Today I discovered the Global Commission for Post-Pandemic Policy. Its mission is "to enable and impact informed learning, debate, and decision-making on the wide range of issues connected with the Covid-19 pandemic crisis in all its dimensions." This, I think is an organization which is as interested as I am in figuring out when the pandemic will be over.
Right out of the gate, they have bad news for those of us whose view of the new world reaches to "summer" or "fall by the latest." It's pretty basic math.
As of today, a billion COVID vaccination doses have been jabbed in arms worldwide. During April, which just ended yesterday, 415,769,587 doses were produced by all pharmaceutical companies involved in the COVID vaccine process.
The world population is over seven billion, giver or take, meaning we'll need about fourteen billion jabs to get the job done. One billion have already been given. Estimates of effective herd immunity range widely, because we just don't know, but let's be conservative and suggest that we have to vaccinate 85% of the world's population. That leaves us in need of roughly 11 billion doses.
If we can ramp up production from 415 million does a month (April's total) to half a billion, that's 22 more months of production to get to herd immunity. That puts us at March 1, 2023. The life span of a jab, from production to someone's arm, is apparently only a few days, so by mid-March, almost two years from now, we can - theoretically - be at global herd immunity.
Theoretically. March 2023 is the perfect result, the ideal, the best-case scenario. Every obstacle adds time - vaccine hesitancy, production or transport interruptions, resistant variants, premature openings, not to mention the enormous level of inequality of distribution already firmly entrenched in the system.
We - meaning everyone - need to be very careful for a very long time - nearly two years. I really don't want it to take that long. Too bad.
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