Must Read! Why Is WHO Now Shifting Focus From Vaccine To Public Health Intervention For COVID-19 Pandemic? What Is Not Being Told To The Public?

WHO: It was reported that changes were made to the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Research Roadmap based on the opinions involving more than 1,528 experts from 137 countries on research priorities and the new shift is away from vaccine development to greater emphasis and focus on public health intervention.


 
That new research roadmap has been published on a preprint server. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.24.20138198v1
 
But what is interesting is that no proper reasons were made public for this shift. Is it because of new findings based on the immunological aspects from studies on COVID-19 antibodies and serology, or is it because of new emerging studies of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus mutations? Is it because of the possible truth that there will never be a truly effective vaccine despite all the hypes by governments and pharmaceutical giants as emerging studies are pointing to such a possibility. Is there something that these collective researchers are not telling us such as the what we can truly expect from the second wave or what are the real long term health implications of COVID-19 for recovered and asymptomatic individuals.
 
International researchers have described only the results of the survey aiming to determine the current applicability of the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Research Roadmap and whether there are new priorities that should be focused on at this point in time during the COVID-19 pandemic but not why.
 
Experts from the UK Collaborative on Development Research, the University of Oxford, and the African Academy of Science conducted the study and held workshops, where researchers representing all WHO regions were able to rank immediate and longer-term priorities.
 
The team said, “It is important to assess now, what are the most key remaining questions that need to be addressed, both to ensure this pandemic can be halted and to learn for future outbreaks of this pathogen or another.”
 
The pandemic has evolved at different time points across the globe

Initially the COVID-19 pandemic was declared a global pandemic on 11th March, and the WHO published its Global Research Roadmap the next day.

The aim was to coordinate and expedite the global research response based on the views of 400 experts worldwide.
 
At that time, three to four immediate research priorities were identified across each of nine themes ranging from “Virus natural history, transmission and diagnostics” to “Social sciences in the outbreak response” and “Vaccine development”.
 
Dr Trudie A Lang, from the Centre Of Tropical Medicine and Global Health, Oxford University and one of the writers of the revised roadmap said, “Now, in June 2020, we see the evolution of this pandemic at different points across the globe. Given that the pandemic is now being tackled in very different contexts and with more advanced understanding, the researchers aimed to build on the original work of the WHO by obtaining a more current perspective on what the research priorities should be now.”
 
He added, “It is important to assess now, what are the most key remaining questions that need to be addressed, both to ensure this pandemic can be halted and to learn for future outbreaks of this pathogen or another.”

The mixed-methods study involving a survey and workshops in which members of the global research community were asked which of the initial WHO roadmap priorities are still the most pressing; whether they are still applicable in different settings, regions, or countries and whether any new priorities have emerged.  
 
Altogether 1,528 individuals completed the survey, and 2,559 attended the workshops, from across 137 countries. The majority were employed in academia, hospitals, research organizations, and non-government organizations.
 
Detailed analysis of the responses showed that the original WHO Roadmap remained relevant globally, but that certain areas require more emphasis. It also showed that important new priorities have emerged, particularly regarding less-resourced countries where healthcare systems are already poorly equipped.

The study identified that more research is needed to bridge knowledge gaps in certain areas, especially those concerning children, pregnancy, and long-term health impacts of the disease.
 
Interestingly there was a shift in focus from vaccines and therapy development, more towards the effectiveness of public health interventions and measures.
 
Considering that a vaccine may still not be available for at least a year and that no effective antivirals have yet been developed, the only interventions that have been implementable and effective have involved public health measures to curb the spread of the disease.
 
Dr Land said, “It is therefore unsurprising then that the survey respondents and workshop participants ranked highly the need for further studies to evaluate the value of such measures as well as studies on other potential interventions as they arise.”
 
Also various new priorities and themes were identified. For the theme “Virus natural history, transmission and diagnostics,” for example, one new priority was “improved diagnostic tools for safer sample collection, faster and easier assays.”
 
For the roadmap, new themes had also emerged; including “Preparing for the next pandemic,” for which “evaluation of governmental policies and lessons learned” was a priority. Another new theme was “Cross-cutting,” where “the use of technology in various aspects of pandemic response” was flagged as a priority.
 
The team said, “Taken together, we suggest that these data support the importance of the WHO research roadmap approach and highlights where funders and researcher should be placing emphasis as well as identifying potential new areas that should be tackled within this pandemic.”
 
To date it should be noted that despite the heavy funding that WHO receives, it has failed to stop the spread of the China virus from day one and has not developed a truly effective and accurate diagnostic protocol, nor has it developed any truly effective treatment protocols or vaccines and has spent lots of monies on PR conferences, taking ad places and paying to use social media platforms including Facebook, Tik-Tok etc and search engine platforms to disseminate often information which are inaccurate, or in some cases can be deemed as misinformation and fake news that could endanger the lives of many.For instance in the initial stages of the pandemic, WHO said that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was not transmissable between humans to humans, then it said it was not airborne, along with lots of other statements (all documented) and most recently it even said at one point that asymptomatic individuals could not spread the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
 
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