U.S. can lead the global COVID fight — or live with it indefinitely
Certain problems, you can see coming.
For example, as it stands, just 6 percent of Africans are vaccinated against COVID-19.
“What did we think was going to happen when we allowed the African continent to remain unvaccinated?” asked Dr. Peter Hotez rhetorically on Monday. “This was all predicted and predictable.”
Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, was reflecting on the latest developments in the ongoing struggle against COVID-19.
On Nov. 25, scientists in South Africa had alerted the world to a new variant, called omicron.
The news went over like a lead balloon. Americans are done with COVID. Done with the disease itself, which has already killed more than 70,000 people in Texas alone. Done with the various restrictions imposed on us in order to slow its spread. Done with the debates about whether those measures make sense. Done with the occasional fistfights and shouting matches between strangers over proper mask usage, and so on. Done with all of that, and all the rest.
But will COVID ever be done with us?
That’s the question the omicron variant raises. And it’s a painful one for Houstonians, who might well have been hoping the worst was behind us. This summer saw a surge in cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the region, spurred along by the delta variant. But that wave — the fourth wave, for those keeping track — is now behind us. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo on Friday lowered the county’s threat level from Level 2, Orange, to Level 3, Yellow — signifying moderate but controlled spread.
The new variant raises the ominous prospect that all those gains could be reversed. Initial reports from South Africa, where it has spread rapidly through Pretoria and Johannesburg, suggest that omicron may cause relatively mild cases, but also that it may be highly transmissible. Scientists have also warned that omicron may be able to evade the
antibodies conferred by vaccination or prior infection, thanks to key mutations, particularly in its spike protein.
The World Health Organization has designated omicron a “variant of concern,” and it’s being described in similar terms by most world leaders, including President Joe Biden.
Biden on Nov. 26 announced new restrictions on air travel from South Africa and seven other countries in southern Africa as part of the federal response to omicron — never mind that up to this point travel bans haven’t proven particularly effective. Biden also again encouraged Americans to get vaccinated, and scolded his fellow world leaders about their responsibilities.
“The news about this new variant should make clearer than ever why this pandemic will not end until we have global vaccinations,” Biden said. “The United States has already donated more vaccines to other countries than every other country combined. It is time for other countries to match America’s speed and generosity.”
On Monday, he reiterated the point: The United States has, to date, shipped 275 million vaccine doses to 110 countries — ”more vaccines to other countries than all other countries in the world combined.” But several billion people around the world remain unvaccinated.
More information about what to expect from omicron itself should come to light over the next couple of weeks, Hotez said. In the meantime, the delta variant hasn’t actually gone away, even if it’s abated in Texas and other Southern states.
In fact, COVID cases have been rising again in the Northern and Western United States — a similar pattern to that observed in 2020.
“I think we have to work on the premise that yet another wave is coming this winter,” Hotez said, adding that for individuals, his advice remains the same: get vaccinated, if you haven’t already; get your booster shot, if possible; and get your children vaccinated, if they’re eligible. According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, two-thirds of Harris County residents have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and nearly 60 percent are fully vaccinated.
But COVID-19 can’t be defeated, Hotez explained, simply by vaccinating everyone in the United States. As he noted, vaccination rates are low in Africa, the Middle East and in Southeast Asia — in other words, in vast and densely populated swathes of the planet.
Delivering vaccines to the rest of the world should have been a priority for U.S. leaders all along, he added.
“The problem was there was never the commitment to do that,” Hotez said. “We practically guaranteed that the southern hemisphere would remain unvaccinated.”
It was a poignant conversation. During the course of this pandemic Hotez, like many scientists — and like many front-line health care professionals, to our enduring shame as a nation — has been vilified by the antiscience segment of the American political landscape.
Those voices, mostly on the right, have wrapped themselves in the flag, casting themselves as standing for freedom against the tyranny of experts wielding vaccines. And yet Hotez, much more than the carnival barkers of Newsmax or grandstanders such as U.S. Sen Ted Cruz, clearly retains a belief in American greatness — or our potential for it, at least.
“When it comes to complex global crises, the U.S. has to lead. That’s just the way it is,” Hotez said. “If the president were to ask me, I would say, well, who else is supposed to lead? Is it Xi? Is it Putin? Is it some nameless bureaucrat with the European Commission?”
“It’s not that hard! You can make 9 billion doses of our vaccines!” he added. “To me it’s dreary as all hell. Where’s the inspiration?”
It’s certainly hard to come by, at the moment. Americans should take the arrival of omicron as yet another wake-up call: We can and should do more to combat this pandemic, which has always, of course, been a global crisis.
Alternatively, we can live with COVID forever — and with the painful sense of defeat such a decision would represent.