On Thursday, the World Health Organization warned that uneven distribution of vaccines across the globe had contributed to the development of new varieties, like omicron. This could pose a threat to global economic recovery.

“Vaccine injustice is a killer, people and jobs,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (WHO Director-General) said in a Covid update held at Geneva’s WHO headquarters.

Tedros stated that the failure of leaders around the world to collaborate to improve vaccine coverage in less-developed countries was the greatest failure of 2021. Tedros noted that the low vaccination coverage of many countries contributed to variants like omicron and delta. Omicron was discovered in northern Africa by health officials in November, while delta was detected for the first time in India in 2020.

By 2021, the WHO set the target of vaccinating 40% of all world population. The WHO reports that 92 countries failed to meet this target, even though they received 9 billion shots in the world.

WHO set the goal of vaccinating 70% of all people in the world by mid-2015.

Tedros stated that global leaders that have demonstrated such determination in protecting their populations will continue that drive to ensure that the entire world is safe, secure and protected. This pandemic won’t end unless we act.

Due to the appearance of the Omicron variant, the International Monetary Fund will likely downgrade its global economic growth forecast. To take into consideration the effects of omicron, the IMF delayed its World Economic Outlook release until January.

“A new variant that may spread very rapidly can dent confidence, and in that sense, we are likely to see some downgrades of our October projections for global growth,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told Reuters during a virtual conference last month.

In October, the IMF forecasted that global economic growth would be 5.9% and 4.9% respectively in 2021-2022. It warned then that the possibility of new types of economic growth had increased uncertainty.

IMF projections show that the worldwide pandemic will result in an increase of $5.3 trillion in gross domestic product, which is $5.3 trillion more than current projections. The IMF urged world leaders to take more steps to improve vaccine coverage in low income countries.

Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve said that Omicron is a threat to U.S. growth but that it was still unknown how this variant will affect public health.

Powell indicated that omicron’s effect will be determined by how suppressing demand it is. According to Powell, the Fed Chair said that it wasn’t clear how this variant will impact economic growth, inflation and hiring.

Powell stated that the Fed’s December meeting had had a less-than-economic effect because more people were vaccinated. He said, “It doesn’t mean that it won’t have an economic impact.”

Powell stated that the global supply chain was affected by the impact of the Delta variant, which he said slowed down hiring during the fall’s wave of infections.

Huw Pill (Boeing’s Chief Economist) told CNBC that the risk of omicron is “two-sided.”

Pill stated that Omicron “has introduced a new degree of uncertainty in our assessment of both the economy as a whole and the inflation outlook and labor market developments,” CNBC’s Street Signs Europe.