Charlotte Atkins
AS the Government announces its ‘green list’ of foreign destinations for quarantine travel - and the EU has confirmed travellers from countries with low infection rates and the fully vaccinated will be able to visit Europe from June - there is an expectation we are returning to something approaching normal, at least by the summer.
But how realistic is that when globally Covid-19 cases are on the rise and vaccines are not being shared equitably?
India has shown how suddenly infections can surge in places that appeared to have escaped the worst. Infection rates in some parts of Europe also remain high. There is a growing concern about new variants, which may be more resistant to vaccines. Countries cannot build a wall around themselves and keep out infections from elsewhere. Already clusters of the Indian variants of Covid-19, which are causing such devastation in India, have been found across England, including in care homes, amid fears about the speed with which they are spreading within communities.
The success of England’s vaccination programme was based on vaccinating those most in need first. The earliest vaccinations gave the most vulnerable, and those most likely to die from Covid, the immune defences to fend off the virus. The second jabs hampered the spread of the disease, pushing the number of people an infected person passes the disease on to below one, and began to shrink the epidemic.
But the vaccine gap between the richer and poor parts of the world is growing by the day. Lowincome countries account for less than one per percent of the doses administered to date. The west is on course for more than 50 percent of adults to be vaccinated by the summer, compared with one in 100 in sub-saharan Africa.
The UK Government has secured orders for more than 517m vaccine doses across the eight most promising vaccines and the USA is predicted to be on course for a stockpile of 300m surplus doses by the summer. Closing that vaccine gap is an urgent medical necessity for combating Covid-19, preventing it mutating and threatening every country, rich or poor. No one is safe until everyone is safe.
World leaders set up the Covax facility specifically to ensure poor and middle income countries could secure vaccines. But it is massively underfunded and has faced vaccine supply difficulties.
Now US President Joe Biden has backed the pleas of South Africa,
India and about 100 developing countries in the World Trade Organisation to overturn patents on covid vaccines in the interests of getting more of them, more cheaply and faster, to huge populations in need.
Patents make it illegal, for up to 20 years, for manufacturers of generic medicines to turn out cheap copycat versions. They preserve the profits of the multinational pharmaceutical companies that make drugs and vaccines. Pfizer expects £19 billion of revenue from its Covid vaccine this year.
Médecins Sans Frontières, one of the most respected international health organisations, speaking out for doctors who risk their lives on the ground in pandemics and emergencies, said: “Countries that continue to oppose the WTO patent waiver, such as the European Union countries, the United Kingdom,
Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Norway, Japan, and Brazil must now take action too, and decide to put people’s health before pharmaceutical profits and waive Intellectual Property rights on all Covid-19 medical tools, including vaccines.”
The management of airports and immigration procedures cannot combat a global pandemic, especially as UK Border Force staff are already identifying more than 100 fraudulent test certificates every day. There has to be a global response and a coherent, fully funded plan from the G7 leaders of wealthy nations, when they meet for their summit in June.
The US President has shown leadership on this issue. The UK Government talks up our special relationship with the USA. Now is the time to demonstrate it by following their lead to make the