Leading scientists from around the world warned that world has less than a year before new variants of Covid mutations emerge as slow roll-out of vaccines can render the first-generation of the vaccine ineffective.
The data has been revealed by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of organisations including Amnesty International, Oxfam, and UNAIDS. Among 77 scientists from 28 countries, two-thirds of respondents claimed that current vaccine has less than a year.
Nearly 90% of the researchers said, more vaccine-resistant mutations are probable as a result of exceedingly “poor vaccine availability” in many nations, particularly in developed countries.
Gregg Gonsalves, associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University, said in a statement, “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.”
To speed up manufacturing and delivery of the vaccines around the world, the People’s Vaccine Alliance encouraged all pharmaceutical firms working on COVID-19 vaccines to freely share their technologies and intellectual property through the World Health Organisation COVID-19 Technology Access Pool.
The new approach to fight the mutant Covid variations is the mRNA approach, employed by the companies Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. But these types of vaccines are far more expensive and unlikely within the reach of poorer countries.
Uneven distribution and availability of vaccines is the major issue right now. While Rich nations like US and UK have vaccinated at least a fourth of their population, countries like South Africa and Thailand have not yet vaccinated 1% of their populations. Many low resources countries are yet to deliver their first batch of injections to their citizens.
Covax – the national vaccination campaign alliance – aims to be able to provide vaccinations to at least 27 percent of the population of low-income nations by 2021, which “is simply not good enough” said Max Lawson, head of inequality policy at Oxfam and the chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance.
