Around 90% of world population has immunity to Covid: WHO

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• Dec 3, 2022 | Dhupali Das

The WHO director-general stated that the COVID pandemic's emergency phase has almost come to an end, but it is...

Digital Desk: At least 90% of the global population now has some level of resistance against Covid-19 infection, the World Health Organization said. "WHO estimates that at least 90% of the world's population now has some level of immunity to SARS-CoV-2, either through prior infection or vaccination," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. 

The WHO director-general stated that the COVID pandemic's emergency phase has almost come to an end, but it is not over. "We are considerably closer to being able to say that the pandemic's emergency phase is over—but we're not there yet," Tedros said.

"Gaps in surveillance, testing, sequencing, and vaccination continue to create the ideal conditions for a new variation of concern to develop, potentially causing significant mortality," he said.

Previously, a study found that a two-dose experimental vaccine could provide protection against severe Covid even one year after the shots. The results may lessen the need for regular booster shots and protect special populations, such as children, who do not have fully developed immune systems.

In 2021, a group of scientists announced that the Moderna mRNA vaccine and a protein-based vaccine candidate containing an adjuvant—a chemical that boosts immune responses — generated long-lasting neutralizing antibody responses to the Covid virus in pre-clinical testing.

Now, a follow-up study by the same team, headed by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Weill Cornell Medicine, and New York-Presbyterian, has found that the 2-dose vaccines still provide protection against lung illness in rhesus macaques a year after they were first given it.

"Following up on our SARS-CoV-2 infant rhesus macaque study, we gave the animals a high-dose challenge with a SARS-CoV-2 variant one year later to assess the durability of vaccine-induced immune responses and their efficacy," Dr. Kristina De Paris, professor of microbiology and immunology at the UNC School of Medicine, was quoted as saying in a report by news agency IANS.