The emergence of a new mutant of the Corona virus, in South Africa, highlights the risk of low vaccination rates against Covid-19 in poor countries, according to the West Street Journal.
Public health officials say the disparity in vaccination rates between countries helped open the door to this new mutation, which contains more than 50 mutations.
According to Our World In Data, only 7% of people in Africa have received vaccinations, compared to 42% of the world's population, 67% in Europe and 58% in the United States.
The World Health Organization described the new mutant, which it called "Omicron", as worrisome due to the high number of mutations and some early evidence that it carries a higher degree of infection than other mutant ones. This means that people who have contracted COVID-19 and recovered may contract it again.
It may take weeks to see if current vaccines are less effective against it.
Amid the uncertainty that may persist for a few weeks over Omicron, countries around the world have taken a safety first approach, considering that previous outbreaks of the pandemic were due in part to the laxity of precautionary measures.
Some public health officials expressed concern about this new variable, stressing that the world risks falling into a dangerous cycle in which new worrying variables appear in non-immune countries.
Last May, the administration of US President Joe Biden tried to help fill this gap by announcing that it would support the temporary suspension of patents and intellectual property for corona vaccines so that poor countries can manufacture the necessary doses for their people.
But opponents of the decision say lifting patent protection would discourage investment in pharmaceutical research.
In a statement Friday, President Biden called on states to waive intellectual property rights for vaccines. "Today's news underscores the importance of moving quickly," he said.
Over the course of this year, Kovacs, the WHO-supported campaign to deliver doses to low-income countries, managed to ship just 544 million doses to the African continent, about a third of what it was planning to send so far.
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