Editorial: Omicron variant is on the heads of world leaders

A UNICEF worker checks boxes of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine after their arrival from COVAX at the airport in Nairobi, Kenya. Photo / AP

EDITORIAL

The lack of leadership around the world on the Covid pandemic has been starkly exposed by the Omicron variant.

The new variant was first detected in Botswana and has sent Europe into high alert after cases were detected in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Belgium.

It emerged from a country which is not the worst performer in Africa for vaccinations, having administered more than 1.35 million doses. However, that's only enough to have double dosed about 29.4 per cent of the country's population of 2.35 million.

One African Union vaccine expert this week called out western countries, criticising the West for travel from Africa and calling for a co-ordinated global shutdown.

Dr Ayoade Olatunbosun-Alakija of the Africa Union's African Vaccine Delivery Alliance told the BBC the world should have been prepared for a new Covid-19 crisis.

"What is going on right now is inevitable, is a result of the world's failure to vaccinate in an equitable, urgent and speedy manner. "Why are the Africans unvaccinated? It's an outrage."

As far back as May 2020, world leaders were notified the "most massive public health effort in history" was needed to overcome the Covid-19 pandemic. "In an interconnected world, none of us is safe until all of us are safe", the UN Secretary-General António Guterres insisted.

That call has been answered by western nations on an informal basis, at best.

Botswana has been drip-fed vaccine, and only recently. The first 1618 doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine were administered on March 26, 2021. This was from its first batch of 30,000, manufactured by the Serum Institute of India.

A second batch of AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccines were manufactured in South Korea and provided through the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative on March 28, 2021.

COVAX and the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust have delivered more than 90 million donated doses to the African Continent.

New Zealand has donated more than two million AstraZeneca doses to COVAX and pledged Pfizer vaccines to the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau to support vaccination of their 12-to 15-year-olds.

But surplus vaccines are not the solution.

The COVAX initiative warned this week: "The majority of the donations to date have been ad hoc, provided with little notice and short shelf lives.

"Countries need predictable and reliable supply. Having to plan at short notice and ensure uptake of doses with short shelf lives exponentially magnifies the logistical burden on health systems that are already stretched."

Other problems associated with the ad hoc supply is that it wastes resources that could be directed towards long-term successful and sustainable rollout. "It also dramatically increases the risks of expiry once doses with already short shelf-lives arrive in-country, which may have long-term repercussions for vaccine confidence."

Until leaders of the developed world commit sustained assistance to the less fortunate, other mutations will spirit away from outbreaks.

International agencies have indicated Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Maldives as well as Argentina and Brazil, and some parts of the Caribbean are in short supply of vaccines.