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This year ends with more of the world’s population vaccinated with at least one dose. Behind this historical milestone there is also a profound inequality in access to drugs that puts the end of the pandemic in 2022 at risk. Next year holds many unknowns: will we be able to immunize the rest of the planet? What other advances does science have in store for us?
They are two sides of the same coin. In one year, the world has managed to inoculate more than half of its population against Covid-19, an undeniable historical milestone that made 2021 a very different year from 2020, even if it was still pandemic.
However, that vaccination figure also hides deep inequalities. While Africa only has 11% of its population fully or partially inoculated, Europe or the American continent have more than 60% with at least one dose of the drug.
The equitable distribution objectives failed in 2021 and it will remain as the great debt to be paid by 2022.
The year we learned immunology
However, 2021 has also been the year of accumulated knowledge. About vaccines, for example, but also about how the virus is transmitted, how variants affect us and how our immune system works. “We learned about microbiology what we did not learn in life,” exclaims María Fernanda Gutiérrez, a virologist at the Javeriana University of Colombia.
“We learned how vaccines work, that there are several classes, the basic principles of immunology,” he adds. “It seems to me that this helps us to strengthen something that Latin America does not have and that is the scientific culture.”
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Scientific knowledge is often stagnant, but the pandemic, despite all the negative things it has brought into our lives, has allowed us to understand how part of medicine works. We take that knowledge with us for 2022 and for the future.
The year of the end of the pandemic?
Precisely 2022 is the year in which we will solve an unknown: will we be able to end the health crisis? Will Covid-19 become an endemic disease? Expert voices cite two keys for this to happen: on the one hand, equity in vaccination. On the other, access to new antiviral treatments.
The debate around the liberalization of patents for Covid-19 vaccines could be resolved next year. Although a difficult negotiation is predicted, opening the intellectual property of these drugs could be essential to increase the production of vaccines and make them more accessible.
“The pharmaceutical companies have the power and that represents a lot of money for them. It is an industry whose mission is to produce silver and that is why they will not want to release patents (…) On the other hand, the pandemic is a social and health problem. health, so they should be able to release them so that other pharmaceutical houses can work and we would have faster and cheaper access to vaccines, “says Gutiérrez.
Antivirals: the other unknown of 2022
The development of antiviral treatments is the other unknown in 2022. Both Merck and Pfizer have put together promising pills that could help prevent severe cases of Covid-19 disease after infection.
However, access to these treatments is also in doubt. The pharmaceutical companies have signed agreements so that other companies in low- and middle-income countries can make the pills, which is a step beyond vaccines but is not equivalent to releasing patents.
For now, Merck already has committed to purchase agreements more than 7.5 million treatments, the equivalent of 75% of all its production in 2021. For its part, Pfizer has already secured the sale of 11.8 million treatments, almost 15% of what it expects to produce in 2022. The United States is the main buyer in both cases.
These treatments may be the key to avoiding large waves of mortality, especially in places where access to the vaccine is scarce. Next year we will see if their distribution will be as uneven as that of vaccines or if we have learned from our mistakes.
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