SHOBHA SHUKLA, BOBBY RAMAKANT - CNS
Gandhi's Talisman is more relevant than ever before to end vaccine inequity and social injustices
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In a world with over 7 billion people, more than 10 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered by the end of January 2022. But more than 3 billion people globally have not received even their first vaccine dose yet. Despite having enough of vaccine doses to protect the most at risk from COVID-19, we have failed to vaccinate equitably. Are some more equal than others? Mahatma Gandhi had rightly said that our world has enough for everyone's need but not for any one's greed.
Only 7% of the people in Africa have had a single dose of vaccine by the end of January 2022. In several countries, less than 50% of most at-risk people, including healthcare workers and other frontline workers, have been vaccinated. More than half of world's countries will fail to meet the global goal of vaccinating at least 70% of the population by June 2022.
Nine out of every ten persons who are hospitalized due to COVID-19 are unvaccinated. "Those who are fully vaccinated, are somewhere between 20 and 50 times less likely to be admitted to hospital," said Dr Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Emergencies Programme, in a media briefing. This protection against acute disease of COVID-19 goes up in those vaccinated people who are more vulnerable to COVID-19, such as those with co-morbidities. "Reality is that the vast majority of people who are arriving in hospitals due to COVID-19 are unvaccinated," added Dr Ryan.
Due to vaccine inequity, as well as due to the appalling failure to break the chain of infection transmission, the number of new COVID-19 cases are soaring high. Highest weekly number of new cases since the beginning of the pandemic in December 2019, was reported in the fourth week of January 2022 (more than 21 million cases), said Dr Ishwar Gilada, noted infectious diseases expert, who was in conversation with CNS (Citizen News Service). This was 2 million more as reported in the third week of January 2022 and 6 million more as reported in the second week - such high weekly numbers of COVID-19 cases were reported neither in 2021 nor in 2020.
It is high time we fully understand the risk of failing to break the chain of infection transmission and patchy vaccination coverage: more the virus circulates in our population, more is the risk of new mutations and the emergence of newer variants.
Who is responsible for putting unvaccinated people at heightened risk of COVID-19 related hospitalisation or even death? It is not the shortage of vaccines that failed us, but the same-old deep-seated inequity and social injustice that has historically failed us on a range of human-development indices, has botched up vaccine rollout too.
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