Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious diseases specialist, recently told CNN it’s incredibly important for everyone to get fully vaccinated because it threatens the return to normal.
- “It’s going to take us that much longer to get back to life as normal, to stop having to wear masks for our protection, if people don’t get vaccinated and we don’t have equitable distribution of vaccines,” Gounder told CNN.
In fact, it’s important for people across the world to get vaccinated at a high rate to stop variants from spreading throughout the world. If one country doesn’t get vaccinated, a variant could grow there that could spread to the U.S.
- “If you have ongoing transmission, replication of the virus in places like India and Brazil, you will have mutant viruses arise, which threatens our own recovery,” Gounder told CNN.
Vaccine developers have started to release vaccines to the world. In fact, Moderna said it would deliver 34 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to the developing world, according to The Wall Street Journal.
- “The doses will be delivered in the fourth quarter of 2021 to the World Health Organization-backed Covax initiative, a program financed mostly by Western governments that offers free coronavirus vaccines to 92 low- and middle-income countries across the world,” according to WSJ.
A COVID-19 vaccine calculator from Bloomberg predicted the world likely wouldn’t return to normal until 2028 because much of the world won’t receive a COVID-19 vaccine for years to come.
- “With vaccinations happening more rapidly in richer Western countries than the rest of the globe, it will take the world as a whole seven years at the current pace,” according to Bloomberg.