The global and local threat of the Covid-19 remains critically high, despite the availability of vaccines meant to slow it down, if not to completely eradicate it.
Experts agree that the virus has the agility to morph into other variants faster than the creation and modifications of vaccines to fight it.
The main problem is the slow pace of vaccination worldwide. Unvaccinated people are most vulnerable. The longer they remain or refuse to take the jab, the more they become breeding grounds for even more lethal Covid-19 variants. Dangers lurk, experts say, when people dismiss science over conspiracy theories on vaccine efficacy. The result is a world that becomes just as defenseless, if not more susceptible than it was in December 2020.
“We know that if you give the virus the opportunity to circulate and replicate, you give it the opportunity to generate more variants,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, told CNN.
According to experts, herd immunity happens only when 70 percent of the world’s population gets vaccinated. Records show that we have a long way to go. As of July 11, the volume of doses given worldwide was at 3.42 billion, with fully vaccinated people at 940 million, or just 12.1 percent of the world’s total inhabitants.
Even though China, the world’s most populous country, has administered jabs to almost all of its people at 1.3 billion (total population as of 2019: 1.398 billion), only 223 million there have been fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, India has recorded 337 million jabs, with 73.3 million or 5.4 percent of its population receiving full vaccination; the United States, at 334 million, with 159 million fully vaccinated people, and Brazil at 114 million and 30.6 million fully vaccinated. The Philippines has so far administered 13.1 million jabs, with the fully vaccinated recorded at only 3.2 percent.
The Delta variant is among the newest in a long list of Covid-19 modifications that have easily and, more often than not, caused more serious debility. This is why people who refuse to be vaccinated should be a cause for alarm. Each time a virus spreads, it seizes the opportunity to discover how to metamorphose.
The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that the Delta variant has been detected in 100 countries, and has overtaken the worrying Beta or B.1.351 variant in South Africa. On July 3, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that, as of mid-June, the Delta variant has accounted for 51.7 percent of cases in the US. In the United Kingdom, according to Public Health England, the variant accounts for 99 percent of Covid-19 cases. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control states that 90 percent of the cases in Europe would be the Delta variant by the end of August.
“Delta is the most transmissible of the variants identified so far,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last month. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told a White House briefing last Thursday that “…the Delta variant has increased transmissibility, and [is] currently surging in pockets of the country with low vaccination rates.”
Experts believe that, while most Covid-19 vaccines offer protection against the Delta variant, the virus can still evade vaccines to a certain degree. The good thing is that vaccines minimize the risk of severe disease and hospitalization caused by the variant. The fear is that the next virus iteration could fully outsmart vaccines, creating havoc even in countries that have high vaccination rates. “We’ve been lucky with the variants so far that they’ve been relatively susceptible to our vaccine, but the more you roll the dice, the more opportunities,” says Fauci.
Another worrisome development is that American pharmaceutical company Pfizer sees declining immunity to its coronavirus vaccine. Now doing its best to develop a booster dose that will protect people from variants, the pharma giant says it would publish data about a third dose of vaccine and submit it to the US Food and Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency, and other regulators. This August, it plans to seek company-specified use authorization for a booster dose.
Pfizer and its partner BioNTech say there is evidence that people’s immunity begins to fade after they have been fully vaccinated: “As seen in real-world data released from the Israel Ministry of Health, vaccine efficacy in preventing both infection and symptomatic disease has declined six months post-vaccination, although efficacy in preventing serious illnesses remains high,” says Pfizer.
Israel’s health ministry in a statement earlier this week said that it had monitored a drop of Pfizer shot’s efficacy from more than 90 percent to about 64 percent in lieu of the spread of B.1.617.2 or Delta variant.
This development puts a damper on global vaccination efforts. The drug maker’s jab is the foundation of many countries’ vaccination efforts. For one, two-thirds of doses released around the European Union is from Pfizer.
In the Philippines, the country’s health experts have so far detected 19 cases of the Delta variant which is believed to be driving the surge in infections worldwide. President Duterte is set to announce the new quarantine classifications in the country this week, as current restrictions are set to lapse today (July 15).
On July 13, in a weekly presidential briefing aired by the state-run PTV station, Octa Research fellow Ranjit Rye urged the government to strengthen enforcement of minimum public health standards. Octa Research called on the government to maintain general community quarantine (GCQ) in Metro Manila until the end of July.
“In NCR [National Capital Region], we should continue with GCQ. We can just ease restrictions on business establishments. We say this because there is still the threat of the Delta variant,” Rye said, urging health authorities to ramp up vaccination in “NCR Plus 8,” comprising of Metro Manila, Bulacan, Cavite, Rizal, Laguna, Pampanga, Batangas, Metro Cebu, and Metro Davao. The focus on “NCR Plus 8” is part of the government’s tack to double up vaccinations in areas with high numbers of active cases.
The Department of Health also saw an uptick in Covid-19 cases in the cities of Makati, San Juan, Muntinlupa, Mandaluyong, Manila, Malabon, and Navotas. Dr. Alethea de Guzman of the DOH Epidemiology Bureau noted that, after having negative two-week growth rates from June 13 to 26, these cities logged positive Covid growth rates from June 27 to July 10.
The end of this pandemic is not yet on the horizon. Most likely, this generation would need to learn to co-exist with the virus. In the meantime, the survival of each inhabitant on this planet depends largely on everyone’s adherence to health protocols and their respective government’s ability to learn from missteps in handling this crisis. Now is the time for the world to act as a global village to beat Covid-19.
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