We cannot fight Covid while hoarding vaccines

Leaving the UK to go back to Beirut just a hair’s breadth before Christmas felt like narrowly escaping a plague island. Everyone I knew either had Omicron or had been exposed. The lightning speed of infections was frightening.

But for the fully vaccinated the main concern is inconvenience: a Christmas spent isolating, or for me, not being able to get on that plane.

In Lebanon Omicron is yet to fully take hold, but I fear for what will happen when it does – a fear I have for every part of the world suffering from crippled healthcare systems and low vaccination rates.

Here an unprecedented financial crisis has ravaged the country meaning at points locating paracetamol at pharmacies has been impossible. In tandem, according to Reuters’ latest figures, just a third of the population has been vaccinated (in comparison to more than 80 per cent of the UK).

Lebanon’s minister of health tweeted last week that 100 per cent of the patients in Lebanon’s Covid ICUs were unvaccinated. And this is the issue.

While for many in the UK having Omicron is akin to a bad cold (thanks to jabs and boosters), this will likely not be the experience for the unvaccinated or those fire-fighting other diseases and conditions in countries where their healthcare systems cannot help them.

From a purely selfish perspective, low inoculation rates elsewhere in the world only encourage mutations that wash up on our shores. We are seeing this play out with Omicron, which apparently originated in South Africa. While it appears to be mercifully mild that might not be the case with the next variant, which will come.

And this is why successful vaccination campaigns everywhere are vital to ending this for all of us.

Only 7.5 per cent of the population of Africa, is fully vaccinated, according to the World Health Organisation, which has repeatedly warned vaccine inequity will prolong the pandemic.

We, the privileged and rich, cannot fight Covid through hoarding boosters for ourselves. We have to make sure as many people as possible globally are vaccinated. That means getting doses to the most vulnerable nations, helping with shortages of equipment like syringes and combatting logistical issues that cause bottlenecks resulting in millions of wasted doses – as happened in Nigeria last week.

This should be the goal of 2022. To end this nightmare for all of us.

Yours,

Bel Trew

Middle East correspondent