mohammed: covid cases arising again, along with variants of the virus. the world health organization says it wants its experts to return to china, to find out more about the origins of the disease. so, how much of a danger is this wave? this is "inside story." ♪ hello and welcome to the program. i'm mohammed jamjoom. only four years ago, the name covid hadn't even been invented. but today, it is a term known the world over after the worst

pandemic in living memory. how it started is unknown, but what is known is that it is still very much around. the extent is less than before, but latest figures show incidents of the disease is on the rise. there are many variants, too, of the virus mutates and develops as it spreads. that presents challenges to scientists working on developing vaccines that can cope with the new threats. covid-19 cases are on the rise in some countries. the world health organization says nearly 1.5 million new infections and more than 2500 deaths have been reported. from july to early august, the number of infections was up 80% on the previous month. the cases are driven by new variants. the w.h.o. says it is concerned about the spread in the northern hemisphere. governments are approving updated vaccines to tackle the new forms. covid-19 has killed nearly 7 million people since it was first detected in china in late 2019. the financial times has reported that the world health organization chief wants the w.h.o. experts to be allowed to return to china for more

investigations into how the disease started. a report after a previous visit was inconclusive. the two main theories are that the disease was transferred from animals to humans at a food market in wuhan or from a leak from the city's karol g laboratory. the w.h.o. chiefs has the answer is not known conclusively -- from the city's laboratory. the w.h.o. chief says that there is not known conclusively, but will be found. before we talk to our panel of guests, let's first speak with dr. maria van kerkhove who is the covid-19 technical lead at the who. dr. vanderhoff, thanks so much for being with us today on inside story, let me ask you first about the fact that the w.h.o. is urging china to offer more information on the origins of covid-19 and is ready to send a second team there to probe the matter? have you received any response from china thus far? guest: we still don't know how this pandemic began, and four years on, this question remains vitally important not only to understand how this one began, but to prevent the next one. so we have been working with our

colleagues in china diplomatically, scientifically, to advance our understanding. and we need collaboration. we need cooperation through scientific study, through different missions. we have actually had several missions to china and we had always envisioned there would be more missions to follow up the different hypotheses, to better understand early data collection, early cases, the importance of the market, any potential breach of biosafety, biosecurity in the lab. but we have yet to receive cooperation from china to be able to understand those earliest cases. mohammed: dr. van kerkhove, earlier this year, the w.h.o. declared that covid-19 no longer qualifies as a global health emergency. but that certainly doesn't mean covid-19 is no longer with us, right, the pandemic has not come to an end, correct? guest: that's right, the emergency of covid was declared over. but the threat is not. the virus is still with us, circulating in all countries. we have a really sharp decline in surveillance and reporting.

so we don't have good visibility on how much this virus is circulating in every country, only that we know that it is. we are seeing increases in case reporting in a number of countries, but more worrying is that we are seeing increases in hospitalization in the americas and in europe where there is good reporting. also seeing increases in deaths, increases in admissions to icu, four years in. this shouldn't happen given that we have tools that could actually prevent people from reading hospitalization, developing severe disease, mohammed: and dying. mohammed: the fact that the virus is mutating and changing, what does that say about the vaccine still being able to provide good protection against getting very sick? guest: the virus is evolving and we are seeing new variants being detected regularly. with so much speculation, the virus will mutate and more variants will emerge. what we don't know is if the variants will become severe or more severe. the worrying possibility is that

we would have a more severe variant. we need to make sure our countermeasures work, our diagnostics, that our vaccines will continue to provide protection against severe disease and death. so, surveillance remains important to be able to see what is circulating, its impact on the human population, but also to look at immune escape, to look at if the vaccines have to be updated. we have a process put in place looking at the variants themselves to characterize each of them. . , to see if they are variants of interest or concern over technical advisory group for covid-19 and position at the compositions of the current vaccines to see if any updates need to be made. there are updates coming out in terms of vaccines, but

vaccination and boosting, particularly among those who are most at risk, over 60 and over 70, people who are immunocompromised, people with underlying conditions, make sure they get the additional booster dose. if you haven't had a booster dose in the last six to 12 months, get one. do not wait. mohammed: dr. van kerkhove, we have seen around the world that vigilance has dropped good people are much more relaxed when it comes to covid-19. how much has surveillance of covid-19 decreased, and from your vantage point, our governments being vigilant enough? guest: surveillance has dropped significantly, and this puts us in a disadvantaged position to understand what is in circulation, what impact it is having. governments can't keep up the surveillance that they had at the peak of the pandemic. what we're doing now is working with governments to calibrate the system, what is the right amount of surveillance necessary? too many countries are declining surveillance tool much in terms of how much the virus is circulating. we need to be able to look at

trends in severity and hospitalizations and icu not just looking at within their own countries to take steps to mitigate those measures, but to report that to us so we could make risk assessments at regional and global levels. but we need countries to remain vigilant. individuals are living their lives because population level immunity has increased and they have some protection against severe disease and death. but governments cannot drop the ball. governments still need to remain vigilant for this virus in the context of everything else, not covid only, but covid in the context of influenza and rsv and other infectious diseases. but also, in the context of floods and droughts and fires, to be able to make sure that this is a disease we manage better. we can do much more to protect people against infection, against developing severe disease and dying. not at the expense of other programs and other diseases, but we have to get this response right. we are working on how we calibrate this response as we go

forward. so much more work needs to be done to be able to achieve this. mohammed: dr. maria van kerkhove, the covid-19 technical lead at the world health organization, thank you so much for joining us on inside story. great to talk to you and great to get your perspective. thank you. guest: thanks for having me. ♪ mohammed: alright, let's go ahead and bring in our guests. joining us from norwich in the u.k. is dr. paul hunter, professor in medicine at the university of east anglia. dr. patrick tang joins us by skype from here in doha. he is division chief of microbiology at sidra medicine. and joining by skype from bristol in the united kingdom, is dr. gabriel scally. he is professor of public health at bristol university. a warm welcome to each of you and thanks for joining us today on "inside story." patrick, let me start with you today. what danger does covid-19 pose, and how much cause for concern is there at this time? guest: first of all, thank you for having me. covid-19 has to be looked at in perspective of all the other

respiratory viruses also circulating, and all the other public health emergencies that we have to deal with right now. so what has happened from the beginning of the outbreak to know is we have built up over immunity both through our vaccination campaigns as well as our natural infection. much of the world has immunity either through one or both of those programs. we are in a much better position to handle new waves of the infection now. but it still remains a danger because the virus is evolving in a way that is faster than some of the other viruses that we have heard normally, like influenza, rsv and other viruses. so there is still a chance that it can become more serious or that it could be able to transmit in a more efficient when identities right now and has some kind of immune escape. we definitely need vigilance,

but it has to be put in perspective of all the other things that we face now. mohammed: paul, patrick was talking about the new waves of covid and the threat they pose. from your perspective, how much of a danger is the wave that we are currently experiencing? guest: there is a lot of things going on at the moment. there are the two new variants, the eg.5 and the b8.2.86 that have been recently described. the most recent one which has a lot of mutations has caused more concern, although at the moment it is still only responsible for less than 1% or 2% of infections in europe. but that may well change. there are a lot of mutations with that, but many of those mutations, we have seen before. so it has been very difficult to judge how much more of a problem this new variant will be

ultimately. some of the initial laboratory studies are looking like it might not be quite as bad as we had hoped, but it is still very early days and we need to monitor it carefully over the coming weeks before we can make a proper judgment. mohammed: paul was talking about mutations. the virus, as we know, it mutates. it changes all the time. do vaccines still provide good protection against getting very sick? guest: there is no doubt that vaccination should remain a very important part of programs in countries to combat covid-19. and unfortunately, however, some countries are restricting the level of vaccination, restricting the levels of boosters. then we have to remember that it is not just protecting the individual who has covid, it is also protecting other people. people who have vulnerabilities

or who are immunosuppressed. we know that covid is really, really dangerous in that situation, and we have seen during the rest of the pandemic really bad outbreaks in hospitals where people were very vulnerable. so to protect the vulnerable, we need to keep up levels of vaccination, change the vaccine. work is happening to try to catch up with the latest variants. so it is a constant process. the other constant process has to be vigilance. i think it is really unfortunate that countries are cutting back on their public health monitoring. in fact, many countries haven't -- well, they haven't strengthened their public health systems. we need stronger public health systems across all countries in order not just to deal with covid, but to deal with other threats as well. mohammed: gabriel, let me follow up with you because you make a good, point of being concerned with governments not doing enough. the fact that we went through

this pandemic and so many countries around the world were caught unawares, how much concern do you have that we are going to get caught unaware again, and why do you think that even after experiencing covid-19 , there is still this reluctance to invest more in public health programs? guest: it is very strange, isn't it? i think when you look at the sheer scale of covid, watched it across the world, it was such a shock in so many ways for so many countries economically and socially and educationally, in all sorts of ways. when vaccination came along and we managed to get covid under control to some extent, i think

there was a collective sigh of relief and a real wish to put it behind us. that is probably the reason. we haven't really looked hard yet, although there are countries inquiring into their poor performance. we haven't really seen the investment in public health systems and monetary and surveillance, and also the investment in our infrastructure, basic infrastructure or ventilation to make sure that people in schools and hospitals and factories in all sorts of places can have access to clean air, because clean air is the biggest protection that we have. mohammed: patrick, do we know if the latest iterations of the vaccine are effective against newer variants of covid like e g.5? guest: we do know that the new vaccines, you wouldn't even call them boosters anymore, they contain different viruses, the xbb variant of covid-19. that one is shown to be

effective against all the lineages that you are talking about. so we should expect that it should give good protection for people that are vulnerable like elderly people and immunocompromised people and people who have other serious comorbidities. paul, do you have an idea of where we are at the moment when it comes to vaccination rates around the world? are people still more or less getting vaccinated, getting the boosters, or has that really plummeted? guest: i think it has slumped. one of the things i would point out is that although there are two elements of the immunity to covid, one is that immunity to infection and the other is protection against severe disease if you do get infected. all of the vaccines give very durable protection against infection. but so far, we have seen very good protection against severe disease lasting many months.

and indeed, if you have actually had a vaccine and it infected and recovered from the infection already, that gives you good protection against needing to go to hospital if you do get infection. the vaccines to reduce transmission of infection, but not for very long, unfortunately. looking at a lot of the data, it is six months. six month after vaccination, more than half of people have lost protection against infection. but not against severe disease. some of that loss is because of the appearance of new escaped mutations. some of it is actually because of declining of short-lived immunity. to be honest, it's not a surprise, short duration of immunity to respiratory infections is something that we have known about for decades. mohammed: mm.

we should point out how remarkable it was and how quickly a vaccine was developed, and how quickly these boosters and new iterations of the vaccine seemed to be coming out and getting approved by different regulatory agencies. but we do know that the virus mutates, it changes and spreads. how much of a challenge does that pose to the scientists working on developing the newer iterations, the vaccines, the ones that can cope with the new threats? guest: we have spoken about the latest vaccine that has been licensed in the states, it is based on the xb1 virus, which was very common early on in the year around about easter. but now it is actually pretty rare. it is on its way out and it is being replaced by other variants, particularly at the moment, the eg.5, which is probably the communist individual variant in many countries now.

and so already, the variant that this new vaccine was directed at has already pretty much died out. but we are still seeing fairly reasonable protection, especially against severe disease, but also against infection from any of the viruses, against any of the new variants circulating. when people think that the new variants bypassing immunity from vaccine, it's never a total thing. it is always gradations. when you talk about hybrid immunity and people who have been vaccinated and had an infection, and almost all of us globally have actually already had one or two infections. looking at the data in the, in england, probably we have had

somewhere of the order about two and a half infections per person at the moment. but we're still seeing severe disease and the more vulnerable. taken together, the vaccines for people who need them the beer disease is still something that we will be giving for a few years yet. but we are, towards some sort of equilibrium with the virus. mohammed: patrick, in many parts of the road, testing for covid has been massively scaled back. her different doesn't make it what it comes to knowing how many people might have it and knowing how to deal with it more going forward? guest: there is a big challenge probably in every country around the world as the amount of people that are sick is going down. we have very little data to guide us in terms of how we manage the ongoing waves of covid-19. but in many countries, they have

instituted more passive ways such as environmental surveillance. doing things like wastewater surveillance and looking at the levels of the virus, they are persisting in the wastewater and that can reflect the activity , and sometimes even predates waves of virus in the community. so there are alternative ways of looking at it. and of course, you are right that our normal ways of surveillance are lacking right now. mohammed: gabriel, it looks like he wanted to jump in, i saw you reacting just then. guest: i think what we have to do is not rely totally on the solo magic bullet of the science of the vaccine and so on. we have to do some really fundamental stuff and that means putting in good ventilation and filtration systems so we can all have clean air. we don't have to go back a long way to find out how effective those were, and the way --

effect is, particularly in the northern hemisphere. we rebuilt most of our buildings to cope with tuberculosis when it was a huge pandemic across the northern hemisphere countries. we did change things. we boo built schools and rebuilt ventilation into hospitals in an innovative waves to reduce the spread of airborne disease. good investment now, not just in the surveillance of the public health systems that some of my colleagues have been talking about, but also in making places healthy for us to live and work in so that we can protect not just from covid, but from all the other respiratory threats spreading in our houses, schools, shops, or wherever we are. mohammed: patrick, it looked like you were reacting to some of what gabriel was saying.

guest: that is absolutely true, there are many other measures that we can put in to try to reduce the burden of respiratory diseases and the threat of other similar pandemics from happening. what has happened now is, during the pandemic, many of the viruses we normally deal with, like influenza and rsv, their patterns have also shifted. there is a bit of unpredictability in many of the other respiratory viruses. . we need to be on our toes in terms of being ready with the right vaccines, being ready with all of these other countermeasures, and improving our ability to reduce transmission within our indoor environment. those are important things that we have to do. and, of course, we can forget that we have to maintain funding for public health. i think that is something many people forget about after the pandemic and that is something that we have to keep telling the story, there are a lot of these verses still circulating.

there are outbreaks every year, all the time, with different viruses that may not make it into the news. mohammed: patrick, that is a good point. before covid, you had scientists, doctors, organizations saying that government should be investing more in public health. it is not new to hear those warnings. do you think that message is actually being heated, that more governments are taking that into account and are prepared to do more going forward? guest: we have to ride the momentum. it is really easy to lose that story amongst all the other things that are happening around the world. in the past, outbreaks cost the world tens of billions of dollars every in lost global economic output. so i think there definitely is an economic case for it. there is a case for it in almost everything, society, education. there is definitely a benefit to

preventing outbreaks and reducing the burden of infectious diseases globally. but we need examples for people and for governments to see, for them to take action. it is important that we keep vigilance about covid and keep telling the stories and remembering what happened during covid-19 so that we still are able to spur action, continued action against future pandemics. mohammed: paul, it looks like you wanted to to what patrick was saying. please go ahead. guest: public health has always suffered from the problem that when it does its job right, nobody notices and when it does not do its job right, nobody notices -- everybody notices. there are numerous episodes over our recent history of money being saved on public health initiatives that was then

dwarfed by the cost of coping with the outcome. gabriel mentioned tuberculosis. that the cutbacks in the u.s. tuberculosis program in the few decades back was followed by very much more problems with tuberculosis that cost far more than the original city is achieved. so it is a problem. leticia is generally have short memories. the same would vaccines, it is always easier to vaccinate people against influenza the year after epidemic than the year before pandemic. and how we deal with this both in public consumption and in political will, this, i think,

one of the biggest issues that we have to face in the coming years. mohammed: gabriel, i will give you the opportunity, we don't have a lot of time left, so before i let you talk, i have to ask you, it feels like many are acting like the pandemic is over, but the simple truth is it just isn't, correct? guest: absolutely. one of the things we have been touched down at all, which some economic commentators and finance or treasury department in the governments are commenting on is the sheer burden of long covid, the people who have had covid, the small percentage of them who go out to have really long-lasting and very disabling symptoms of all sorts. that burden needs to be factored in and we need to not only look after them well, we need to put our effort into trying to keep covid under control so it doesn't add to those burdens. there are big, economic as well as social and terrible health burdens on the individuals and their families.

that is really important. international corporation is absolutely vital around issues such as the distribution of vaccines. but each country needs to look at how they have done in terms of vaccination. i know of examples where there has been a real social class divide in terms of the uptick of vaccination and some of the people that are the least well-off community level, both geographically and may be issues of race and color and level of education and so on, they are not getting the vaccines that really would help them. so we need to be putting the effort now into trying to get the people who may be haven't been vaccinated at all through the course of the pandemic. mohammed: alright, we have run out of time so we have to leave the conversation there. thank you so much to all of our guests, dr. paul hunter dr. , patrick tang and dr. gabriel scally. and earlier thanks to dr. maria van kerkhove. and thank you too for watching. you can see the program again at any time by going to the website

at aljazeera.com. and for further discussion, go to our facebook page, that is facebook.com/ajinsidestory. you can also join the conversation on x, formerly known as twitter -- our handle is @ajinsidestory. firmly, mohammed jamjoom and the whole team here bye for now. ,♪