The Omicron variant and vaccine inequality
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 3 December 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Could a more equitable global vaccine rollout have stopped the new variant? As the world waits for more information about just how contagious and dangerous the new Covid-19 variant is, we ask if the emergence of a variant like Omicron could have been avoided – or at least slowed - if people all around the world had been vaccinated at the same pace. Instead, richer countries race to give booster vaccines to their own populations as many poorer countries are still waiting to receive their first jabs.
Tamasin Ford hears from Dr. Richard Mihigo, who coordinates the WHO’s immunisation and vaccine development progamme in Africa. He says it’s not just about shipping jabs to countries; the international community could also step up to help with planning and logistics for the distribution of vaccines. Dr. Atiya Mosam, a public health specialist in South Africa, was disappointed in the way the world reacted when news the new variant came out of her country. She argues that the travel bans that many countries quickly imposed are both discriminatory and ineffective. She also worries that many South African scientists feel they have been punished for being open and honest with the world about their discovery. Dr Meru Sheel, an epidemiologist at the Australian National University, says the issue of vaccine inequality should have been fixed many months ago. She says the vaccines should evenly distributed because it makes the most sense from a public health perspective, and also because it’s the ethical thing to do.
(Image: Passengers at Cape Town airport in South Africa on 29 November 2021. Source: David Silverman/Getty Images)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Tamison Ford. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. There's fury in Southern Africa as the world continues to tighten its borders against them because of the Omicron coronavirus variant. |
| 0:15.0 | From my end, I was quite angry and disappointed, you know, as were many colleagues. I think it felt discriminatory and |
| 0:22.5 | sort of needlessly punitive towards our country. Omicron has now been detected in more than 20 |
| 0:28.5 | countries. If closing down borders doesn't work, what needs to be done? What we're really |
| 0:33.8 | seeing is that the virus is mutating. And if we want to avoid the virus to mutate, |
| 0:38.8 | we need to vaccinate larger parts of the world. In today's Business Daily from the BBC, |
| 0:44.0 | we'll take a look at whether the world's uneven vaccine rollout could bear some of the |
| 0:49.2 | blame for the emergence of the Omicron variant. |
| 0:56.0 | These restrictions are completely unjustified and unfairly discriminate against our country |
| 1:04.0 | and our southern African sister countries. |
| 1:06.9 | That South Africa's President, Cyril Ramaphosa, more than 30 countries have now closed their borders to much of southern Africa. |
| 1:14.6 | The prohibition of travel is not informed by science, nor will it be effective in preventing the spread of this variant. |
| 1:23.6 | The only thing the prohibition on travel will do is to further damage the economies of the affected countries |
| 1:30.7 | and undermine their ability to respond to and also to recover from the pandemic. |
| 1:36.8 | The Omicron variant was first identified in South Africa last week, |
| 1:40.7 | but it's now been detected in more than 20 countries around the world. |
| 1:45.7 | It's still not clear which country the new variant first emerged from, |
| 1:50.1 | yet the world continues to tighten its borders against countries in southern Africa. |
| 1:56.1 | Antonio Guterres, the United Nations General Secretary, |
| 1:59.7 | says it amounts to travel apartheid. |
| 2:02.8 | The people of Africa cannot be blamed for the immorally low level of vaccinations available to them. |
| 2:09.6 | Nor should they be collectively punished for identifying and sharing crucial science and else information with the world. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.