I have been working in the field of vaccines for over 15 years. The inequity of the Pandemic and access to vaccines has left me sad.
It is a success story that Australia has almost 90 percent coverage for two doses of Covid-19. In settings such as New South Wales, where a rapid roll out of Covid-19 vaccination helped with the bending of the curve, high levels of first-dose coverage along with other public health measures helped.
Most of the low- and middle-income countries have only a small percentage of their population vaccined. An analysis shows that only 2.5% of the population in low-income countries are fully protected from vaccine-related diseases.
The frontline defence of many countries is very weak because healthcare workers have not yet beenvaccinated. With more than 3.5 billion people waiting for their first dose of the vaccine, many high-income countries are now introducing boosters or third doses for the entire population.
There are only a small number of doses available to low-income countries, which makes it hard to get a vaccine. There are other challenges such as cold chain low-temperature storage, distribution logistics, vaccine hesitancy and shortages of health workers to administer the vaccines in some settings.
Omicron is a new variant of concern. The variant did not start in South Africa. The WHO Technical Advisory Group has raised alarms for several reasons, while it is still early days. The strain appears to be spreading faster in one of the most populated regions of South Africa, where it has a new combination of multiple genes.
The emergence of this new variant of concern could have been avoided by science. Natural selection is a part of the reason for the viral mutations. When the virus enters a cell, it can make copies of itself that can be passed on to another person.
Sometimes during this process of copying in non-immune persons, it may introduce an error, or even a variation of an error, that can offer a competitive advantage to the viruses to spread from one non-immune person to another.
If a person is already immune, the virus can't spread between people, preventing the emergence of new ones.
The emergence of each new variant of concern can have implications for our public health response measures, how we test for the strain and whether the current vaccines will work. The emergence of new vaccines that escape existing ones can affect the success of Covid-19 vaccination.
It's too early to say if Omicron will replace the Delta variant of sars-coV-2 or if it will cause severe disease, but it's a good sign.
Vaccination is one of the best ways to prevent the emergence of new variant.
For several months, experts in the field have advocated for greater vaccine equity across the world, ensuring that low-income countries have greater access to vaccines through increased supply through Covax, waivers of intellectual properties that hold the recipe for how vaccines are made, and greater manufacturing capacity in low-
It is important to wipe out the world's population, especially those living in poverty, who experience the worst impact of Covid-19 at the same pace as those in rich countries.
The economic estimates from the United Nations suggest that low- and middle-income countries will suffer losses of $12tn through to the year 2025.
The impact of the Pandemic on other health programs around the world, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, can cause greater impact on people living there.
We need faster policy-level solutions that increase vaccine supplies in low- and middle-income countries as countries embark on booster, adolescent and paediatric vaccination programs.
The current approaches are not optimal.
Dr Meru Sheel is a senior research fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University.
