Announced by researchers in South Africa last week, a new variant of the virus that causes Covid-19, dubbed omicron and with “an unprecedented number of mutations in the spike protein”, prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to emphasize a “very high” global risk represented by the strain.
As news of the suspension of flights from southern Africa piled up in the news, many attributed the development of new variants to low rates of vaccination against Covid-19 in poor countries – what was already being called “vaccination apartheid”.
“The omicron variant reflects the threat of prolonged injustice in vaccination. The longer it takes us to provide vaccine equity, the longer we will allow the Covid-19 virus to circulate, mutate and become potentially more dangerous,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom wrote on Twitter.
Ayoade Olatunbosun-Alakija, co-chair of the African Vaccine Delivery Alliance, said in an interview with the BBC that “what is happening is inevitable and is a result of the world’s failure to vaccinate equitably, urgently and quickly.”
“We knew this was a crossroads we would reach. This would bring us to a new variant. This would lead us to more dangerous variants. Why do we pretend we’re surprised? Why are we closing Africa if this virus is already in other continents?”, he asked.
It is a debate that raises a number of questions. First, it remains to be seen whether omicron is more dangerous than previously discovered variants, or whether Covid-19 vaccines that have been used around the world are less effective against it. Furthermore, the argument that low vaccination rates necessarily lead to the development of new variants is questioned.
To intensify the debate, it is not even known whether the omicron emerged in South Africa: it was revealed this week that the Netherlands identified the first case of the variant in a November 19 sample, a week before South Africa announced the discovery. . In the Netherlands, 74% of the population has already been fully vaccinated against the new coronavirus, while in South Africa the rate is 36%.
uneven distribution
Regardless of these discussions, the humanitarian issue is enough to condemn the unequal distribution of immunization agents around the world. According to WHO data, in high-income countries, 65% of the population has already been vaccinated with at least one dose; in low-income countries, the rate is only 8%.
The Covax Facility consortium, created to purchase and distribute vaccines to poor countries, has already allocated 1.4 billion doses, but less than 600 million have been sent so far.
To make the equation even more complex, when vaccines arrive, demand is low in many countries. In late November, before the omicron discovery was announced, South Africa asked Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer to delay deliveries of Covid-19 vaccines because they already had too many doses in stock, due to the hesitation of many South Africans in getting vaccinated.
According to a report by The New York Times, the governments of Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi made the same request to vaccine manufacturers and donors.
“Almost no investment in education or vaccine promotion has been made in low-income countries. Why do we expect that all we have to do is deliver the vaccines to an airport, take a picture, and people will come running to the airport and get the vaccine?” Saad Omer, an epidemiologist at Yale University, told the American newspaper .
This week, Africa’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that most vaccine donations made to countries on the continent so far have occurred too soon and with short dose expirations, which hinders the planning of vaccination campaigns and the increase in the population served.
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