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The corona vaccines will no longer be effective within a year if variants can continue to develop in different countries due to insufficient vaccination. This is what international scientists say in a survey by Amnesty International and Oxfam, among others.
The People’s Vaccine Alliance survey, a coalition of several organizations, probed the predictions of 77 scientists from 28 countries about the future of corona vaccines. And these are not particularly reassuring: two-thirds of the scientists surveyed think that the vaccines that have already been developed will no longer work against the rapidly mutating virus within a year. In fact, one in three think the world has only nine months or less to renew or modify corona vaccines.
Global vaccination is getting off to a very slow start: countries such as Thailand and South Africa have vaccinated less than 1% of their population. In other countries, the very first injection has not even been taken. As long as the virus has free rein in many countries, mutations will continue to emerge – mutations that may spread more quickly and test the efficacy of the developed vaccines. The survey found that 88% of scientists at renowned institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Yale and University of Edinburgh think persistently low vaccination coverage in many countries makes vaccine-resistant mutations more likely to emerge.
“Not an ambitious goal”
According to the scientists surveyed, new vaccines therefore emerge fairly quickly. The mRNA vaccines, such as those from Pfizer and Moderna, can be adapted quite easily and are therefore of additional interest in the case of resistant mutations. However, these vaccines are not only more expensive, but also more temperature-sensitive. For these reasons, poorer countries have a more difficult time obtaining the easily adaptable mRNA vaccines.
Covax, the global vaccination program that distributes vaccines to poorer countries, hopes to have at least 27% of the inhabitants of those poorer countries injected by 2021. But Max Lawson, Oxfam’s head of inequality policy and chairman of the People’s Vaccine Alliance, does not think this target is high enough. “We don’t see an ambitious global target, while scientists broadly recognize that limited vaccination is quite dangerous.” The People’s Vaccine Alliance is calling for the patents on the vaccines to be lifted and also to release the manufacturing technology.
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