Gaps in COVID vaccine roll out could breed new variants – survey

Geographical and income gaps in the roll out of the coronavirus vaccine could create breeding grounds for new variants, warned the International Council of Nurses (ICN) as they released data from a new survey on Friday.

The survey found that 88% of the surveyed countries that had started vaccinating nurses were either high- or upper-middle-income countries. Some eight low- and lower-middle-income countries surveyed in Africa had not begun vaccinating their nurses.

In countries where vaccinations had not yet started, many national nursing associations reported that they did not know when the roll out would begin.

“Since the pandemic began a year ago, ICN has been drawing attention to the relentless rise of healthcare worker infections, which now run into the millions. Tragically, we can now confirm that  more than 2,700 nurses have made the ultimate sacrifice, while the true number of deaths for healthcare workers is likely to be in the tens of thousands,” said ICN Chief Executive Officer Howard Catton in a press release.

“The risk remains high and imminent for healthcare workers, and is why ICN is again calling for them to be prioritized globally for vaccination, to protect them, and our health systems,” added Catton. “However, very worryingly, our national nurses associations on the ground are reporting that the roll out of the vaccines is slow and unequal, with a chasm opening up between high- and low-income countries, and the majority is not even at the start line.”

Catton stressed that in light of new variants that have been discovered, such as the South African variant, the gaps in vaccine roll outs create “a potentially catastrophic new dynamic.”

“ICN urges countries to act now to avoid the serious risk of not hitting the WHO target for the beginning of the vaccine roll out in all countries in the first 100 days of this year. The clock is ticking,” said Catton. “We will only stop the pandemic as one world: the virus knows no borders, and a nation-by-nation approach will ultimately fail because it will leave hot spots for new variants to spread. The real race now is between the virus’s ability to mutate, and the urgent response required from our governments to act together in solidarity to defeat it, starting with the global roll out of the vaccines and the prioritization of healthcare workers in every country.”

While thousands of variants of the novel coronavirus exist, only some of them have undergone significant changes, including the UK, South African and Brazilian variants, which seem to spread faster and may even be somewhat resistant to the vaccine, although the variants have not been found to render the vaccine ineffective.

The ICN is backing the World Health Organization’s Vaccine Equity Declaration, which calls on countries around the world to work together to ensure vaccines are equally distributed, including to lower income countries, with healthcare workers and hig- risk people prioritized.