Trending Now
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
A mother holds her daughter's arm as a healthcare worker administers the child with Pfizer-BNT covid-19 vaccine in Taiwan.
COVID vaccine rollout: Taking stock 3 years on
It’s been almost three years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.
Since then, we have gone from the fear of greeting one another in public to the horrors of overcrowded ERs and morgues — to the remarkably fast development of a vaccine and its uneven rollout. Nearly 7 million people have died worldwide, and while the virus is still out there, most countries now have access to effective jabs.
How did we do? In mid-2020, many of us were visiting loved ones through hospital windows, spraying our grocery bags with bleach, and wondering whether public life would ever again go “back to normal.” It seemed like the horror would never end, but a break in the clouds came in Dec. 2020, with the first mRNA vaccines making their way into arms in the US and UK. (Chinese jabs were developed first but proved less effective, and no one remembers Russia’s miracle drug that never was.)
While it seemed like a long wait, the vaccines were rolled out in record time. “We had a virus that was not known to science before December 31, 2019, and we had a vaccine in people's arms in December 2020,” says Dr. Amesh Adajla. a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Prior to COVID, the fastest-ever rollout of a vaccine was for mumps, and that took nearly four years. Within 12 months, the coronavirus jab was available thanks to concentrated research. Decades of DNA research enabled scientists to being designing the mRNA for the COVID vaccine as soon as genetic code became available.
“Various scientific groups and manufacturers were able to provide enough doses to do very big studies very quickly, so we had answers super early,” says Dr. Margaret Ann Harris, an epidemiologist at the WHO. “Never in the history of humanity have we had really good data so quickly.”
Today, some 5.5 billion people around the globe – 72% of the population – have received at least one dose. But in the early months, the rollout was slow and uneven.
Global inequities in access and high rates of vaccine hesitancy made the world vulnerable to new variants. Vaccine nationalism — the me-first approach to battling COVID — saw Western countries opting to inoculate their own populations before sending vaccines abroad. But, as Ian Bremmer told us then, the race to outsmart COVID was (and is) global.
Health officials in early 2021 stressed the need to treat vulnerable populations around the globe first — and not only for humanitarian reasons. After all, outbreaks anywhere put everyone in danger of new mutations that could compromise the existing vaccines, as we’ve seen to varying degrees with both the delta and omicron variants.
The COVAX initiative worked to get vaccines to the rest of the world — to date delivering nearly 2 billion doses to 146 countries — but supply issues and vaccine nationalism slowed their efforts early on. Dr. Harris says she became “the most hated person in Britain” in early 2021 for saying that the next step after vaccinating the at-risk population at home should be to send jabs to vulnerable groups abroad.
So how can we do better next time? It’s perhaps no surprise that domestic politics pushed governments to cater to their own populations first.
“Politicians will always default to protectionism. The same thing happened during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic when Australia developed the first vaccine and they put export restrictions on it,” says Adajla.
The only way to avoid that is to make plans now. “We must put a clear strategy in place to distribute vaccines globally, put aside what keeps individual groups happy and go for what really needs to be done for humanity,” says Harris, noting how there are still plenty of countries where under 40% are vaccinated against COVID today
A WHO treaty is in the works that lays out recommendations for pandemic-related international cooperation, preparedness, and response. We’ll be watching to see whether it can help protect us from the scourge of vaccine nationalism.
Can surveillance prevent the next pandemic?
While the Munich Security Conference was dominated by discussions about the ongoing war in Ukraine, there were many other critical issues on the table as the world faces converging crises. One of them was health security, and how nations can apply the lessons of the COVID pandemic to future public health threats.
On the sidelines of the 2023 MSC, GZERO’s Tony Maciulis spoke to Francis deSouza, CEO of the biotech company Illumina, about how countries and regions can better communicate to stop the spread of new pathogens and the road ahead for the rapidly growing genomics industry.
- What We’re Watching: The perfect city, cities vs nations, the post-pandemic planning problem ›
- War in Europe is top priority at Munich Security Conference ›
- The Ugly Politics of COVID-19's Birth ›
- How the Moderna vaccine works, why it’s effective, and how it’ll be distributed ›
- Crispr Gene Editing - GZERO Media ›
- “Health is a human right”: How the world can make up progress lost to COVID - GZERO Media ›
Key questions about the omicron variant
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Good morning everybody and I hope everyone is okay this Monday. I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving, those of you that celebrate. Of course, pretty difficult news over the weekend, and even this morning, the World Health Organization, referring to the new variant omicron of COVID as a very high global risk. And when I hear those words, obviously we get moving at Eurasia Group, a firm very much concerned about that. And indeed, this is in terms of new news about this pandemic that we've all been living with now for almost two years, this is some of the most concerning new headlines that we've seen thus far.
There are some things we know and some things we don't know, there are three things we need to know, if you want to really assess what the omicron risk represents for us and for the world: rates of infection, sickness and mortality and vaccine effectiveness. We only have strong answers about the first, which is we know that this is a lot more infectious as a variant than Delta has been, which itself was much more infectious than the original virus. And that is a very serious problem. I've spoken with a lot of the epidemiologists we know about this over the weekend, they're all extremely concerned about that.
But we certainly don't know much at all about how lethal the disease is. For example, it could be that this disease is extremely infectious and less lethal than the delta variant. And if that was the case and it became the dominant variant, it would actually not just be a non-story, it would be extremely important and good news, because it would mean a whole bunch of people would be getting infected would be developing antibodies as a consequence and wouldn't be getting very sick, especially if it turns out that also didn't mean long COVID, which again, you're not going to know for quite some time. That's the problem with dealing with a disease that we've never heard of before.
But so far, the cases that we know about are overwhelmingly from South Africa and it's a population in terms of those that have tested positive that are mostly under 30, they don't have preexisting conditions and therefore they wouldn't be likely to get sick in any case. And so you're not learning anything. Turns out most of them still have sense of smell, that's a little unusual. Most of them more exhausted, have muscle pain, that's a little unusual, but nobody that's focusing on the cases that we have information on so far have a good sense. We probably won't have a good sense for about two more weeks.
Secondarily, the people making the vaccines feel pretty confident that these vaccines will be somewhat less effective than versus delta variants, simply because this variant is so different, but how less effective, they don't know. And they won't know that again for at least a couple of weeks. That's a problem too. So what we do know though, is that there is a relatively low level of vaccination still globally. There are plenty of places that have significant anti-vax and vaccine hesitancy sentiment, including my own United States, including Russia, including most of Eastern Europe. And there are also a lot of people that are immunocompromised, which means that even if this disease isn't a risk to you as a fully vaccinated person with a booster, it's still going to lead to lots of people getting hospitalized and dying, if it turns out that this is the same level of lethality as Delta.
So we'll find that out in relatively short order. And what that means is in the near-term, you're going to have a lot more risk aversion in travel. You're going to have a significant reduction in consumer demand. That'll take inflation off in the near term, it'll reduce prices at the pump for example. What happens over the next month to three depends completely on the answer to those two questions. And if this really is a dangerous, dominant global variant, as it well could be, it's kind of like a coin flip right now, then you're going to see all sorts of additional lockdowns, you'll see problems with supply chain, which will lead to more inflation again. It will be economic contraction and all of this will particularly be felt on the backs of poorer people and lower developed countries.
A big point here is that the mRNA vaccine producers, Pfizer, Moderna, can reformulate these vaccines to respond to Omicron variant within a matter of a few weeks. They can get them approved and then roll out major distribution in the course of a few months. So by end of first quarter next year, if you're in a wealthy country, you have access to mRNA vaccines, you'll be able once again, to protect yourself, protect your loved ones.
Having said that, the mRNA vaccines are available mostly to the wealthy countries. And this is yet one more accelerant of a big gap driving wedge between wealthy countries and poor countries. It's a big problem for China, which has to maintain their zero COVID policy. Maybe they can't even hold the Olympics. This is a bad scenario, they probably can't. They are trying to develop their own indigenous mRNA capabilities. They will have them at some point over the course, probably mid 2022, and then they will start producing and rolling them out. So again, bigger economic problems for China and particularly for those countries that aren't vaccinated yet that don't have the ability to get mRNA themselves. And also don't have the money to be able to respond to the economic scarring that occurs with all of these stop, start pandemic impact on the economy, they're going to be facing the absolute worst case scenarios here. And so that's the developing world, those are the emerging markets.
One final thing I would say here is Africa, there's a lot of people that are from South Africa that are very embittered by the fact that we're putting these travel restrictions on anyone from South Africa and a number of other countries of concern that of course are countries of concern in large part because they have virtually none of their population vaccinated, very low percentages. And in the case of South Africa, they do an awful lot of testing. They're pretty good at that. And that has allowed them to find out about the spread of the Omicron variant far earlier than we otherwise would've. So yes, they are being punished.
But what's really, horribly, both ironic and sad is that of the eight African countries that the Americans have put full travel restrictions on, five of them have actually refused recent additional exports of vaccines because they are worried about their existing stockpiles expiring. Why would that happen? Number one, too much vaccine hesitancy on the ground in those countries. Number two, too many difficulties in actually distributing the vaccines across countrysides that have very, very poor infrastructure indeed. So these countries are getting hit in every which way and just sending them vaccines by itself isn't going to fix the problem. We're going to need to do much more education on vaccinations. We're going to need to improve infrastructure and distribution capacity on the ground. Heck, in South Africa you have a huge immunocompromised population because of the AIDS epidemic, which is so large still there and in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, which means even if they take the vaccines, their body is not able to produce the kind of immunity, the kind of antibodies that would allow people to respond effectively and not get sick and die from COVID.
You remember Colin Powell who had suffered cancer and as a consequence had been taking drugs that really reduced his immune system. He was fully boosted and older and died from catching COVID. And there's really nothing we can do about that kind of thing until we stop spread and you're not going to stop spread until the entire global population is effectively vaccinated up to speed with full antibodies.
So that's where we are, not great news. Really hoping, as I'm sure everyone is, that we'll have better news over the course of the next couple weeks, as we learn much more about this new variant. Everyone be safe and I'll talk to you soon.
- What We're Watching: The Omicron variant sparks panic and ... ›
- The Graphic Truth: Who's refusing the COVID vaccine? - GZERO ... ›
- Make the COVID vaccine mandatory - GZERO Media ›
- What We're Watching: South Africa's COVID surge, the elusiveness ... ›
- Omicron variant unlikely to lead to lockdowns by governments - GZERO Media ›
- Omicron will be home for Christmas - GZERO Media ›
- Omicron will be home for Christmas - GZERO Media ›
Are we really building back better after COVID? Experts, policymakers weigh in
Eighteen months later, some countries are already recovering from COVID, while others are still in the thick of it. What's the current state of play on vaccines, what's holding up distribution, will the world emerge stronger or weaker, what should the private sector do, and has Biden delivered on US leadership expectations?
Top leaders from the United Nations, the WHO, the World Bank, and Microsoft weighed in during a Global Stage virtual conversation hosted by GZERO Media in partnership with Microsoft during the 76th UN General Assembly, moderated by The New Yorker's Susan Glasser."Science needs to succeed over politics" — WHO's Dr. Mike Ryan | GLOBAL STAGE | GZERO Mediayoutu.be
For Dr. Mike Ryan, head of emergencies at the World Health Organization, one big obstacle is vaccine hesitancy. And the worst part about it is, in his view, powerful people who weaponize misinformation to serve their own political or economic needs. We need to have a healthy debate about vaccines and their safety, he says, but ultimately "science needs to succeed over politics."
World Bank Chief: Developing Countries Need to Know When Vaccines Coming | GLOBAL STAGE | GZEROyoutu.be
For his part, World Bank President David Malpass says that wealthy countries and more recently India's Serum Institute are producing so many vaccines that there will likely be enough stocks to inoculate the entire world by the end of the year. However, to accomplish that, he warns, the nations that need jabs must know when they'll get them so they can prepare the groundwork to get the shots in people's arms.
Michelle Bachelet: Building back better is not going back to 2019 | GLOBAL STAGE | GZERO Mediayoutu.be
Even if we are able to vaccinate the world in time, UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, says that building back better after COVID shouldn't mean returning to the same world we had before the pandemic. What we had back then, she explains, were political, social, and economic systems that didn't respond to people's needs — now we can either break through them, or break down to become an (even more) unequal world.
Why Public & Private Sectors Should Work Together| GLOBAL STAGE | GZERO Mediayoutu.be
Building back better is also about the private sector. The question is not if but rather how corporations will get involved. Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, believes the private sector has a big role to play in helping to roll out COVID vaccines. But the most important thing it can do, he says, is collaborate effectively with the public sector — with a clear understanding of each side's role "so we each do what we're equipped to do and what we do best."
Biden's International Leadership "All Focused at Home" | GLOBAL STAGE | GZERO Mediayoutu.be
Many countries are disappointed about a multilateralist like Joe Biden not delivering on US vaccine exports that the rest of the world desperately needs. But it doesn't surprise Ian Bremmer, who says Biden upset his allies the same way by withdrawing so abruptly from Afghanistan or leaving the French out of the AUKUS loop. For Bremmer, Biden, initially viewed as way more competent and trustworthy than Donald Trump, is now one of the least trusted US presidents in recent history — apart from Trump himself — because whatever he says, his international leadership is "all focused at home."
Is the world really building back better? Watch our live discussion today at 11am ET
"Pandemic" was the most used word of 2020. "Delta" looks set to inherit this year's title.
Vaccination rates are ticking up slowly. Governments aren't talking to each other enough. Parts of the world are back to normal, while others are still locked down.
Have we actually made any progress since the COVID-19 outbreak?
Unfinished Business: Is the World Really Building Back Better?
Wednesday, September 22nd, 11am ET/ 8am PT
Watch the event here.
Our speakers:
- Susan Glasser, staff writer and Washington columnist, The New Yorker (moderator)
- Ian Bremmer, President and Founder, Eurasia Group & GZERO Media
- Brad Smith, President and Vice Chair, Microsoft
- Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
- Dr. Michael Ryan, Executive Director, WHO Health Emergencies Programme
- David Malpass, President, World Bank Group
Special appearance byAntónio Guterres, UN Secretary-General.
Visit gzeromedia.com/globalstage to watch on the day of the event.
Does the UN have any actual authority?
76 years after the United Nations was founded, amid an unending pandemic and growing climate and refugee crises, today's UN Secretary-General António Guterres has stark words for member nations: "In our biggest shared test since the Second World War," Guterres says, "humanity faces a stark and urgent choice: a breakdown or a breakthrough." But if something as immediate and catastrophic as a deadly pandemic can't spark a renewal of global cooperation, then what can? On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer explores the question: if the United Nations doesn't have the authority to force its members to take drastic measures to avoid global catastrophes, what is it actually good for? (Quite a lot.)
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: UN Sec-Gen: Without trust, catastrophe awaits
Podcast: UN Sec-Gen Guterres has a warning for disunited nations
Listen: In a frank interview on the GZERO World podcast, António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, speaks with Ian Bremmer at the UN ahead of the annual General Assembly week. Guterres discusses COVID, climate, the US-China rift, and the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan, and does not mince words when it comes to the dire state of the world. "We are standing at the edge of an abyss," Guterres warns. COVID is "defeating" the global community and a climate catastrophe is all but assured without drastic action. Amidst this unprecedented peril, there remains a startling lack of trust among nations. And yet, there is still hope.
- UN Chief: Still time to avert climate “abyss” - GZERO Media ›
- GDP should reflect cost of polluting planet, says Microsoft's John ... ›
- Podcast: Elizabeth Kolbert on extreme climate solutions - GZERO ... ›
- The Graphic Truth: Where are climate-linked scorchers deadliest ... ›
- An interview with UN Secretary-General António Guterres - GZERO ... ›
Politics, protest & the Olympics: the IOC’s Dick Pound
With COVID rates rising globally, this year's Olympics faced some major hurdles. But the pandemic was only part of the picture. The Tokyo Games played out against a backdrop of mounting global tension surrounding gender equality, racism and human rights, leaving many people to examine the place of politics on the playing field and podium. On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer looks at the long history of protest at the Games with Dick Pound, the longest serving member of the International Olympic Committee and a former Olympic athlete himself. Plus: the US Women's National Soccer Team is the most decorated team in the sport, but are they paid as much as their male counterparts? A look at what equal pay for equal play means.
- How political sports boycotts (really) work - GZERO Media ›
- Olympics corner: Refugees - GZERO Media ›
- Signal quiz: Olympics trivia! - GZERO Media ›
- The Graphic Truth: Olympic champs of budget overruns - GZERO ... ›
- Biden's exit overshadows Netanyahu's US visit - GZERO Media ›
- At the 2024 Paris Olympics, security fears and logistical challenges abound - GZERO Media ›
- Could the Olympics ever be free of politics? - GZERO Media ›
- Ian Explains: Why authoritarian rulers love the Olympics - GZERO Media ›