As a handful of wealthy countries hoard vaccines and plot booster campaigns for already highly vaccinated populations, newsuggests that countries stockpiling supplies for themselves while large parts of the world go without risk bringing about new, possibly dangerous dangerous variants of the virus and an increasing number of Covid-19 infections. ...
According to models constructed by the researchers, areas of low vaccine coverage make it more likely for the virus to evolve into more dangerous variants and possibly become more transmissible, resistant to vaccines or are able to escape the immune system and be capable of infecting those with immunity.
Sharing vaccine supplies more equitably could help alleviate this long-term risk, reduce cases in areas that don’t have access to vaccines and reduce the overall number of cases in the long-term, the researchers found, though regions where vaccines are more accessible could see a short-term increase in infections.
Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust in the U.K. and one of the study’s co-authors, said the work underscores the importance of sharing vaccine supplies “in parallel...not in sequence.” The models also indicate that a “prompt redistribution of vaccine surpluses is likely advantageous” globally and for both countries of high and low levels of vaccine access, the researchers wrote in the paper. There is also a strong ethical component to the vast inequities in global vaccine distribution.
Is there a strategy and have we considered all of the variables short term and long term?