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A mother holds her daughter's arm as a healthcare worker administers the child with Pfizer-BNT covid-19 vaccine in Taiwan.
COVID vaccine rollout: Taking stock 3 years on
It’s been almost three years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.
Since then, we have gone from the fear of greeting one another in public to the horrors of overcrowded ERs and morgues — to the remarkably fast development of a vaccine and its uneven rollout. Nearly 7 million people have died worldwide, and while the virus is still out there, most countries now have access to effective jabs.
How did we do? In mid-2020, many of us were visiting loved ones through hospital windows, spraying our grocery bags with bleach, and wondering whether public life would ever again go “back to normal.” It seemed like the horror would never end, but a break in the clouds came in Dec. 2020, with the first mRNA vaccines making their way into arms in the US and UK. (Chinese jabs were developed first but proved less effective, and no one remembers Russia’s miracle drug that never was.)
While it seemed like a long wait, the vaccines were rolled out in record time. “We had a virus that was not known to science before December 31, 2019, and we had a vaccine in people's arms in December 2020,” says Dr. Amesh Adajla. a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Prior to COVID, the fastest-ever rollout of a vaccine was for mumps, and that took nearly four years. Within 12 months, the coronavirus jab was available thanks to concentrated research. Decades of DNA research enabled scientists to being designing the mRNA for the COVID vaccine as soon as genetic code became available.
“Various scientific groups and manufacturers were able to provide enough doses to do very big studies very quickly, so we had answers super early,” says Dr. Margaret Ann Harris, an epidemiologist at the WHO. “Never in the history of humanity have we had really good data so quickly.”
Today, some 5.5 billion people around the globe – 72% of the population – have received at least one dose. But in the early months, the rollout was slow and uneven.
Global inequities in access and high rates of vaccine hesitancy made the world vulnerable to new variants. Vaccine nationalism — the me-first approach to battling COVID — saw Western countries opting to inoculate their own populations before sending vaccines abroad. But, as Ian Bremmer told us then, the race to outsmart COVID was (and is) global.
Health officials in early 2021 stressed the need to treat vulnerable populations around the globe first — and not only for humanitarian reasons. After all, outbreaks anywhere put everyone in danger of new mutations that could compromise the existing vaccines, as we’ve seen to varying degrees with both the delta and omicron variants.
The COVAX initiative worked to get vaccines to the rest of the world — to date delivering nearly 2 billion doses to 146 countries — but supply issues and vaccine nationalism slowed their efforts early on. Dr. Harris says she became “the most hated person in Britain” in early 2021 for saying that the next step after vaccinating the at-risk population at home should be to send jabs to vulnerable groups abroad.
So how can we do better next time? It’s perhaps no surprise that domestic politics pushed governments to cater to their own populations first.
“Politicians will always default to protectionism. The same thing happened during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic when Australia developed the first vaccine and they put export restrictions on it,” says Adajla.
The only way to avoid that is to make plans now. “We must put a clear strategy in place to distribute vaccines globally, put aside what keeps individual groups happy and go for what really needs to be done for humanity,” says Harris, noting how there are still plenty of countries where under 40% are vaccinated against COVID today
A WHO treaty is in the works that lays out recommendations for pandemic-related international cooperation, preparedness, and response. We’ll be watching to see whether it can help protect us from the scourge of vaccine nationalism.
What is the real origin of the COVID-19 virus?
A controversial new World Health Organization report on the origins of the coronavirus that suggests it likely originated from a bat but transferred to humans via an intermediary animal. Could the virus have emerged from a Chinese lab, as former CDC Director Robert Redfield recently suggested? That's the least likely scenario, says the WHO's chief scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan. "The betacoronaviruses are very, very common in bats and there's a lot of genetic similarity between the SARS-CoV2 and many of the viruses in the...bat species," Dr. Swaminathan told Ian Bremmer in an interview on GZERO World, airing on US public television stations starting April 9. Check local listings.
Watch the episode: Vaccine nationalism could prolong the pandemic
Vaccine nationalism could prolong the pandemic
Vaccine nationalism, where countries prioritize their own citizens before the rest of the world, has been effective for rich nations like the United States and Israel. But leaving behind so much of the global population isn't just a humanitarian issue. It could prolong the pandemic, according to the World Health Organization's Chief Scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, who argues that what the global vaccination effort most urgently lacks are doses, not dollars. In a wide-ranging interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World, she calls for a large increase in the global vaccine supply in order to prevent the rise of more dangerous and vaccine-evading super-variants. She also weighs in on a controversial new WHO report investigating the origins of COVID-19 and suggests we may be seeing alternative vaccine forms, like nasal sprays, sooner than we think.
Podcast: Dr. Fauci's Pandemic Prognosis
Listen: The country's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, joins Ian Bremmer to talk vaccines, school re-openings, and when—and how—the pandemic could finally come end. He was last on GZERO World just weeks before the pandemic hit in the fall of 2019 and he described at the time what kept him up at night: a "pandemic-like respiratory illness." This time, he talks about how closely that nightmare scenario foreshadowed the COVID-19 pandemic. He also offers some guidance about what public health measures vaccinated Americans should continue to take in the coming months (hint: masks stay on).
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.What We're Watching: China charges Aussie journo, Palestinian election talks, WHO debunks COVID myths
Australian journalist charged in China: Australian journalist Cheng Lei was detained last August in China for allegedly passing state secrets to foreign actors. Now, the reporter — who worked for Chinese state broadcaster CGTN when she was arrested — has been formally charged with a national security crime, though Beijing has unsurprisingly remained mum on the details. Her family (including two young children in Melbourne) say that Lei is innocent, while the Australian government has pleaded with Beijing to ensure due process. But Canberra's ability to lobby for Lei's release is surely hampered by its increasingly fraught relations with Beijing: Australia has criticized Beijing's meddling in Australia's internal government affairs, its spying activities, and called for a probe into China's alleged COVID coverup — prompting China to hit back with a series of devastating tariffs on Australian goods. The Chinese government has also targeted Australian journalists, and the last two Aussie reporters in mainland China recently fled at Canberra's urging. For now, Lei remains behind bars. Is the Australian government powerless to respond?
Palestinian election summit: Palestinian leaders kicked off a two-day summit in Cairo to discuss upcoming legislative (May 22) and presidential (July 31) elections, the first time Palestinians will head to the polls in 15 years. The Egyptian-brokered talks between longtime Palestinian foes — Fatah, which governs the occupied West Bank, and Hamas, the militant group that holds power in the Gaza Strip — aim to iron out procedural arrangements for the upcoming votes, including whose security forces will guard polling stations and which judicial body will resolve disputes. Palestinians have not held elections since 2006, when Hamas — designated a terror group by the US and the EU — won by a significant margin, leading to a shaky unity government and bloody power battle that saw Hamas seize control of the Strip. Fatah was eventually relegated to the West Bank, where President Mahmoud Abbas has since led a 15-year "emergency government." We're watching to see whether the polls will even take place at all, since previous elections have been scheduled only to be later rejected by those at the top.
WHO ends COVID probe in China: Wrapping up a hard-fought visit to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, a team of World Health Organization experts announced Tuesday that it's "extremely unlikely" that COVID leaked from a lab. That initial conclusion poured cold water on the conspiracy theory — promoted at the onset of the pandemic by former US President Donald Trump — that the virus was either engineered by or accidentally released from a Chinese lab, a claim most scientists have long dismissed. The WHO team said it is "most likely" the virus was transmitted to humans from an animal at a wet market, but possible it came from a different source, like from imported frozen food products, for instance. WHO says their probe is ongoing, but the inconclusive findings so far are surely a relief for Beijing, which has often pushed unscientific alternative theories that the coronavirus did not originate in China. We'll be keeping an eye on whether the full investigation comes out with any definitive findings, and if other countries will even trust the probe given perceptions of the WHO being too cozy with China.What We’re Watching: Hong Kong crackdown, Maduro tightens grip in Venezuela, WHO out of Wuhan
China cracks down (again) on Hong Kong democracy: In the largest crackdown since China introduced its Hong Kong security law six months ago, police arrested 53 members of the city's pro-democracy movement. The detainees — who had helped organize an unofficial primary vote for opposition candidates ahead of elections later this year — are accused of trying to overthrow the city's pro-Beijing government. One of those jailed is a US lawyer and American citizen. In the same operation, police also raided the home of Joshua Wong, a prominent activist who is already serving a one-year prison term for standing up to China's takeover of Hong Kong. China says the activists are backed by foreigners who want to use Hong Kong as a base to undermine China's stability and security, while the opposition argues that China is just using the new law to silence legitimate dissent. Now, with most pro-democracy figures behind bars or in exile, the mass street protests that prompted the passage of the security law are unlikely to return, and the future of democracy in the city is bleak.
Maduro takes over parliament in Venezuela: Following recent elections largely boycotted by the opposition, allies of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro officially took control over the country's National Assembly this week. For the past several years the Assembly had been the only part of the government not in Maduro's grasp. During that time, the body was headed by opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who in 2018-2019 led mass protests over the authoritarian drift and economic incompetence of the Maduro regime, and was recognized as "interim president" by the US, EU, and most Latin American democracies. Since then, Guaidó's star has fallen – Maduro held his ground, the streets got tired, and the opposition couldn't unify. Now, Guaidó is left heading a shadow assembly that will still meet but has no real power, and his foreign backers will have to reassess whether continuing to support him is the best way to advance their interests in Venezuela.
Wuhan cover-up 2.0? World Health Organization experts investigating the origins of the coronavirus have been denied entry to Wuhan, the Chinese city where the initial outbreak of COVID-19 was reported over a year ago. China and the WHO — which for some were too cozy early in the pandemic — have been negotiating for months over this mission, which aims in part to assess whether the virus in fact came from a meat market or elsewhere. After taking flack for covering up the initial outbreak in Wuhan, Beijing had promised to be more forthcoming, but keeping WHO fact-finders out of Wuhan shows that Xi Jinping is still wary of any probe or evidence that might undermine China's international reputation — especially at a time when Beijing is deploying its COVID-19 vaccine diplomacy to win arms and minds in dozens of developing countries. But the world wants to know more about what happened in Wuhan, will credible answers ever emerge?Mongolia records first local coronavirus transmission
ULAANBAATAR, MONGOLIA (REUTERS) - Mongolia recorded its first domestic coronavirus transmission on Wednesday (Nov 11) following hundreds of imported cases, the country's health minister said during a briefing.
World Health Organisation urged to invite Taiwan to key meeting
GENEVA (AFP) - The World Health Organisation (WHO) is facing renewed pleas to allow Taiwan to participate in a key international meeting amid fears its exclusion could jeopardise efforts to rein in the coronavirus pandemic.