COVID-19 variants will keep coming until everyone can access vaccines
The emergence of Omicron underscores the consequences of vaccine inequity. Experts say it will take more than donations to fix the problem.
Angelique Coetzee was puzzled. The South African doctor had been seeing COVID-19 patients who mostly had sore throats and fevers. But on November 18 Coetzee examined a 29-year-old man complaining of extreme fatigue and severe headaches—symptoms more in line with heat stroke than COVID-19. By the end of the day, Coetzee had treated seven or eight similar cases.
“It didn’t make any sense to me,” says Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association.
Within a week, researchers determined that the patients were infected with a new SARS-CoV-2 variant, now known as Omicron, that has a large number of mutations and can spread more rapidly than previous variants. Omicron is now dominant in South Africa and many other
