The omicron variant, discovered last week in South Africa as the newest concerning strain of COVID-19, has emerged amid starkly unequal global access to vaccinations, according to public health experts who say that continued inequalities will only enable further dangerous variants.
Although approximately 43% of the world’s population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to Our World In Data, just 2.9% of residents in low-income countries had been as of Saturday. Dr. Reshma Ramachandran, a fellow within the Yale National Clinician Scholars Program, told KCBS Radio's Rebecca Corral in an interview on Monday that those conditions are ripe for variants to spread.
"We know that these variants come through when we do have unvaccinated populations," she said. "So if they do have access to an effective vaccine, such as the mRNA vaccines or any of the vaccines that have been recommended by the World Health Organization, this could have definitely been prevented. And hopefully as access is being more and more prioritized by different governments, we'll see low-income countries finally have the protection that they need to prevent a future variant from emerging as well."
The WHO has repeatedly sounded the alarm about unequal access to vaccines, and its top official claimed earlier this month that six times as many booster shots in wealthy nations were being administered compared to first and second doses in low-income countries.
Ramachandran blamed globally unequal access on pharmaceutical giants like Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer, all of whom she said control the price and supply of vaccines around the world. She said the vaccine manufacturers have prioritized countries who could pay premium prices, such as the U.S., after relying on them and other wealthy nations who subsidized and funded vaccine research and development.
In a piece she co-authored for MedPage Today on Sunday, Ramachandran pointed to Moderna’s refusal to name three National Institutes of Health scientists on a patent application for its mRNA vaccine genetic sequence as an especially egregious example. Listing the NIH scientists would enable the U.S. government to allow other manufacturers to produce the Moderna vaccine without the pharmaceutical giant's permission, ending the company's monopoly over production and pricing.
"We basically gave them a blank check to be able to produce these vaccines without any sort of conditions to make sure that access would be guaranteed for everyone across the world," she said, adding that the U.S. and other nations who contributed to vaccine development could've added conditions to agreements with pharmaceutical companies to ensure equitable access around the globe.
Moderna offered earlier this month to share ownership of the vaccine, allowing President Joe Biden’s administration to "license the patents as they see fit." The NIH said it was in "good faith discussions" with the company, but no agreement has been reached.
Biden on Friday called on nations that were set to meet at a previously scheduled World Trade Organization meeting this week to waive intellectual property protections for vaccine manufacturers, which would allow for more global production. That meeting was postponed within hours of Biden’s comments, as officials cited the omicron variant. It hasn't yet been rescheduled.
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