Home » To avoid new variants vaccines must be given to everyone – Gwynne Dyer

To avoid new variants vaccines must be given to everyone – Gwynne Dyer

by admin

December 01, 2021 11:35 am

The new omicron variant of covid-19 has been discovered and reported by scientists in South Africa and Botswana, the only countries in southern Africa where there is expertise and resources to sequence the virus genome.

And what have the rich countries of the world done? Like the drunkard looking under a lamppost for the car keys he lost – “Where did you drop off?”. “Over there”. “Then why are you looking for them here?”. “Because you can see it better here” – they blocked travel from southern African countries.

On November 23, scientists from Botswana sent 99 genome sequences from sars-cov-2 to the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK, which since March 2020 has served as a portal to more than a million similar sequences from dozens of countries. Here they noticed that three of these genomes looked different from the usual delta variant.

Discriminated and isolated
On the same day, a different team in South Africa loaded the genomes of seven covid samples with the same suspected mutations in the spike protein that the virus uses to infect human cells. Within hours, scientists from all over the world were able to study those genomes on the web and in 72 hours the WHO declared that we are facing a fifth “worrying variant”.

At that point, the rich countries of the global north immediately closed the gates in the face of travelers from South Africa and nine other countries in the region. It’s not even clear if the new variant emerged right here, but so what does it matter?

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Professor Tulio de Oliveira, the Durban scientist in charge of the research to understand the new variant, underlined how South Africa has been “very transparent as regards scientific information … The world should support South Africa and the whole of Africa. and not to discriminate or isolate it “. Let alone!

On November 28, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa already warned that the travel ban “has no scientific basis nor will it be effective in countering the spread of this variant. The only thing that will be achieved with the travel ban will be to further damage the economies of the affected countries and weaken their ability to react to the pandemic and recover ”.

The risk of new variants emerging also exists in rich countries, where the covid virus still has a wide circulation

Where do we start? Perhaps from the fact that there is no country called Africa. For example, there is virtually no shortage of vaccines in South Africa, a semi-developed country where the main problem is reluctance to get vaccinated. Internet access is very high and distrust of the authorities is even higher, so only 27 percent of South Africans are fully vaccinated.
This is what could be defined as the “digital boor” problem, shared by developed countries such as Russia (where only 43 percent of the population is double-dose vaccinated) and Germany (68 percent), as well as by supporters of Trump in the United States (about 50 percent).

Cynics might say the problem solves itself. As outgoing German health minister Jens Spahn said, “probably by the end of this winter almost everyone in Germany will be vaccinated, cured or dead.” But the problem is not just local.

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The risk of new variants emerging also exists in rich countries, where the covid virus still has a wide circulation. In most African countries and in the poorest countries of Asia the risk is very high and will continue to be, because they cannot get enough vaccines. A year after the first vaccines became available, only 6 percent of Africans are double-dose vaccinated.

Impulsive punishment
By the end of this month (December), twelve billion doses of the vaccine will have been produced worldwide, more than enough to vaccinate all humans over the age of 18. But their supply is mostly based on price, so in richer countries schoolchildren are getting vaccinated and adults are getting a third dose, while in the global south several billion adults have not yet received a first dose.

Indeed, in the long run, the rich are feeding a reservoir of potentially devastating new variants in poorer countries in order to feel safer in the short term. Everyone knows that wealth tends to make people narrow-minded and uninterested in the welfare of others. Less well known is that it also tends to make them stupid.

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Meanwhile, they are also punishing the economies of poorer countries, enacting impulsive travel bans from an entire region of Africa suspected of incubating the omicron virus – even though we all know that its presence has already been confirmed in Europe and Asia. and which is certainly already found in the Americas.

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To do the right thing, albeit belatedly, the energies of the whole world should focus on getting vaccines to the poorest countries: “No one is safe until everyone is safe”. Apparently the omicron could be a big problem, and there could be an even bigger one behind it.

(Translation by Giusy Muzzopappa)

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