Heading toward a safer, better world
After a grim year, nations usher in 2021 with hope, aided by a more comprehensive arsenal to fight the pandemic
Puurs, about 30 kilometers north of the Belgian capital Brussels, is little known except for its brewery, which produces the world-famous Duvel beer. Yet the small town of 16,000 residents made headlines recently for providing fresh hope in the global fight against COVID-19.
The Pfizer factory there has been manufacturing the novel coronavirus vaccine, jointly developed by the US company and Germany’s BioNTech. On Dec 8, Margaret Keenan, 90, became the first member of the public to receive the Pfizer vaccine after its use was approved by the United Kingdom government.
Following the UK, countries such as the United States, Canada, Mexico, Singapore and Switzerland have also approved the vaccine, which claims to have 95 percent efficacy. Before that, China and Russia had already started to deploy their locally developed vaccines. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were the first foreign countries to approve the vaccine by Chinese company Sinopharm, with a claimed efficacy of 86 percent, in early December.
There are more than 50 trials of COVID-19 vaccine candidates being conducted around the globe, according to the World Health Organization.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, has called it “an astounding scientific achievement” to have safe and effective vaccines against a virus that was completely unknown only a year ago. Vaccines usually take years or even decades to develop.
Despite the COVID-19 vaccines creating hope around the world, the US’ Duke Global Health Institute in Durham, North Carolina, said that its models show there will not be enough to cover the world’s population until 2023 or 2024.
Rich countries, such as Canada, the US, the UK, members of the European Union and Australia, have preordered the most vaccines per capita.
The WHO’s COVAX facility, a global coalition of 190 economies pushing for equitable distribution of the vaccines, aims to access 2 billion doses by the end of this year. But the effort has been haunted by a funding shortage, with Tedros urging the partners to fill an immediate funding gap of $4.3 billion to procure vaccines for the most-needy countries.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin pledged that the nation is fulfilling its commitments with concrete actions to ensure the accessibility and affordability of its COVID-19 vaccines in developing countries.
China currently has five vaccines entering phase three clinical trials. Reports said the vaccines can be preserved for 36 months at temperatures of 2 C to 8 C, which makes them easy to store and use, even in developing countries.
Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, said vaccines will have a major impact on morbidity and mortality rates in high-risk groups.
“But the impact on transmission will not come until a much higher proportion of the population of a country is vaccinated,” he said.
Besides insufficient supply and inequitable distribution, hesitancy over getting vaccinated is a major concern.
A survey conducted in 15 countries in October by global market researcher Ipsos, found that only one in five respondents would immediately get a COVID-19 vaccine after it became available. In most countries, more than one in five people said they would wait a few months to a year before getting vaccinated.
Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser to Tedros, said the world is going into this year with more hope because it has the knowledge and tools to fight the coronavirus. Vaccines, new therapeutics, tests and other methods have allowed people to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
“It’s a long tunnel,” added Aylward, a Canadian physician and epidemiologist.
Tedros and other WHO officials and experts have stressed that people and authorities still need to do all the basics this year, from social distancing, wearing masks and hand hygiene
to contact tracing, testing and quarantine.
The organization recently warned Europe that “there is a high risk of further resurgence in the first weeks and months of 2021, and we will need to work together if we are to succeed in preventing it”.
Europe and the Americas are still the epicenters of new cases and deaths, despite new lockdown measures imposed in many European countries in recent weeks.
Besides the threat of further spread of the virus, the pandemic is plunging more people into poverty.
According to the World Bank, it is estimated COVID-19 pushed an additional 88 million to 115 million people into extreme poverty around the globe last year, with the total expected to rise to as many as 150 million this year. The bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than $1.90 a day.
Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia
University in New York and one of the world’s leading experts on the fight against poverty, said ending poverty is feasible with the right strategies and investments.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative “can play a big role in ending poverty”, he said, adding that it should be pursued diligently, with a focus on green and digital technologies.
Sachs praised China for meeting its target of ending extreme poverty last year. “This is a great historic accomplishment. It is also an inspiration and role model for other regions of the world,” he said.
Penny Goldberg, a professor at Yale University and former chief economist at the World Bank, warned of the negative impact of COVID-19 on accelerated digitization in areas such as e-commerce, online education and remote work.
“All this will cause further disruption to our economic system, amplifying existing inequalities, especially between those who have the skills required to take advantage of digital technologies and those who don’t,” she said.
The pandemic has wreaked havoc on the global economy. The International Monetary Fund in October predicted that the global economy will grow by 5.2 percent this year. But following the contraction last year, the level of global GDP this year will be only 0.6 percent above that of 2019.
Goldberg said the pandemic has caused a major worldwide recession. “We will be dealing with its implications for the next couple of years at least,” she said.
Jim O’Neill, a British economist and former chairman of Goldman Sachs, is more optimistic, saying this year will be “a year of significant relief”.
He said the vaccine rollout around the world will help bring the crisis under control and that global economic growth will spring back sharply. “I think we will have a stronger recovery in 2021 than the consensus thinks,” he said.
O’Neill said China is likely to witness its strongest GDP growth for many years in 2021, perhaps even more than 8 percent, and its share in the global economy will rise even further.
“It is really quite remarkable,” said O’Neill. “Hopefully, Chinese consumers will play a bigger and bigger role, which also means the rest of the world will benefit more.”
Lian Weiliang, deputy chief of the National Development and Reform Commission, told a forum in late November that China will overtake the US as the top consumer goods market very soon.
Goldberg said because of the pandemic, the world is moving further away from multilateralism toward regionalism as the new face of globalization.
Sachs disagreed, arguing that globalization will actually intensify in the years ahead.
He added that there will be a muchneeded opportunity for a return to rationality in the New Year.
O’Neill echoed the views, saying that the next four years will be better than the previous four. “And it is quite likely that the (Joe) Biden administration will both want to recommit the US to the postwar standards of international governance, including trade,” he said.
He cited the international cooperation on developing vaccines and other treatments for COVID-19 as “real life examples of why globalization is anything, but in decline”.
After British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted his thanks on Dec 8 “to our NHS, to all of the scientists who worked so hard to develop the vaccine”, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo took to Twitter to remind him it was “made in Europe”.
It was actually much wider than Europe. The first vaccine approved in the UK was jointly developed by US and German companies and manufactured in a facility located in Belgium. Shanghai-based Fosun Pharma invested in BioNTech early in the vaccine development stage and was also involved in its clinical trial.
And all the vaccines developed are based on the COVID-19 genome sequence mapped out by Professor Zhang Yongzhen and his team at Shanghai-based Fudan University School of Public Health and given free to the world on Jan 12, last year.