After two years of pandemic, the COVID-19 could be controlled, but the inability of the international community to equally distribute the vaccines it could prolong or exacerbate in 2022 a pandemic that has already cost millions of lives.
Despite the explosion of cases in Europe today, many public health experts believe that the world now has the tools and expertise to master the virus. But public authorities and society must make difficult and sometimes disputed decisions.
“The evolution of this pandemic is in our hands,” insists Maria Van Kerkhove, in charge of the fight against COVID-19 at the World Health Organization (WHO), in the front line since the appearance of the disease at the end of 2019 in China.
Can we “reach a stage where we control transmission in 2022? Absolutely! ”He exclaims. “We could have already arrived, but we haven’t,” he says.
A year after their arrival on the market, the vaccines demonstrated their efficacy against the most serious forms of the disease, although they do not completely stop its transmission, which allows the appearance of new variants such as the delta or the recent omicron.
Faces of COVID-19
World production should reach 24 billion doses by June, a quantity in theory more than enough to immunize the entire world population.
For now, 7.5 billion doses have been administered, but especially in rich countries that, despite solidarity speeches, distribute vaccines for their children and booster shots, while less favored nations continue to have large percentages of the unprotected population.
Throughout the world, scenes of intubated or bedridden patients have been repeated in corridors due to lack of space, cared for by exhausted medical personnel. And on the streets of countries like Brazil or Indonesia, endless lines of relatives have been seen looking for oxygen.
The stamp of hundreds of improvised pyres to incinerate the victims of COVID-19 in India reflected the magnitude of the tragedy: officially 5.1 million people, although the WHO estimates that it may be two or three times more.
No country has registered as many victims as the United States, with 800,000 deaths from the pandemic. The constant stream of obituaries on the account @FacesofCovid (Faces of COVID-19) humanizes this impersonal figure.
“Christopher Mehring, 56, of Dillon, Montana, died of COVID-19 on November 2, 2021. Words are useless to describe his love for his grandchildren.”
And Europe, which seemed to have turned the page with the widespread deployment of vaccines, returned to pandemic reality in late 2021 with a virulent fifth wave that has forced governments to again balance freedoms and restrictions.
In this time, the anti-vaccination and anti-restriction movement has become radicalized, with riots in the Netherlands, France or Belgium.
Either everyone or no one
Even so, experts are confident that the “pandemic” stage may soon come to an end.
As in the case of the flu, the world could continue to live with COVID-19 as an endemic but controllable disease, says Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California Irvine.
For the White House advisor on the pandemic Anthony Fauci, the face of the fight against the virus in the United States, with the vaccination this disease “will be a more or less loud background noise, but it will not dominate us as it does now” .
But inequality in access to vaccines remains a challenge, adding to pre-existing imbalances between rich and poor countries.
The former vaccinated an average of 65% of the population, while the latter did not reach 7%, according to UN figures.
As WHO leader Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus repeats ad nauseam: “No one is safe if everyone is not.”
The more the virus circulates, the more likely a more contagious, deadly, or vaccine-resistant variant will emerge.
An example is the fears generated this month by the detection of the omicron variant, identified for the first time in southern Africa and which the WHO has described as “worrying”. Although the organization considers that it represents a “very high risk”, it also recognizes that for now there are many questions about its dangerousness, its transmissibility and especially its resistance to vaccines.
Rich countries would demonstrate “myopia thinking that by getting vaccinated they get rid of the problem,” warns Gautam Menon, professor of biology and physics at Ashoka University in India.
A catastrophic scenario hypothesis recently developed by the WHO as a warning raises an out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic caused by increasingly dangerous mutations, coupled with another Zika-like pandemic.
In this scenario, confusion, misinformation and migratory crises triggered by disease reduce trust in political and scientific authorities to nothing and sink health systems.
It is an even more disturbing approach considering that “we have a virus at the origin of the current pandemic and many candidates for the next one,” acknowledges Michael Ryan, WHO director for emergencies.
“It’s certainly not the last of the dangerous pathogens,” says health and science specialist Jamie Metzl.
However COVID-19 evolves, “it is clear that we will never be able to demobilize,” he adds.
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Ricardo is a renowned author and journalist, known for his exceptional writing on top-news stories. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he is known for his ability to deliver breaking news and insightful analysis on the most pressing issues of the day.
