THE World Health Organisation said yesterday that there has been an increase in deaths and hospitalisations from Covid-19.

The body warned that there needed to be increased surveillance and more vaccinations to guard against the virus.

This came as activists in South Africa said earlier this week that the country had been “bullied” by the powerful pharmaceutical companies to pay more for vaccines.

Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus  said there had been an increase in deaths and hospitalisations from Covid-19 in several regions.

Mr Ghebreyesus told a press conference that in some parts of the Middle East and Asia the increase in deaths has been reported, while in Europe there have been a noticeable rise in admissions to intensive care units.

He said the data was limited because several nations have stopped reporting Covid-19 deaths and hospitalisations but “we continue to see worrying trends as the winter season approaches in the northern hemisphere.”

In the United States, for example, hospitalisations from the virus soared by 15.7 per cent for the week ending August 26, according to the country’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

The warning of the new rise of the Covid-19 follows a complaint by the Health Justice Initiative (HJI), a South African NGO campaigning against public health inequality, that big pharmaceutical companies “bullied” South Africa into signing unfair agreements that forced the country to overpay for Covid-19 vaccines compared with Western nations.

HJI said that according to vaccine contracts between the pharmaceutical companies and the government, Johnson & Johnson, charged South Africa 15 per cent more per dose of its Covid-19 vaccine than it charged the European Union.

They also said Pfizer-BioNTech charged South Africa nearly 33 per cent more than it is said to have charged the African Union.

Fatima Hassan said: “In simple terms, big pharma bullied South Africa into these conditions. Pharmaceutical companies held us to ransom.” 

South Africa was liable for payments to companies of at least $734 million (£587m), HJI said.

Foster Mohale, spokesperson for South Africa’s Department of Health, said: “I wouldn’t say we were bullied, but we were in a catch-22 situation to save the lives of South Africans against all odds.

“The department entered into these agreements to secure vaccine doses to protect the lives of South Africans against the deadly virus which claimed more than hundred thousand lives in South Africa.”

Kafi Mojapelo, a spokesperson for J&J, denied the allegations, saying his company “supplied our vaccine to South Africa at our final global price.”