People wearing protective face masks wait to receive a vaccine for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at a vaccination centre in Mumbai, India, April 26, 2021.
Niharika Kulkarni | Reuters
LONDON — New Covid-19 variants are likely to keep on emerging until the whole world is vaccinated against the virus, experts warn, saying that the sharing of vaccines is not just an altruistic act but a pragmatic one.
“Until the whole world is vaccinated, not just rich Western countries, I think we are going to remain in danger of new variants coming along and some of those could be more virulent than omicron,” Dr. Andrew Freedman, a reader in infectious diseases at Cardiff University Medical School, told CNBC on Thursday.
Viruses “tend to become milder” as they evolve, Freedman noted, but he cautioned that this “isn’t always the case.”
“It may well be with future variants that they are even more contagious, they may be milder, but we can’t say that with certainty.”
To date, 58.6% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine, with 9.28 billion doses administered worldwide, according to Our World in Data.
The majority of adult populations are now fully vaccinated against Covid in wealthy, predominantly Western countries like those in Europe or the U.S., and in many of these countries shots are being rolled out to younger teens and even younger children.
But in low-income countries, only 8.5% of people have received at least one dose of a vaccine, Our World in Data shows.
‘Global escape strategy’
Since the start of the vaccine rollout, the World Health Organization has repeatedly implored richer countries to donate excess vaccines to the Covax initiative, an international scheme with the aim of ensuring more equitable global access to vaccines.
The mantra “no one is safe, unless everyone is safe” has often been heard from the WHO and other experts who say the pandemic won’t be over until everyone is protected.
“I can’t emphasize sufficiently that there’s no escaping that logic,” Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London, told CNBC earlier this week.
“This isn’t altruism or aid or anything, this is the global escape strategy from something that we’re all suffering together. Unless we can share out the vaccines and produce enough vaccines for everybody, the next variant is just around the corner.”
Covid vaccines have been proven to significantly protect people against severe infection, hospitalization and death so aside from the fact that more widespread vaccination coverage will potentially save millions of lives, it is also likely to help prevent new variants from emerging: