♪ ♪ >> hello come again. the headlines on al jazeera. or than 80 people including children have been killed in airstrikes in yemen. the u.n. has condemned the attack led by the saudi coalition calling on all sides to engage in dialogue. >> the aerial bombardment that targeted civilians on an order that is not careful enough to protect civilians is unacceptable.

what we need is to stop this vicious circle in which things keep escalating one after another. what we need is to have as we have been proposing from long ago, a cease-fire together with the opening of the harbor and the airports and then the beginning of a serious dialogue among the parties. these escalations need to stop . anchor: u.s. and russia holding frank talks. moscow is sticking to demands that nato should not let ukraine joined the alliance though that is being rejected by the u. and its european allies. has killed 19 people and reduced the mining town to rubble. it happened when a truck carrying explosives collided with a motorbike. in the u.s., anti-abortion

activists are rallying in washington to mark the landmark ruling that legalized abortion. thousands are marching to the supreme court as it considers state bands limiting access to the procedure. energy giant chevron and toad all have withdrawn from a major gas project citing a worsening humanitarian situation. rights groups have welcomed the situation. the energy sector has been the biggest force. from sunday, people entering australia will no longer have to show proof of a negative pcr tests. osundairo's will be able to take a rapid antigen test within 24 hours of archer and those that have contracted covid only have to wait seven days. those are the headlines. next on al jazeera is "inside story." i will be back after that. thank you for watching. ♪

♪ >> living with coronavirus. some european countries are calling for a new approach. they say it should not be dealt as a health emergency but as an illness. does that convince anyone? this is "inside story." ♪ ♪ anchor: hello and welcome to the program. after two years of crippling waves of coronavirus, strict lockdowns and thousands dead, several european countries are hoping to treat the pandemic is

a thing of the past. the latest omicron variant wave has broken infraction records across the continent. daily infections have exceeded the peaks of earlier waves with france alone reporting a half a million cases on tuesday. hospital admissions and deaths are way down compared to previous variants especially for those fully vaccinated. several european countries see those figures as a sign the disease can be treated as endemic. another of many indices that we have learned to deal with. spain is one of the hardest hit economies on the continent and has called for restrictions to be dropped. portugal has already eased knee-jerk curbs on crowded venues. -- eased curbs on crowded

venues. the world health organization is warning the world is far from declaring the pandemic over and the death rate is too high to treat coronavirus as another endemic disease. >> now is not the time to give up on the strategy. we are hearing a lot of people suggest that omicron is the last variant. that is not the case. the virus is circulating at an intense level around the world. it is not time to give up on the comprehensive strategy that we have outlined. the goals of reducing severe disease and death remain. >> this pandemic is nowhere near over and with the incredible growth of the omicron variant globally, new variants are likely to emerge. anchor: for more on this, i am joined by our guest in singapore. the visiting precipice --

professor at the national university of singapore and a former who official. in oxford, we have a consultant on global health and senior health policy advisor for people's vaccine alliance. and in cambridge, we have chris smith, a specialist who is editor and host of the naked scientist podcast. a warm welcome. singapore is starting to move away -- >> i think the singapore middleman has taken the pragmatic approach towards living with the virus. and i think it has done so in a pragmatic manner. based on three legs of a stool.

it is based on good governance in the context of having a very coordinated and harmonious and single-minded response to deal with the pandemic. the second one is a very robust health care system that is able to deal with any surges in the severe cases of covid-19. and finally, and perhaps very importantly as well, is social capital. a population which is very trusting of the government and ready to follow government recommendations and instructions. as a result, it has succeeded very well. and i think it is on the right path to living sustainably and safely with the virus. anchor: is it fair for european countries to say it is about

time to move forward towards a more relaxed lifestyle when you have sub-saharan africa lagging far behind in vaccinations? > from the beginning of the virus we have been hearing that no is safe until everyone is safe. it is just words. it does not mean anything. what is happening is that high level vaccination and europe and that is why they feel a little bit more comfortable to remove restrictions. while, as you said, very little vaccination rates in many low income countries including in sub-saharan africa. basically, globally, we have a wonderful environment for the virus to mutate. some people are vaccinated and some are not. the virus will mutate creating new variants which will reach europe and other countries and then we start screaming.

and the other thing is about removing restrictions happening now, a lot of doctors in the u.k. are saying this is not based on data. it seems it is a political decision rather than a scientific decision. just like singapore may have a fantastic health care system in the u.k., it is really under huge stress because of the number of people -- because of covid and the implications of covid and the long list of people that had to delay their tests or other treatments not related to covid-19. anchor: chris, when we say that starting -- when we say it is time to treat covid as an

illness that we have to deal with because it will stay longer , it sounds easier on paper. >> i think it is important to see the situation through the lens of the here and now and not the lens of last year. this time last year, taking the u.k. as an example, the number of people dying every day was about 1500 at one point. and the number of people in hospital accounted for nearly half of the beds have in our national health service. we could not be more different now where other we do have people in hospital, probably half of them are in hospital with coronavirus, not because of coronavirus which is completely different from last year. and the number of people losing their lives is a fraction of where we were. and the reason that has happened is we have been able to transform the condition from what was lethal to some into

almost trivial for everyone and that is thanks to vaccines and we have other weapons to throw at this in the form of antivirus drugs. it is not a given that if we vaccinate everyone we will no longer face variants because the sobering observation is that omicron which has brought many countries back to the brink of lockdowns or into lockdowns, this emerged in the context of south africa which was pretty highly vaccinated as african countries go. and they were declaring at the time omicron emerged, just a few hundred cases per day while the u.k. was having up to 50,000. it is not given that vaccine stop variants but what we can do with vaccines is we can convert severe disease into trivial disease. and that should be our goal. we need way to stop people dying and that is across the world but we should not kid ourselves that

is soon as we achieve that magic vaccination of the world, the covid disaster is over because it is not pure what we can have done is stop people dying. anchor: this is what people are concerned about -- this false hope that this could be the beginning of the end of an era and the beginning of a post covid-19 era. singapore for example started with a zero-tolerance approach and now it is starting to relax most of its restrictions because it has met the threshold of vaccinations. but we have seen a surge of infections recently. couldn't this be the concern facing singapore in the near future? >> i think the surge in infection with the arrival of omicron is something the singapore government foresaw and were very prepared for. and the way they dealt was this -- with this was not to leave

the restrictions or lockdowns, not even increasing travel restrictions from other countries but continuing with the surveillance, continuing importantly with vaccination providing boosters and more recently, providing vaccination to the younger children, 5-12 and 12-17 and once again ensuring that the health care system was ready. and we have seen in the last few days that even among children that have been given the vaccine, there were more issue -- no issues with serious side effects. a couple of hospitalizations but nothing that required icu for example. i think the reality is that the virus is already out there.

the cat is out of the box. and as mentioned just now, the real issue is to prevent people from dying. anchor: countries like spain have been battered economically by covid-19. they are saying, we cannot continue like that. for that particular reason, it is time for the scientific community to start thinking seriously about shaping our post-covid 19 world. >> there are already talks and debates and studies about a post-covid 19. i am not advocating for lockdown. i am advocating for good measures. and one good measure is vaccinating the rest of the world. you can protect people in the u.k. from dying from covid at how about people and the other

countries that are not protected? there is one thing. you get data from the u.k. and south africa but many other countries do not have that data so you actually do not know how many people are infected or dying because the data is not really good. and therefore, we cannot say, it is not killing people in south africa. we don't have that data. the important thing is about -- just like singapore reached 90%, other countries need to reach that level. and then, yes, covid will stay with us just like the flu has stayed with us. the world managed to get rid of one virus only. we only have smallpox out and everything else we live with with vaccinations. kids around the world are vaccinated against measles but

there are still measles. or polio. with vaccination, we are controlling it. for covid, the vaccines we have, as the speaker from cambridge said, we have cut mortality and the high level of morbidity but it does not curb transmission so we still need more research for better vaccines. we should really aim for better vaccines but in the meantime, we have effective vaccines, very good vaccines are out and they should be available to other countries so that we don't have mutations. and look at the serious variant. alpha started in the u.k. when there were no vaccines.

the level of vaccination in india was unusually low, under 5%. and then this one, omicron started in south africa again with low vaccination. south africa has a higher vaccination. anchor: i see your point. >> we need vaccinations and although to middle income countries. anchor: some people think this could be an indication that we are going back to before 2020. the problem is you have the concern there, you have patients with complications and the idea that you have to maintain a massive vaccination

campaign to confidently tell people that we could live with covid way it is in the near future. are we talking about a decision that is unlikely to have huge economic ramifications? >> i don't agree. we have always had that vulnerable population and so has every other country. we have just told them they are more vulnerable this year and so more people are worried. previously, they were blissfully unaware. that is why we have had a flu vaccine campaign successfully for many years. the whole world is talking together sharing flu data and orchestrating because the flu season is so predictable. they orchestrate a flu vaccination campaign and we understand how to deploy it and how best to do it and it protects the most vulnerable.

this is really not any different. i strongly believe this could settle down into a seasonal issue. the common human coronavirus, there are four of them that cause colds, they are about 5% or 10% of the cold get in winter. we can probably predict in the future, what causes sars-cov-2 will circulate more often in the winter. we can anticipate that and give people a vaccine top up if they are in a vulnerable group. most people though will be absolutely fine and half the time they won't have any symptoms whatsoever. that is not that much different from the flu so i think this is something where we can learn prior learning and prior practice and put it into practice to protect those people that need protecting. anchor: why is the world health organization concerned about and immediate shift -- an immediate

shift towards a post-covid 19 reality? >> i think the concern about a premature acceptance that it is already going to become an dumb again we have less to worry about i think has to go with what has been mentioned before. as long as there are pockets in other parts of the world where vaccination coverage is less then what is needed, the virus will continue to circulate, to be transmitted and new variants are going to appear. no one is safe until everyone is safe. that is the reality. i think the who is concerned that some countries have taken a path towards a more relaxed attitude and plus, the fact that

omicron, the evidence is that it is causing a milder disease. i think what they are concerned about is a false sense of security. just to remind the world that there are pockets of unvaccinated people and as long as those exist, it poses a continuing risk. anchor: the who is also saying that for covid-19 to become an endemic disease, we have to be able to say we can predict how the virus will move forward in the future. >> the data is critical for health decisions, health policy decisions for each country but also globally. i think investing in data and

surveillance and lab tests is critical in countries. the data does not come from the sky. it comes from having reliable, trusted, trained community health workers. these are people in the community that can actually collect proper data and send it to be analyzed and collated at the country level and then the global level. and based on that, countries can make their own decisions and globally, the who and other agencies can give global guidelines of how to respond. but again, until we have a high level -- until we reach the target of 70% of people in each

country vaccinated, we will still have lockdowns and not really have a clear vision of what is next. and that should be the priority. anchor: for you, the benchmark is 65%, 70% of countries to move forward. the logic for the lockdowns is world leaders were worried about the health system being overwhelmed. that could mean the health system would collapse. and this is why they went for a drastic approach. countries are saying it is time to change that and relax. one of the questions many are asking is, what if tomorrow or the day after we have a new and aggressive variant, could that bring us back to square one? >> you never say never in

medicine. in the u.k. in the 1940's, we had a world war and people periodically were subject to being bombed by foreign planes. it does not mean they spent their entire life in an air raid shelter. a bill to a bomb shelter and had sirens and when the warning signals went off, people acted accordingly. we have to live our lives knowing there is a potential threat but it will not be ever present at the same degree of severity so we have a population aware of that and can react accordingly. we are seeing this begin to happen over christmas. prior to christmas, various measures were in place but people went further than the measures required in order to keep themselves safe which shows that people can judge the risk and can be trusted to do so. i think it is not unreasonable for us to have a future where we could alert people to the risk

coming. in this instance, perhaps there was some overreaction but what -- but it was a cautious overreaction. i think we have no reason to doubt that the measures won't work because they do work. we want to minimize the harm because otherwise the risk is that the pill is worth than the ill. anchor: do you think the second booster, third booster, six booster will be the norm for the future to shield communities against covid-19? >> a schedule will have to be made by individual countries. from my personal view, i think a third booster is well justified especially for those who are vulnerable, older people with underlying mobile -- morbidities, etc.

as to the value of a fourth, fifth, sixth, i am not so convinced. as a virologist, if you keep repeating doses, you lower reaction but that is my personal view. anchor: you also work for the peoples vaccine alliance which says it is about time for the international community to come together to ensure that doses are manufactured globally and the international property issue is addressed. and we have to provide people with vaccines and treatment free of charge in the near future. do you see that implemented in the near future? >> i have been working hard to get that implemented. it is not just about intellectual property but about sharing knowledge about the

vaccines. for example, the african union with the south african government set up at -- mrna in africa. the moderna vaccine is funded by the american taxpayer, if they share that knowledge, it can enable companies to produce enough for people in developing countries rather than now where they are reliant on from a suitable companies. anchor: we are running out of time, unfortunately. we appreciate your insight and look forward to talking to in the near future. and thank you to you for watching. you can see the program at any time by going to our website at al jazeera.com.

you can also join the conversation on twitter. from the entire team in doha, goodbye for now. ♪ ♪ óc

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