This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
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Will it take a COVID strain deadlier than Omicron to wake up world leaders?

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

This column argued last month that there is a dire need for new thinking on security, citing climate breakdown and the COVID-19 pandemic as the real security challenges of our times.

For the latter, it cited the World Health Organization’s (WHO) mid-November global COVID-19 death toll of 5.1 million but also warned that the WHO was concerned about underreporting of deaths in many countries. Other reliable assessments ranged from 12 to 17 million deaths.

The column predicted further problems due to low vaccination rates worldwide: “So COVID-19’s impact is far higher than what is commonly assumed, and there is still a long way to go. Global vaccination rates are hopelessly inadequate, yet very few governments have any clear vision for what is really needed.”

At that stage, the WHO had reported that 7.2 billion vaccine doses had been delivered across a global population of almost 8 billion. Full vaccination with a booster therefore requires close to 25 billion doses but, as the column put it: “This is unlikely to be reached until well into 2023 – resulting in large pools of virus interacting with only partially vaccinated populations, which is a recipe for more variants.”

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Meanwhile, there has been discussion among virologists and epidemiologists regarding the implementation of annual boosters to try and keep the pandemic under control. This means that by the time we reach global vaccination, richer states could already be in the full swing of an annual booster system, making it even less likely that the Global South will catch up, and will remain more at risk from variants.

Huge advantage for the virus

The overall argument of that column was that conventional thinking on global security has been constrained by the standard military approach, whereas this thinking will not work for either the pandemic or climate breakdown. And the pandemic holds the most immediate risk, bearing in mind the old saying, “It is the bond closest to your throat that you first cut loose.”

Since then, the pandemic has rapidly evolved yet again. Two aspects are most pressing: the new Omicron variant; and indications that vaccine nationalism is accelerating – just when the opposite is needed. Omicron has come out of the blue and is spreading rapidly less than a fortnight after South Africa announced its detection. It has already been detected in 24 countries, with more being added to the list every day.

While intensive work is going on to assess its infectivity, lethality and resistance to vaccines and antiviral drugs, there is little concrete information, partly explaining the sudden attempts of some countries to keep it out. The tentative results are mixed. Some data from South Africa, the worst affected country so far, show that it produces relatively mild symptoms, but this may be skewed by the fact that many of the first Omicron cases have been identified in younger individuals or detected in very recently screened travellers, so the impact on the elderly is unclear.

Early indications are that Omicron could be much more infectious than the previously dominant Delta. Based on the rise in COVID-19 cases and sequencing data, Tom Wenseleers, an evolutionary biologist at KU-Leuven in Belgium, has estimated that Omicron could infect three to six times as many people as Delta, over the same time period. “That’s a huge advantage for the virus — but not for us,” he said.

A more worrying indication is that Omicron is infecting people who have already had COVID-19. According to new evidence collected in South Africa by the country’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), the latest epidemiological evidence suggests that Omicron can evade immunity from infection with earlier variants and is causing reinfections at three times previous rates.

The Omicron variant is precisely what the WHO has been warning about for at least a year as it repeatedly called for accelerated global vaccination. This brings us to the second element of concern: the persistence of vaccine nationalism from wealthy countries protecting their own at the expense of the wider world.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/will-it-take-a-covid-strain-deadlier-than-omicron-to-wake-up-world-leaders/
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