New Study Documents Vaccine Deprivation in Africa Creates New Variants

A joint study by WHO and the AU’s Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, entitled “A Year of Genomic Surveillance Reveals How the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic Unfolded in Africa,” indicates that the lower rate of vaccination throughout Africa (3.2% of the 1.2 billion people) makes it a ripe area for breeding new variants. Further, the very partial introduction of the vaccine, carried out slowly and inadequately, actually favors mutations that would make variant strains more resistant to the vaccine.