As Canada responds to news of the omicron version of COVID-19, health and infectious disease experts are urging the government to focus on global vaccination fairness rather than travel prohibitions.
The doctors, as well as a human rights policy expert who spoke to CBC this week, believe that the federal government can and should increase vaccine shipments to low-income countries sooner than planned, encourage more vaccine production, and advocate for rules requiring pharmaceutical companies to release vaccine recipes.
They claim that doing so is in everyone’s best interests.
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“It’s in your interest to have everyone on this planet vaccinated as soon as possible if you don’t want to be altruistic… and if you only want to be self-interested,” said Dr. Ross Upshur, a professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the department of family medicine at the University of Toronto.
Following the discovery of omicron, Canada stated that travel from nations in southern Africa, which had reported instances of the new strain of concern, would be restricted. Critics slammed the move as soon as it was discovered that the variation was also appearing in other regions of the world, including Canada. Infectious disease experts have long argued that the best strategy to avoid disease transmission and mutation is to ensure that nations across the world have adequate immunizations to cover a large proportion of their people. By mid-2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) hopes to have 70 percent of the world’s population completely vaccinated.
However, according to vaccination statistics from local governments as of Wednesday via Our Globe in Data, the world is far from that aim, with about 40 nations — the most of which are in Africa — having fewer than 10% of their people immunized against COVID-19.
