Vax Facts

The Omicron strain of COVID appears to be peaking, even as a variation of Omicron that spreads more easily but is harder to detect is suddenly out there, making it more imperative to vaccinate as many people throughout the world as possible.  An I'm happy to report that some progress is being made on that front.

Two weeks I posted on how the world reach the 50 percent vaccination benchmark.  Today, the number of people fully vaccinated on this planet is now a solid majority - 52 percent.

But, as the chart above shows, Africa remains the sticky wicket - only 10 percent of Africans are vaccinated, and only one country on the continent has a full-vaccination rate higher than 60 percent . . . Morocco, which probably doesn't even count because it's not a sub-Saharan country. 

I guess we should be happy that the number of fully vaccinated people in Africa broke into double digits. But that double-digit number has to get higher to ensure fewer new strains in the future.

Halfway There

Whisper it quietly, but the planet is half the way toward getting everyone fully vaccinated against COVID.

According to this chart from Our World In Data, at least 50 percent of the global population has gotten both doses of a COVID vaccine, and, in breaking numbers on further, as seen in the statistics at the bottom of the chart, fully vaccinated people in this earth account for a bare majority - 50.33 percent as of this past Monday, January 10.

This is good news, of course, but as always in this pandemic, it comes with a caveat.  Several caveats, in fact.  First, it took thirteen months to get this far, meaning that at current rates of vaccination, it would theoretically take until February 2023 to everyone on the planet jabbed - and we know that many people refuse to get the shot anyway.  Second, while many countries are far along on full COVID vaccination, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa continue to lag dramatically; while more than half of the people on the various continents and in Oceania are vaccinated, only 9.7 percent of the people of Africa are fully vaccinated.  Third, at least two strains of the virus, including Omicron, came from South Africa, and others could come from African countries as random as Gabon or Zambia.  Any one of them could be the doomsday strain that humanity has no way to protect against.

The pandemic can end this year, but it won't until we get all of those people in Africa vaccinated.  The United States should approach the 70 percent minimum full-vaccination threshold some time this spring, and there will still be holdouts.  Once we've gotten as many Americans vaccinated as possible, it's more than imperative to get Africa and other areas of the world vaccinated.  And, given all of the new strains that keep sprouting up like so many gremlins from an eighties popcorn movie,  we can't wait until February 2023 to do so.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is already getting over a million COVID infections a day and hospitalizations have hit a new record high. 😢

Continental Drift

The pharmaceutical company Moderna announced that it hopes to build a factory in Africa to make COVID vaccines to get the continent's people vaccinated faster to end the pandemic.  Many vaccine donations to Africa have been promised, but few of them have actually been been getting there.

I say that Moderna "hopes" to build a vaccine factory in Africa because the company put out no details of its plans.  Moderna didn't say which African country the factory would be located in, for starters.  Did Moderna say when it would be operational?  It did not.  Did Moderna indicate when the plant would be basically finished - topped out, at least?  It did not.  Did Moderna say when construction of the factory would start?  Negative.

This isn't funny, and I'm sure the director of the World Health Organization, who is from Ethiopia, would be the first to say so.

What Moderna did was get some good publicity, but the company assured no one about its intentions.  Forbes magazine said it best in noting that saying you're going to build a factory without offering specifics is like saying you're going to get married someday without knowing to whom and when.  And Africa needs this factory as soon as possible because the pandemic is killing Africans and possibly causing variants worse than Delta right now.  Many people even believe that Moderna's announcement is really just a PR ploy to avoid allowing the World Health Organization to copy Moderna's vaccine formula for faster production to get more vaccines to where they're needed, which would require a waiver from Moderna's patent.

And, given the vague promises from Moderna, the firm will less likely get a contractor to build its plant and more likely to get Mystico and his lovely assistant Janet to create a factory through hypnosis.  (You have to be a Monty Python fan to get that joke.)

Thus, despite Moderna's non-announcement, the pandemic continues. Meanwhile, in the United States, despite more vaccine mandates, that day-to-day full-vaccination rate continues to increase at a pathetic 0.1 percent.  One day last week, it didn't even go up that much. 😬