Saturn?

We're back!  Been visiting with nuclear family - two sons, one daughter-in-law, one grandbaby - for about two weeks.  Wonderful.  Now, back to real life.

'Real life,' as it pertains to the new world, contains more concern about the imbalance in vaccination supply.  If no one's safe until everyone's safe, then the new world doesn't begin until there is herd immunity all over the world.

It seems like just yesterday that we were bemoaning the fact that it would be until 2022 until this happened, and we upgraded our analogy-journey from Columbus's new world to the asteroids to Jupiter.

Now we hear that an outfit called the Economist Intelligence Unit ("the world leader in global business intelligence," according to them) is predicting that "...most poor countries will not achieve mass Covid-19 immunisation until at least 2024 and some may never get there," leaving us with "...a starkly divided world over the next few years in which a handful of developed countries are fully vaccinated while others race to catch up."

Countries such as the UK, US, Israel and those in the EU will probably achieve “widespread vaccination coverage” – meaning priority and vulnerable groups, and almost all of the rest of the population – by late 2021. They will be followed by a slew of other developed countries by the middle of 2022 and then most middle-income countries by the end of that year.

But 84 countries that make up the world’s poorest will not receive enough doses to sufficiently immunise their populations for at least a further year, a global faultline that will run through the first half of this decade, said Agathe Demarais, the unit’s global forecasting director and author of the report.

“It’s going to define the global economy, the global political landscape, travel, pretty much everything,” she said.

The reasons for this disparity are pretty much what you might have guessed:  "...existing supply deals, production capacity, vaccine deliveries so far, infrastructure to administer doses and vaccine hesitancy rates."  Another new phrase for all of us to ingest:  "vaccine hesitance rates."  And remember COVAX?  The Economist Intelligence Unit is "skeptical" of its projections:  “There’s a lot of political hope that the targets will be hit … but we can see there are already delays for production and delivery in richer countries, so we can expect some delay in poor countries.

We won't have reached the new world until herd immunity is global, of course, but the other half of the equation is economic:  we won't have reached the new world until the economy is normalized, whatever that will look like.  But it won't happen until COVID is under control everywhere there are consumers, in other words, everywhere.  

And the International Chamber of Commerce, in a report titled "The Economic Case for Global Immunizations," tells us that the sophisticated modeling used in their research makes it clear that "...no economy can recover fully from the COVID-19 pandemic until vaccines are equally accessible in all countries."

 Which will be sometime in 2024.  Looks like we're going to Saturn.