Rich countries are to blame for omicron

The saddest thing about the emergence of the omicron variant is its utter predictability. For months, even longer, public health officials have been warning that as long as the coronavirus can circulate freely and widely, it would change its form, and that those mutations could be more difficult to handle than the original variant. In October, former British prime minister, Gordon Brown predicted this. He said: “We in the West may feel safe and blessed at the moment, because we’ve had the vaccines, but we may find a new variant that comes out of Africa or Asia, where people have not been vaccinated and are not protected. And it obviously isn’t susceptible to the vaccines that we have at the moment.”

The solution was also utterly obvious: to vaccinate the rest of the world — and fast. But that never happened, and the resulting disparities are stunning. Close to 70 percent of the European Union and about 60 percent of the United States have been fully vaccinated, and yet only about 8 percent of people in the world’s poorest countries have received even one dose. Earlier this year, this failure could be attributed to a problem of production and supply. But the world is now producing 1.5 billion doses of vaccine monthly. The problem has been one of distribution — or, to put it bluntly, of the rich world hoarding vaccines at the expense of the poor.

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