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Experts Warn: Failure to Rapidly ‘Vaccinate the World’ May Lead to Covid-19 Mutations
Epidemiologists from dozens of countries around the world issued a loud warning Tuesday that failure to ensure global administration of Covid-19 vaccines within the next year—at the very latest—could allow vaccine-resistant variants to spread among unprotected populations to such an extent that current shots are rendered ineffective.
According to a new People’s Vaccine Alliance survey of 77 leading epidemiologists from 28 countries, two-thirds said they believe the international community has “a year or less” before Covid-19 mutations proliferate widely enough to make a majority of first-generation vaccines ineffective, requiring the production of new or modified shots—an opportunity that the pharmaceutical industry is already preparing to seize.
Nearly a third of the expert respondents said the more accurate timeframe for that alarming scenario is likely nine months or less.
More than 80% of the survey respondents agreed that “persistent low vaccine coverage in many countries would make it more likely for vaccine-resistant mutations to appear,” underscoring the importance of global production and speedy distribution of highly effective existing shots.
“With millions of people around the world infected with this virus, new mutations arise every day,” said Gregg Gonsalves, associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University. “Sometimes they find a niche that makes them more fit than their predecessors. These lucky variants could transmit more efficiently and potentially evade immune responses to previous strains.”
“Unless we vaccinate the world,” Gonsalves warned, “we leave the playing field open to more and more mutations, which could churn out variants that could evade our current vaccines and require booster shots to deal with them.”
Quarraisha Abdool Karim, associate scientific director of CAPRISA and professor in clinical epidemiology at Columbia University, echoed Gonsalves’ assessment, saying in a statement that the potential for Covid-19 variants to undercut vaccination progress serves as yet another example of “our interdependence” in the fight against a virus that has no regard for borders.
“High coverage rates and herd immunity in one country or region of the world while others, particularly low- and middle-income countries, continue to wait in line will create the perfect environment for the virus to continue to mutate and negate the benefits of any vaccine protection,” said Karim. “In contrast, there are enormous benefits for everyone to have more equitable access to available doses of vaccines.”
The People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 international organizations, said Tuesday that if the current inoculation rate persists, it is “likely that only 10% of people in the majority of poor countries will be vaccinated in the next year.”
Experts have warned that if restrictive intellectual property rules that benefit the for-profit drug industry are left in place, some developing nations may not get sufficient vaccine access until 2024.
While rich countries are currently inoculating their populations at an estimated rate of one person per second, successful vaccine rollouts could be imperiled by highly contagious new variants that develop and spread among nations without vaccine access—and eventually make their way into wealthy nations. One study released last week found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is less effective against a coronavirus strain that originated in South Africa and has been detected in the United States.
(Courtesy: Common Dreams, a US non-profit news portal.)
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Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo, in an article published in Inequality.org, “Global Billionaire Wealth Surges $4 Trillion Over Pandemic, While Cost of Vaccinating the World is $141.2 Billion”, point out that the rich have enough money to vaccinate all the people in the world – what is needed is the political will to impose a wealth tax on them, as has been argued in several articles published in Janata Weekly. An extract from their article:
As over 2.8 million people have died globally from Covid-19 in the past year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires has surged.
The planet’s 2,365 billionaires have seen their wealth increase $4 trillion, or 54 percent, during the pandemic year. Their combined wealth rose from $8.04 trillion to $12.39 trillion between March 18, 2020 and March 18, 2021.
Thirteen billionaires saw their wealth increase over 500 percent. Many of them are connected to companies that benefited enormously from the conditions of the pandemic, including having their competition shut down or diminished.
There are 270 new billionaires on this year’s global list, while 91 billionaires fell off the list.
The analysis was conducted for the Patriotic Millionaires (and their affiliated UK Millionaires) and Millionaires for Humanity by the Institute for Policy Studies –Program on Inequality, drawing on research from Forbes, Bloomberg, and Wealth-X.
While billionaires were getting richer, the pandemic caused the global economy to shrink by 3.5 percent in 2020, according to the IMF. COVID-19 has been an accelerant on global inequality, with acute adverse impacts on women, youth, the poor, the informally employed, and those who work in contact-intensive sectors.
If global billionaires had paid an annual wealth tax in 2020, modelled on the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” levy proposed by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, they would have paid an estimated $345 billion in wealth taxes. Based on the current expectations of wealth growth, a small wealth tax such as this would raise $4.14 trillion over the next decade.
The “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” would levy an annual 2 percent wealth tax on assets over $50 million –and a 3 percent tax on assets over $1 billion (wealth under under $50 million would be exempted).
The annual revenue from this wealth tax would be more than twice the estimated $141.2 billion cost of delivering COVID-19 vaccines to every person on the planet, according to estimates from Oxfam.
The U.S. accounts for less than one-third of billionaire wealth on the global list. In the US alone, if this tax was applied to US billionaires on the Forbes Billionaires List, this would generate $120 billion a year, or $1.5 trillion over the next decade.
(Chuck Collins directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. Omar Ocampo is a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies.)
