Health experts said the doses needed to make it around the world were not just for the richest countries.
They said it was necessary to reduce the rates of death and serious illness in poorer nations.
They said that the more the virus spreads, the more likely it is to evolve and cause more harm to everyone, including the vaccine.
A variant is worrying.
A new variant, dubbed B. 1.1.529, has been imported from Hong Kong and is mostly found in South Africa.
The variant has been spreading quickly, but a relatively small number of cases have been discovered so far.
Tulio de Oliveira is on November 25, 2021.
According to Insider's Dr. Catherine Schuster-Bruce, experts are worried about the high number of mutations in B. 1.1.529, which could make existing treatments less effective.
Scientists are trying to figure out if it is more infectious or more deadly.
Many experts say it's the worst variant they've seen since the beginning of the Pandemic.
It's not clear where the new variant came from. It could have been in a neighboring country or in South Africa.
Both of those countries have low vaccination rates, and have documented the struggle in securing doses.
Our World in Data reported that just over twenty percent of people in South Africa and over twenty percent of people in Botswana have beenvaccinated.
The vaccine rates of South Africa and Botswana are shown in a graph.
Data is our world.
The nightmare scenario could be arriving in the same way experts warned about.
The expert warned for months.
The World Health Organization had urged richer countries to share vaccine doses and to make sure poorer countries have their first shots.
The countries have not listened.
The WHO experts said that the vaccine distribution needed to be widened to stop new, dangerous variant from emerging. In August, WHO chief scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan warned that booster campaigns would only lead to more variant.
The same scenario has been warned of by other experts.
In an interview with Insider in March, Ken Shadlen, professor of development studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said that if global vaccine inequality persisted, it's going to undermine the health benefits of all that we're doing with vaccines.
He said that it would take a lot of confidence to believe that the vaccine-escaping variant wouldn't emerge if the virus keeps spreading.
In March, Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota who advised Joe Biden on COVID-19 during his presidential transition, expressed the same concerns to Insider.
If the world's richest nations have done widespread vaccinations, it would be difficult to end the epidemic.
The UK and Germany are limiting travel from a number of African nations in order to stop the spread of the new variant.
