The planet could have one year or less before its COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective and modified formulations are needed, a survey of epidemiologists, virologists and infectious disease specialists says.
Scientists have said that a global vaccination effort is needed to neutralize the threat of COVID-19. This is due to the threat of variations of the coronavirus — some more transmissible, deadly and less susceptible to vaccines — that are emerging.
The grim forecast of one year or less came from two-thirds of respondents, said the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of organizations including Amnesty International, Oxfam and UNAIDS, who carried out the survey of 77 scientists from 28 nations.
Nearly one-third of the respondents said that the timeframe was likely nine months or less.
Persistent low vaccine coverage in many nations would make it more likely for vaccine-resistant mutations to appear, said 88 percent of the respondents, who work at institutions such as Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, Imperial College London, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the University of Edinburgh.
“New mutations arise every day. 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,” said Gregg Gonsalves, associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University. “Unless we vaccinate the world, 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.”
The vaccines that have received emergency authorizations in different parts of the world are a mix of old and fresh technologies.
Of particular interest is the mRNA approach, employed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, which can be tweaked at speed (within weeks or months) to accommodate new variants.
However, they are unlikely within reach of poorer nations, given that they are far more expensive and have onerous temperature storage requirements.
While the UK and US have administered at least one vaccine dose to more than one-quarter of their populations and have secured hundreds of millions of jabs, nations such as South Africa and Thailand have not even managed to inoculate 1 percent of their populations.
Some nations are yet to administer their first dose.
COVAX — a global vaccine initiative — hopes to be able to supply at least 27 percent of the population of lower-income nations with vaccines this year.
“The urgency we see in rich nations to vaccinate their populations, aiming for all adults by the summer, is simply not reflected globally. Instead, we have COVAX aiming for perhaps 27 percent by the end of the year if we possibly can manage it — that is simply not good enough,” said Max Lawson, head of inequality policy at Oxfam and chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance, which is urging vaccine developers to openly share their technology and intellectual property to boost production.
“Where is the ambitious global goal? A goal that the science tells us is needed? I think that’s the key point — we just don’t see the ambition that would go along with it, widespread recognition that limited vaccination is quite dangerous,” Lawson said.
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