over the past three years, the pandemic has presented an unprecedented challenge to the entire world, shedding light on many issues and vulnerabilities. While the global crisis required the highest degree of cohesion, mutual assistance, coordination and rejection of selfish practices, some countries preferred to look for scapegoats and politicise the situation. Pure opportunistic reasons were behind the failure, during the years of the pandemic, to address the issue of WHO registering Russian vaccines that have proven their effectiveness and saved millions of lives all over the world. At the same time, more facts have been uncovered recently suggesting that American pharmaceutical companies and others filling the markets with their vaccines engaged in corruption. There are reasonable questions, reinforced by growing evidence of various side effects from their use, about whether the WHO decisions to expedite their global certification had been justified. Nevertheless, despite all the difficulties and problems that have been revealed, the world was able to handle this hardest of blows and save millions of lives, which was only possible thanks to mutual support and cooperation.

Now that we have overcome the acute phase of the crisis, there are still the problems of global post-crisis recovery, in particular its socio-economic dimension.

A solution will require countries to become even more united and to abandon the narrow-minded interests of certain groups of states that seek to perpetuate global inequality. Russia is ready to provide assistance and cooperate with all countries based on the principles of solidarity, equality and respect for international law in the search for mutually acceptable solutions to achieve progress in sustainable development and expand international cooperation in the field of global health to prevent future pandemics.