A renowned specialist has informed a cross-party committee of UK MPs that COVID-19 is now a pandemic of poor countries, adding that governments seeking to vaccine their way out of the pandemic are running a great risk.
The World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19, Dr David Nabarro, informed an all-party committee on coronavirus that the world was still amid the pandemic, with 5,413 fatalities recorded in the previous 24 hours alone.
“This is a disease now fundamentally of poor people and poor nations,” he said.
The development of novel variations that may elude existing vaccines is one worry, Nabarro added. At the same time, the public may be unwilling to cooperate should measures such as mask-wearing and social separation be reinstated.
“If there is a hoovering up of vaccines for the boosters, that is just going to have a global consequences that are really quite extreme, and everybody needs to know that,” he said.
According to official figures, more than 22 per cent of people in the UK aged 12 and above have had a booster dose, with an estimated 68.6 per cent of the population having received at least two vaccinations.
In Africa, by comparison, just 6 per cent of individuals had been completely vaccinated by the end of October, according to the WHO. Some African nations have even lower percentages, according to Our World in Data, with Nigeria having just 2.8 per cent.
