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GENEVA, May 24 (Xinhua) -- The World Health Assembly (WHA), the highest decision-making body of the World Health Organization (WHO), on Monday refused to include a proposal on Taiwan's participation in its agenda.

Chen Xu, China's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Office at Geneva, said in a statement at the meeting that the Chinese delegation firmly supported the recommendation by the General Committee of the 74th WHA to not include the Taiwan-related proposal in the agenda.

(Reuters) --- The COVID-19 pandemic is being perpetuated by a "scandalous inequity" in vaccine distribution, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday as he set new targets for protecting people in the poorest countries.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that no country should assume that it's "out of the woods", no matter its vaccination rate, as long as the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its variants spread elsewhere.

GENEVA, May 22 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The World Health Organization and three other international bodies, FAO, OIE and UNEP have formed a team of experts to help develop a global plan to prevent the spread of diseases from animals to humans.

The One Health High-Level Expert Panel was an initiative launched by France and Germany late last year, and held its inaugural meeting this week, reported WHO..

GENEVA, May 21 (Xinhua) -- The actual figure of global coronavirus-related deaths might be two to three times higher than official numbers showed as many countries face challenges to properly estimate and report the number of fatalities, said the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday.

(Reuters) --- Waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines will not be enough to narrow the huge supply gap between rich and poor countries, the head of the World Trade Organization said on Thursday.

South Africa and India have urged fellow WTO members to waive IP rights on vaccines to boost production. Poorer countries that make up half the world's population have received just 17% of doses, a situation the World Health Organization head has labelled "vaccine apartheid".

GENEVA, May 19. /TASS/: Over 4.8 million novel coronavirus cases and over 85,000 deaths were registered worldwide in the past week, the World Health Organization (WHO) said a weekly bulletin released in Geneva early on Wednesday.

GENEVA, May 15 (NNN-AGENCIES) –– The World Health Organization issued a grim warning that the second year of Covid-19 was set to be “far more deadly”, as Japan extended a state of emergency amid growing calls for the Olympics to be scrapped.

“We’re on track for the second year of this pandemic to be far more deadly than the first,” said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

(Reuters) --- The World Health Organization urged rich countries on Friday to reconsider plans to vaccinate children and instead donate COVID-19 shots to the COVAX scheme for poorer countries.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also said the second year of the pandemic was set to be more deadly than the first, with India a huge concern.

GENEVA, May 12 (Xinhua) -- A COVID-19 variant first identified in India has been found in 44 countries with a possible presence in five more, and is believed to be resistant to certain antibodies, including from vaccines, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Wednesday.

The variant, named B1617 and informally dubbed the "double mutant," has three different sub-lineages, B1617.1, B1617.2 and B1617.3, which were being found increasingly in other countries, especially in Europe and North America, the WHO said in its weekly update.

10 May 2021; MEMO: The spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rupert Colville, said on Friday that Sheikh Jarrah's evictions if ordered and implemented, would violate Israel's obligations under international law.