(CNN) Many of the world’s richest countries have spent the past year hoarding coronavirus vaccines, buying up enough doses to vaccinate their populations several times over and consistently failing to deliver on their promises to share doses with the developing world.
The World Health Organization said the approach was “self-defeating” and “immoral.”
It might be starting to bite. A new and potentially more transmissible variant of the virus likely emerged from a region with low vaccination rates.
The new variant, known as Omicron, was first identified in South Africa, although it is unclear whether it originated there or whether it was brought into the country from elsewhere in the region.
What scientists do know is that the virus is much more likely to mutate in places where vaccination is low and transmission high.
“The Omicron variant is already spreading across the world — as of Sunday, it has been detected in a number of countries including South Africa, Botswana, Australia, the UK, Germany, Italy and Belgium.”
Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton, told CNN in a phone interview:
“It has probably emerged in another country and has been detected in South Africa, which has very, very good genomic sequencing capacity and capability … it might well be a consequence of an outbreak, probably in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where there’s not a huge amount of genomic surveillance going on and vaccination rate is low.”
Head said the emergence of new variants was “a natural consequence of being too slow to vaccinate the world.”
World is put on high alert over the Omicron coronavirus variant
“We still have large unvaccinated populations, like we have across sub-Saharan Africa, and these are susceptible to big outbreaks,” he said.
New variants of the virus that have caused problems in the past, Head added, have all emerged from places that experienced big, uncontrolled outbreaks … READ MORE.
