Countries should fight virus together

DEAR Editor, It is surely in no one’s interest to promote vaccine wars and scoff at countries who are now suffering more from the Covid-19 virus than ourselves.

Countries like the UK and Brazil, where the virus spread widely and caused “worldbeating” numbers of fatalities and cases of serious illness, may well be the ones who, by allowing the virus to run rampant (sometimes through government policy e.g. to achieve “herd immunity”), have generated even more deadly variants that have spread far and wide.

New variants could arrive which would make the UK’s current vaccination ineffective. Thus the South African and Brazilian variants are threatening the UK vaccination programme while the more virulent variant first detected in the UK has spread fast through Europe and much of the world. It is likely that the UK, which so far has imported vaccines from Europe but has exported none to other countries, will need to import even more vaccines from abroad because of new resistant variants.

In a sense, then, wealthier countries like the UK and Israel, who have achieved some immunity early through their power to acquire vaccines, could in turn find themselves subject to variants from elsewhere that threaten their whole programmes.

It is clear that countries throughout the world, rich as well as poor, depend on one another. “No man is an island”, as the poet said in his eloquent sermon on Death. In this one, we are all in it together.

Mike Temple, by email