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Omicron will be home for Christmas
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Happy Monday, and yeah, I think I'm still talking to you about the pandemic. I was hoping I would be talking a lot less about the pandemic these days, but we are in the midst of very significant learning on the omicron variant, and I thought I would share what we know and what we really don't know, because the headlines obscure that.
What we know: Big news is that the vaccines don't work very well at all to prevent spread. And that's even true for the mRNA vaccines, the best vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna, that if you've taken two shots, which means that you're considered fully vaccinated and you've got your app, or you've got your vaccine passport, you really aren't protected from getting infected from omicron. Pfizer showing after two vaccine jabs something like 23% effectiveness, which is not effective at all. And the non-mRNA vaccines look like they're even worse, which means that a very, very transmissible strain is not being prevented by the vaccines. That's the bad news, and it's bad news.
Having said that, we know that they work really well to prevent hospitalization and death. And that's not just true for the mRNA vaccines. It's true for other vaccines too. And by the away, it's true even before you get a booster shot. In other words, if you've just gotten two shots from Pfizer, two shots from Moderna, you're really not going to get hospitalized or die from COVID. It's very, very unlikely indeed, but you are quite likely to be able to contract it and spread it, and that's a problem.
Now, we've seen a lot of headlines that say that Omicron is milder as a variant. And the reality is, we don't know that. What we know is that a lot more people are vaccinated, and we also know that the vaccinated people are particularly among those that are most vulnerable. The oldest, the people that have preexisting conditions. That is a population that is very significantly vaccinated, in some countries close to 100%, which means that the outcomes are milder than they would have been from delta, simply because omicron is hitting populations that are more protected against hospitalization and death. And that the people that aren't vaccinated are primarily people that aren't likely to get sick from COVID. Younger, healthier populations. But we don't yet have any conclusions around to what extent you are equally or more or less likely to get seriously sick if you are unvaccinated, even if you're unvaccinated and you already got COVID, than from delta. And that uncertainty is something we probably won't have real data on for at least another week or two.
And I will tell you that the epidemiologists that I've been talking to tell me that if they were to guess, they'd guess that so far, educated guess, that it's probably about the same or maybe a little milder, but not much, than delta, and that most of the change is from the change in population, as opposed to the impact of the disease.
Okay. We also know that omicron is spreading really, really fast. That it's going to be dominant in the United Kingdom and very shortly as a variant. It's already in 30 states that we know of in the US. That means it's really in every US state, and it will be the dominant spread in the United States within a few weeks. So yes, omicron will be home for Christmas. And also some good news is that vaccinations are getting pushed up. We're seeing people more quickly get vaccinated, get their boosters as a consequence of the news around omicron.
Having said all of that, the staggering level of spread even among vaccinated populations mean that hospitals could easily get overwhelmed again as a consequence of this. In the next week in the United Kingdom, that's absolutely possible. In Denmark, that's absolutely possible. And in the United States over the coming month, that's absolutely possible as well. So we are not out of the woods, and that means in terms of travel, in terms of vaccine passports, you're going to see a lot of changes.
Increasingly, if you've got two vaccines, that's not going to be seen as enough to travel internationally, which is annoying to a lot of people, because you kind of assumed that it would even a week or two ago. Now, no, not so much. And what if you've been boosted? Well, you're probably going to need another booster in six months' time. Again, in all of the apps and the vaccine passports and the papers that are allowing you to go to restaurants, and shows, and travel, in those places where those regulations exist are likely to get updated to require a booster shot, and then eventually another booster shot, too.
Madness. When does it all end? Well, it is a problem because the nature of the vaccines and the relationship with the disease make this much harder to politically respond to. In other words, the argument for getting your booster shot is not about whether or not you're going to get sick. The argument about getting the booster shot and another booster shot is about protecting people that are unvaccinated, protecting those that are immunocompromised, even if they have been vaccinated, and that's a harder argument to make. It's a harder argument for politicians to be effective at. It's a harder argument to push mandates upon a population.
And having said that, you look at the last few months, and Kaiser Family Foundation just put out a study in the United States where we're still seeing 1,000 deaths on an average day from COVID. 163,000 people did not have to die from COVID if we had gotten full vaccination rates. In other words, the science was there, the vaccines were there, and just the effectiveness of those vaccines on populations that are not immunocompromised, 163,000 people would be alive today that are not from COVID because we couldn't get our act together in getting vaccines rolled out, getting people to be willing to take them.
And that is the problem going forward. I'm not going to die from COVID. If you've been vaccinated, you're not going to die from COVID, but a lot of people will. And they will from this omicron variant, because we are unable to ramp out boosters fast enough, and second boosters fast enough, which a lot of people are sick of, a lot of people aren't going to feel comfortable with. We don't have the regulatory capacity to get it done, and that means the non-vaccinated population is going to be incredibly vulnerable and exposed. And it also means that economic impact of all of that will continue to grow, and that's around the world. That's not just the United States, that's everywhere, and that's particularly older and vulnerable populations.
So that's what we're looking at. Merry Christmas to everybody. I'm sorry. I wish I had better news on that front. I'm still hoping that over the next week or two, we get more information that will allow us to say that omicron is actually somewhat milder in form than delta is, but right now we don't have that information. The information we have is not so happy. So that's it, and I hope everyone is doing okay, and I will talk to you all real soon.
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Africa’s vaccine cloning gamble
Less than a year after the world started putting COVID vaccines into people's arms, most regions have immunized at least half their populations, but Africa still lags behind. With industrialized nations hoarding jabs and the COVAX facility faltering, barely five percent of the African population is fully vaccinated.
Some enterprising South African scientists are now making a bold bid to change that, with an experiment that could benefit not only Africa's 54 nations and billion people, but the entire world: Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, a Cape Town-based startup, has developed a plan to reverse-engineer Moderna's mRNA shot and manufacture it for priority distribution on the continent.
How are they going to do it? The ingredients in Moderna's vaccine "recipe" are mostly publicly available — the trick is to figure out what to do with them. It's like having all the ingredients and measurements to bake a cake, but only vague instructions for each step.
Given that the Moderna vaccine was developed with US taxpayer money, lawyers are still figuring out which aspects of the process belong solely to the company. But that may be moot for now: the company says it won't sue, leaving Afrigen apparently in the clear to go ahead.
Cloning an mRNA vaccine would be a huge win for South Africa. It would be the equivalent of the moon landing in terms of accomplishment and prestige for a nation that too often grabs headlines for all the wrong reasons. Moreover, the project is backed and funded by the World Health Organization, so if the code is cracked, the formula would be made available to all as a public good across the whole continent and the wider developing world.
A highly effective yet affordable jab that can be manufactured anywhere could be a game-changer to stop more contagious COVID variants from emerging where the population is still unvaccinated. What's more, the sky's the limit when it comes to mRNA's potential to create vaccines against other diseases endemic to Africa such as Ebola, less infectious but way deadlier than COVID.
But don't get too excited just yet. The startup says it'll take up to a year to reverse-engineer Moderna's jab. Also, getting the formula right is only one piece of the puzzle. Afrigen would then need to figure out how to mass-produce, store, and deliver the vaccine around a continent with often poor infrastructure, not to mention getting raw materials at a moment when global supply chains are already stretched thin.
There's a political angle too. In the US, the Biden administration wants Moderna to sell more vaccines to COVAX at cost, and is facing growing criticism for treating the company with kid gloves after ignoring Biden's call to boost production for low-income countries despite Uncle Sam being Moderna's research sugar daddy.
Meanwhile, public health advocates are urging the National Institutes of Health to force Moderna to give up its secret sauce, and calling out the US government for paying lip service to waiving patents and global vaccine equity while not pushing the drugmakers harder to share their tech or prioritize supply for countries with low vaccination rates.
Technically, the Biden administration has some leverage because the White House bankrolled Moderna's vaccine research through the NIH and Operation Warp Speed. But twisting Moderna's arm would be a hard sell for the US government, traditionally reticent to meddle with Big Pharma and with little to gain (politically at home) from vaccinating other countries.
Moderna, for its part, says that right now it's better for the company to expand production itself than to share its tech because scaling up production in Africa will take too long. More broadly, it's also playing a longer game of aiming to dominate the post-COVID mRNA manufacturing landscape along with Pfizer.
No one knows if reverse-engineering mRNA COVID vaccines will work, but then again no one's tried before. Still, the upshot is that there's a huge opportunity despite uncertainty about the science, the business of producing the jab, and the politics behind it all.
The race to vaccinate: Dr. Atul Gawande provides perspective
Can the US vaccinate enough of its population to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths before new and more contagious COVID-19 variants take hold? And will these vaccines even be effective against more adaptable mutations of the virus? Surgeon and public health expert Dr. Atul Gawande, most recently of the Biden/Harris COVID-19 Transition Task Force, joins Ian Bremmer on GZERO World to discuss the latest in the global effort to vaccinate our way out of this pandemic. He also explains why people should get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine if offered the chance, despite its lower overall efficacy rate compared to the mRNA-based vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
Podcast: The Race to Vaccinate: Dr. Atul Gawande Provides Perspective
Listen: Can the United States vaccinate enough of its population to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths before new and more contagious COVID-19 variants take hold? And will these vaccines even be effective against more adaptable mutations of the virus? Surgeon and public health expert Dr. Atul Gawande, most recently of the Biden/Harris COVID-19 Transition Task Force, joins the podcast to discuss the latest in the global effort to vaccinate our way out of this pandemic. He also explains why people should get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine if offered the chance, despite its lower overall efficacy rate compared to the mRNA-based vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.
A shot in the arm: Moderna’s co-founder on the COVID-19 vaccine
The pandemic's US death toll shows no signs of abating and the holiday season's spike will likely dwarf any surge that came before it. But in the midst of this dark winter there are glimmers of hope, as the first of the COVID-19 vaccines have nearly arrived (or, depending on when you read this, already have). On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer interviews Noubar Afeyan, the co-founder of a leading vaccine developer Moderna. They'll discuss distribution plans, the revolutionary science behind Moderna's vaccine, and how a company younger than Twitter became a frontrunner in the race to end the pandemic.
Podcast: COVID Vaccine in Record Time - What Now? Moderna Co-Founder Noubar Afeyan
Listen: The pandemic's US death toll shows no signs of abating and the holiday season's spike will likely dwarf any surge that came before it. But in the midst of this dark winter there are glimmers of hope, as the first of the COVID-19 vaccines have nearly arrived (or, depending on when you read this, already have). On the GZERO World podcast, Ian Bremmer interviews Noubar Afeyan, the co-founder of a leading vaccine developer Moderna. They'll discuss distribution plans, the revolutionary science behind Moderna's vaccine, and how a company younger than Twitter became a frontrunner in the race to end the pandemic.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.
How the Moderna vaccine works, why it’s effective, and how it’ll be distributed
"What we're trying to do is to educate the immune system to see the protein before it's seen the virus." In a race for a COVID vaccine, Moderna, a 10-year old company with no products previously on the market, developed a vaccine in 10-months, by using revolutionary new mRNA technology. Now the focus shifts to how to distribute and safely administer this vaccine. Moderna co-founder and chairman Noubar Afeyan explains.
His conversation with Ian Bremmer was part of the latest episode of GZERO World, which began airing nationally in the US on public television Friday, December 11th. Check local listings.
Watch the GZERO World episode: A Shot in the Arm: Moderna's Co-Founder on the COVID-19 Vaccine