Americans are very fortunate because we have ready access to the Covid-19 vaccine. That is not the case in India, which has the largest Coronavirus outbreak in the world.
Dr. Bhavna Lall with the University of Houston college of Medicine says that nation is reporting 400,000 cases a day, and that is likely a very low estimate as there is little access to testing. "People are struggling to get hospital beds. There's a critical shortage of oxygen, medical supplies medication. My own family is struggling with Covid."
She says even though India is the largest manufacturer of vaccines in the world, they don't have enough vaccines for their country of 1.4 billion. Only 2% of that population is fully vaccinated. "There needs to be more vaccine equity worldwide."
The situation is so dire that people are "literally dying in ambulances, outside hospitals. There is such a raging outbreak that they need aid immediately. This is the world's problem. The outbreak there is the problem of the world because these variants from India and from other countries are going to continue to spread and the more the virus spreads the more variants will form."
She is calling for global equity regarding the vaccine. "Of the amount of vaccines that have been given to countries, only .3 percent of them have gone to developing countries, which is nothing. If we're only vaccinating certain countries and not others, at the end of the day this pandemic will continue, forever. For a very long time."
There are at least two variants that have emerged from India, B.1.617, which has a double mutation and B.1.618. "There are variants from other countries as well, such as Brazil, South Africa and the UK that are circulating in America as well, and these will continue to circulate unless we can actually vaccinate the whole world."
She suggest we should share our vaccines if people in America don't want it.
