The Covid-19 pandemic will not last forever. It will likely continue to fizzle and fade as it heads towards its third year, resurging with new variants and then waning in the face of vaccines, mitigation measures and human behavior. But even if the virus is never stamped out, immunity will improve, reports CNN.
How long will it take to get there?
Pandemics fade out of view as a result of human efforts like vaccine development, contact tracing, genomic analysis, containment measures and international cooperation.
“This is the major issue: There was never a plan, (and) there still isn’t a plan at a global level,” said Andrea Taylor, assistant director of programs at the Duke Global Health Institute.
Some countries have fared better in the face of Covid than others. But to accelerate the endgame, countless experts — including Taylor — are calling for a new, global approach, particularly when it comes to vaccines, treatments and information sharing.
“We knew ahead of time what would happen if we took this nationalistic approach, but we did it anyway,” Taylor said. “And we are now living with the consequences of that.”
The world’s key tool
“The first tool that we have is the vaccine,” says Roberto Burioni, a professor of microbiology and virology at San Raffaele University in Milan, a high-profile commentator on Italy’s pandemic response.
The development of several vaccines, all highly effective in stopping severe disease and useful too in stemming transmission, was a world-first. The previous record to get a shot on the market was four years, but the Covid-19 pandemic ripped up all expectations and reset the gold standard in the field.
It is not enough to simply have a vaccine, though; it must be administered to as many people as possible, as many times as required.
Vaccine availability
Even in developed countries where the availability of shots is not an issue, gradually waning immunity, the transmissibility of new variants and pockets of vaccine skepticism have made clear that extremely high rates of coverage are needed to prevent waves of infections.
As well as their continued efforts to encourage unvaccinated people to get a first dose, richer countries now have two main planks to their inoculation strategies: ensuring school-age children are vaccinated, and administering booster shots — as many as prove to be necessary to keep protection high.
According to WHO, less than 8% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. Meanwhile, 63.9% of people in high-income countries have received at least one shot, according to WHO.
Firstly, the supply of vaccines needs to be increased and stabilized. WHO’s vaccine-sharing program COVAX forecast in September that 25% fewer doses will be provided to the developing world than previously anticipated.
‘Feast or famine’
The emergence of the Omicron variant in sub-Saharan Africa, where vaccination rates are low, has underlined once more the importance of a strategy to vaccinate poorer nations.
The potential consequences of that disparity are obvious. “Vaccine inequity … will prolong the pandemic,” said Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton.
“It’s feast or famine at the moment — (countries) get nothing for three months, and all of a sudden they get millions of doses,” said Taylor. “Supply has to come in a predictable, reliable manner.”
Head, who has published research on vaccine supply in Ghana in the past year, added that when vaccines do arrive through COVAX, they have often been close to their expiry date, and were not accompanied by the necessary freezers or equipment to transport them throughout their destination countries.
WHO blamed shortfalls at one Johnson & Johnson plant for its missed COVAX target in September, and backlogs at an Indian plant developing AstraZeneca vaccines caused supply issues in the United Kingdom and the EU in the first months of 2020 — showing the dramatic effect that just a single facility can have on global distribution.
How the Western world handled the AstraZeneca vaccine?
And developed nations should lead by example, too. Head said participants in his Ghanian study “were seeing how the Western world had handled the AstraZeneca vaccine,” which is the shot that COVAX most relies on but which suffered several false starts during its rollout in Europe.
This included a number of countries suspending the rollout of AstraZeneca shots in March over blood clot concerns. Europe’s medicines regulator later pronounced it safe to use but confidence was undermined.
Vaccine hesitancy among his participants increased after those hiccups and pauses in the European rollout, Head said. “What we see and do in the global north in regards to vaccines is seen and heard in other parts of the world.”
Travel bans
Most recently, travel bans placed on South Africa and other nearby nations after authorities successfully detected the emergence of the Omicron variant have divided scientists.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has complained the bans are “unjustified,” and they have been condemned by the UN and WHO.
Experts are calling for countries to come together on Covid, not pull apart — and that call was taken up by WHO this week when it called for a global treaty to avoid the same mistakes when the next pandemic strikes.
“We’re never going to make a successful case on altruism,” she concedes. But with a fresh outbreak anywhere in the world threatening every country, “you can make a nationalistic case for the need to do things in a coordinated, global way.”
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Source: CNN
