Omicron strain shows that no one is safe until we are all safe

CHRISTMAS is within touching distance of the tape but galloping up on the outside is the Omicron variant, ready to bring the festivities and our economy to a screeching halt.

How much of that more-thanlikely possibility is attributable to the failure of the better-off countries to cater for the health needs of under-resourced poorer countries which in themselves are in no position to carry out comprehensive vaccination programmes against the virus?

As long as that state of affairs continues to exist, the virus will quietly gestate unseen, allowing newer variants to spring into existence, only to come to our notice via the systems of testing available to the better-prepared territories when individuals return from holiday or business trips to those regions or individuals from those untreated areas visit the shores of Europe and the UK.

While scientists are fighting to find a remedy to limit the ravages of Omicron, in the background other variants will be evolving in the Petri dish of untreated populations with the capacity of eluding the effects of the current vaccines.

No one as yet knows what potential Covid has for producing dangerous variants through mutation or whether it will eventually blow itself out, having exhausted its range of variants.

If Covid has the same capacity as the flu virus to keep coming back in a new form then we are going to have to create new vaccines every year to counteract the danger to the world’s population.

Recently there has been one hopeful but belated development, in that the G7 is going to meet to identify the best way forward to keep this virus under control. Let us hope that they come to realise that they must cooperate strenuously to fulfil the pious mantra that no one is safe until everyone is safe.

Denis Bruce, Bishopbriggs.