CORONA Virus poses a common threat to humanity and this alarming situation warrants a collective approach to successfully defeat the contagion. The World Health Organisation (WHO) the other day launched what it called a landmark collaborative plan under which it brought together world leaders including those from France, Germany and South Korea through video conference on Friday who pledged to accelerate work on tests, drugs and vaccines against COVID-19 and to share them around the globe.
Out of 2.83 million cases, the virus has already claimed lives of about two hundred thousand people across the world. With each passing day these figures are substantially rising and there is urgent need to fight the pandemic at global level with countries having resources fast-tracking their efforts to find cure to the disease before it is too late. There should be no divisions to win this battle against an invisible enemy. Hence, those stayed back from this collaborative plan must also come forward and provide it much needed impetus to achieve success at the earliest. In fact resource rich countries should play their role in these testing times and find an effective, affordable vaccine against the virus. Addressing a conference of world leaders, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres also stressed the need that treatments and vaccines should belong to the whole world, not individual countries or region. Over a hundred potential COVID-19 vaccines are currently being developed including six already in clinical trials. We are confident that collective approach will help the countries find a winner vaccine against the pandemic in coming days. After finding the vaccine, next challenge will be to produce it in sufficient quantity so that it could reach each and every region without any discrimination to save precious lives.
Undoubtedly, the WHO has played an instrumental and lead role since outbreak of the virus by staying alert and engaging with all the countries providing technical and medical supplies to the ones where these needed the most. Now it has gone a step further to wage a collective war against the pathogen. Instead of pointing fingers on the world body, its hands need to be strengthened in order to emerge stronger and successful out of this unprecedented challenge.