A survey of experts in 28 countries revealed that a majority of epidemiologists and other infectious disease specialists predict that mutations of the coronavirus could make current vaccinations ineffective.
According to CNBC, the new survey from the People’s Vaccine Alliance found that two-thirds of the 77 epidemiologists consulted said that we had a year or less before the virus mutates to the state that the majority our first-generation vaccines are no longer protective and new and modified vaccines will be required.
Of those surveyed, according to a press release issued by Oxfam International, a third of the experts gave a time frame of nine months or less for the vaccines to be rendered ineffective against COVID-19. Less than one in eight said they believed that the mutations would have no effect on vaccine efficacy.
“The overwhelming majority — 88 percent — said that persistent low vaccine coverage in many countries would make it more likely for vaccine-resistant mutations to appear,” wrote the authors.
Nearly 75% of the experts surveyed from such prestigious institutions as Johns Hopkins, Yale, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Cambridge University, and the University of Edinburgh, said we need global sharing of technology and intellectual property to increase worldwide vaccine coverage to stop the variants form emerging. And we need it fast, they added.
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“The more the virus circulates, the more likely it is that mutations and variants will emerge, which could make our vaccines ineffective,” said Devi Lalita Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, according to the Oxfam press release. “As we’ve learned the viruses don’t care about borders. We have to vaccinate as many people as possible, everywhere in the world as quickly as possible. Why wait and watch instead of getting ahead with this?”
At the current rate of vaccination, only 10% of people in the majority of poor nations would be vaccinated in the next year, according to CNBC. The People’s Vaccine Alliance, representing a coalition of over 50 organizations that are pressing for equal global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, presented their survey on Tuesday.
The World Health Organization stated in January that the equitable distribution of coronavirus vaccine is at “serious risk.” WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the world was on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure.”
He added that the “recent emergence of rapidly-spreading variants makes the rapid and equitable rollout of vaccines all the more important.” He said that “it’s not right that younger, healthier adults in rich countries are vaccinated before health workers and older people in poor countries.”
The WHO asked that wealthier countries that have millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines stockpiled share a portion of their supply so that those in poorer countries can be vaccinated as soon as possible.
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