AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Vaccines and Variants a Year into the Pandemic
/February marks a year since the first coronavirus cases were confirmed in the Americas and the virus has left a scar, claiming more than a million lives. Now the pandemic has entered a new phase, one in which countries are trying to roll out vaccines as variants threaten to undermine the protection those vaccines offer.
“We are encountering a problem that nobody is safe until everybody is safe,” says Dr. Roselyn Lemus-Martin, a COVID-19 researcher with a PhD in molecular biology from Oxford University. She explains that Latin America—and the world at large—is in a race against time to get as many people immunized as possible before the variants spread. “With these new variants, it’s going to take us a while to get to herd immunity.”
Meanwhile, a lack of transparency about vaccines can undermine public confidence in immunizations. Lemus-Martin has gained an audience in Mexico for her use of social media to explain the science behind both vaccines and variants, as well as how mechanisms such as COVAX work. She tells AS/COA’s Carin Zissis why there was a concern with Russia’s Sputnik V—for which countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, and Mexico have acquired contracts—and how a new article in The Lancet is “good news for Latin America” as a study found that the vaccine has a 91.6 percent efficacy rate.