"The identification of a new, highly mutated variant of the coronavirus virus in southern Africa highlights the risk to global public health posed by large, unvaccinated populations in the developing world, where countries have struggled to get immunizations and the virus is spreading and evolving.
Overall, just 7% of people in Africa are fully vaccinated, compared with 42% of the global population, according to Our World In Data, a project based at Oxford University. In Europe and the U.S., vaccination levels are 67% and 58%.
That disparity, public-health officials say, helped open the door to the rise of this latest variant, which has more than 50 mutations -- including 30 on the virus's spike, a main target for vaccines -- from the one that emerged in Wuhan, China, two years ago.
World Health Organization scientists on Friday declared the new strain, which they named Omicron, a "variant of concern" and said evidence suggests that it is more contagious and that it is able to infect people who have already had Covid-19 or been vaccinated.
The variant that is currently dominant world-wide, Delta, was first identified in India and sparked a surge that reached 400,000 cases a day there last spring, when vaccinations remained at low levels.
About a third of India's population has now been fully vaccinated, yet vast areas of the developing world remain even further behind. Africa's most populous country, Nigeria, has fully vaccinated just 1.7% of its 206 million people. Africa's second-most populous country, Ethiopia, currently in the grips of a civil war, has covered just 1.2%.
Some public-health officials say they are worried the world risks being pulled into a dangerous cycle in which worrying new variants emerge in unvaccinated populations, prompting more highly vaccinated countries to order up booster shots, making it more difficult to get doses to the developing world.
"We're looking into a situation where high-income countries will keep getting regular boosters, while people in low-income countries haven't even had their first dose," said Alexandra Phelan, an adjunct professor of global and public-health law and ethics at Georgetown University.
Africa isn't alone in having big chunks of the population unvaccinated. South Africa, having covered 24% of its residents, will likely soon surpass Bulgaria, the least vaccinated EU country, which has yet to persuade more than 25% of its population to get a shot." [1]
1. World News: Vaccine Disparity Paves Way For Strains
Hinshaw, Drew. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 27 Nov 2021: A.8.
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