LONDON (AP) — The head of the World Health Organization says the COVID-19 delta variant first seen in India is “the most transmissible of the variants identified so far” and warned it is now spreading in at least 85 countries. At a press briefing on Friday, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the lack of vaccines in poor countries was exacerbating the impact of the delta variant’s exponential transmission. Tedros said the global community was failing and that it risked making the same mistakes made during the AIDS crisis decades ago and during the 2009 swine flu pandemic — when vaccines only arrived in poor countries after the outbreak ended.
