The longer it takes the world to get vaccinated, the more variants we’ll see.
By
It’s been kind
of a hard year, but I felt optimistic about the holidays. My wife and I had
just scheduled our COVID-19 boosters. Even better, we’d been able to get our
young child vaccinated.
We imagined a
cautious return to simple family pleasures like indoor dining — and maybe
playdates at indoor play centers during the long Midwestern winter. Maybe we’d
even test our kid’s appetite for air travel and visit relatives in different
parts of the country.
Then — another
COVID-19 variant. Possible breakthrough infections. Travel bans and tumbling
stock markets. And that familiar feeling of the rug being pulled out.
We don’t know a
whole lot about the Omicron variant yet. Will it fizzle out like earlier
variants, or run rampant like Delta? Whatever happens, we do know one thing:
The longer it takes the world to get vaccinated, the more variants we’ll see.
Here in the
United States, getting vaccination rates up means battling misinformation,
apathy, and employers who won’t give their employees sick time. But vaccinating
the rest of the world means battling corporate greed.
In poorer
countries, vaccine access is limited by the patent protections for
pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer, Modern, and Johnson & Johnson. That puts
life-saving vaccines beyond the reach of what many countries can comfortably
afford.
Omicron was
first reported in South Africa. As my Institute for Policy Studies colleagues pointed out in their invaluable Inequality.org newsletter,
“South Africa had pleaded with Western governments earlier this year to waive
vaccine patents. Instead, South Africa ended up having to pay over double the price for doses that European
Union nations paid.”
Thanks to price gouging like that, they note, Moderna alone has minted five new billionaires. Meanwhile South Africa’s vaccination rate hovers at less than 30 percent. With rates that low, new variants are inevitable.
But South Africa
is comparatively lucky — less than 10 percent of people on the African continent are
fully vaccinated.
According to the
People’s Vaccine Alliance, rich countries have received about 50 times as many vaccine doses
as poor countries. That means the virus has free rein to multiply
over vast swathes of the planet. Every new infection increases the possibility
of new variants — including some that may prove resistant to the existing
vaccines.
To close those
gaps, poorer countries need more vaccines — and fast.
The Biden
administration courageously defied Big Pharma by backing a waiver for vaccine
patents. But countries like Germany continue to resist it, and advocates insist the U.S. isn’t doing enough to fight for it.
Another solution
involves simply sending doses overseas. The administration announced in August
it had already exported 110 million doses, and it recently promised another 500 million. That’s good, but
public health advocates are calling for far more.
Vaccine equity
could save millions of lives and prevent needless suffering. That’s reason
enough on its own.
But by
protecting workers across the globe, it would also ease the global supply
disruptions that are contributing to inflation here and abroad. And it would go
a long way toward ensuring that the existing vaccines remain effective.
“You may be
fully vaccinated, you may have had your booster, but you’re not that
disconnected from the person who lives in a country where only 2 percent of the
population is vaccinated,” warns Emory University virologist Boghuma Kabisen Titanji.
If these gaps
persist, “the virus will catch up with us regardless of where you are.”
She’s right.
Thanks to a new variant halfway around the world, I have to worry about whether
I can take my kid to the diner down the road. But it’s a fitting holiday
lesson, in a way — the more we give, the more we get. Better tell the
administration to make a list.
is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies and editor
of OtherWords.org.