Millions of Britons travel each year to countries where vaccination rates are low, i analysis has revealed, as the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine creator said delivering vaccines to nations that have fallen behind is “urgent”.
Restrictions have now largely been lifted in the UK, where vaccination rates are high – but scientists warned that low immunity levels in other countries could lead to dangerous new variants.
Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, who led the development of the vaccine at Oxford University, warned that “no one is safe until we are all safe” as she called for action to ensure a fairer distribution of vaccines.
In a letter, co-written with Dr Richard Hatchett, the chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the professor noted that the global distribution of vaccines can “protect all of us by reducing the selection of further variants.”
Some of the UK’s most popular travel destinations have very low proportions of their populations fully vaccinated, including populous nations where many Britons have family connections.
Around one and a half million people visited India in 2018 before the pandemic – but less than 20 per cent of its population is fully vaccinated.
Of the UK’s most popular destinations, Pakistan has the smallest fully vaccinated population, with just 14 per cent fully vaccinated and almost three quarters of a million people visiting the country before the pandemic.
Both India and South Africa, which were collectively visited almost two million times in 2018, have produced virulent Covid-19 variants. The Delta variant, which developed in India, spread to the UK before most of the rest of the world partly due to the strong travel links between the two countries.
Thailand, another popular tourist destination for Britons, has struggled to vaccinate a substantial proportion of its population. Around a third are fully vaccinated so far and more than half a million people a year from the UK visited the country before the pandemic.
Dame Sarah and Dr Hatchett warned of a potential “embarrassment of riches” in vaccine supply in the future. The co-authors added that offering booster jabs and vaccinating children, as the UK is currently doing, will place “additional pressure on global vaccine supplies”.
They wrote: “Such extensions of the use of Covid-19 vaccines by high income countries will place additional pressure on global vaccine supplies and potentially further increase disparities between high-income countries and the rest of the world in terms of vaccine access.”
The letter, published in Science Translational Medicine, adds that as the number of vaccines being produced has increased “markedly”, the larger supply could make them available across the globe “as long as all countries are prepared to receive and deliver these life-saving medical products.”
By early September 2021, 41.5% of the world’s population had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, yet only 1.9% of people in low-income countries had, they wrote.