Lessons for the next pandemic: Covid-19 persists as a consequence of the non- universality of vaccination or because of the ineffectiveness of vaccine

Abstract

Covid-19, a global health pandemic, bears its roots to the small city of Wuhan in China and has gradually propagated to the entire world. The pandemic saw different impacts in different economies in terms of disease spread, regulatory action and mitigation of the virus. On an analytical scale, the virus stood as a real-life test of the regulatory soundness, health infrastructure and financial resources of a country. Vaccine development efforts by most developed countries began as soon as the start of the pandemic. However, despite various vaccine development endeavours, the pandemic still spread exponentially in waves and continues to spread even now. Some analysts have apportioned this spread to the inefficacy of vaccines, causing the virus to mutate. While others opine that the non-universality of vaccination was the major reason caused by the disparity of technological development, infrastructural shortcomings and resource constraint. Essentially, the analysis focuses on imparting that there is no plain vanilla conclusi on and the contributors are circumstantial to the country-specific context. Few improvement areas such as a patent waiver, voluntary pooling and increase in fundi ng could be looked at.