Scenarios of Future Pandemic: 2 : No country can be safe until all countries are safe:

Scenarios of Future Pandemic: No country can be safe until all countries are safe: 2
Many factors will determine the overall outcome of the pandemic. A nationalistic rather than global approach to vaccine delivery is not only morally wrong but will also delay any return to a level of “normality” (including relaxed border controls) because no country can be safe until all countries are safe. SARS-CoV-2 could continue to mutate in ways that both accelerate virus transmission and reduce vaccine effectiveness.
Vaccine hesitancy, misinformation, and disinformation could compromise the global COVID-19 response.8 Naive assumptions about herd immunity, given the appearance of new and challenging SARS-CoV-2 variants, could seriously risk repeated outbreaks and recurrences. SARS-CoV-2 can probably never be globally eradicated, because of its presence in many animals (including cats and dogs)10 and because of incomplete vaccine coverage and variable degrees of immunological protection.11 Hence, ongoing strategies to deal with the endemic presence of SARS-CoV-2 in populations over the long term will be needed. Furthermore, we do not yet know if, and when, revaccination with current or new COVID-19 vaccines will be required since the duration of immunological protection and the efficacy against emergent SARS-CoV-2 variants remain unknown.
With such uncertainties, we should not assume that recent scientific progress on COVID-19 diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments will end the pandemic. The world is likely to have many more years of COVID-19 decision making ahead—there is no quick solution available at present. The decisions of global agencies and governments, as well as the behaviours of citizens in every society, will greatly affect the journey ahead. There are many possible outcomes. At one extreme is the most optimistic scenario, in which new-generation COVID-19 vaccines are effective against all SARS-CoV-2 variants (including those that may yet emerge) and viral control is pursued effectively in every country in a coordinated effort to achieve global control. Even with international cooperation and adequate funding, this scenario would inevitably take a long time to achieve.
The COVAX initiative is just an initial step towards addressing vaccine equity and global coordination for vaccine access, especially for lower income countries. At the other extreme is a pessimistic scenario, in which SARS-CoV-2 variants emerge repeatedly with the ability to escape vaccine immunity, so that only highincome countries can respond by rapidly manufacturing adapted vaccines for multiple rounds of population reimmunisation in pursuit of national control while the rest of the world struggles with repeated waves and vaccines that are not sufficiently effective against newly circulating viral variants. In such a scenario, even in high-income countries, there would probably Future scenarios for the COVID-19 pandemic be repeated outbreaks and the path to “normality” in society and business would be much longer. And there are many other intermediate or alternate scenarios.
Source : Lancet