MOSCOW, July 2. /TASS/. Global vaccination will help reduce probability of new coronavirus mutations since they depend on the scale of the infection, Alexander Lukashev, director of the Institute of Medical Parasitology and Tropical Medicine, said on Friday.
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said earlier that coronavirus vaccines may lose their efficacy due to the coronavirus mutations and the solution to this problem was global vaccination.
"Global vaccination is necessary because non-vaccinated countries are a source of new virus variants. The matter is that the emergence of mutations depends on the number of infection cases, and, when there are hundreds of millions of them, we have much higher risks of new mutations than there are several million cases, i.e. a hundred times less," he said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel.
According to the expert, immunity to the coronavirus infection will fade away after the disease, and a person will catch only those virus variants that are immunity-resistant. "When we organize regular vaccination, if we monitor the immunity of the bulk of the population, the virus will not be able to circulate, and it will have much less possibilities to mutate and escape the vaccine," he added.
According to the latest statistics, around 182.7 million people have been infected worldwide, and more than 3.9 million deaths have been reported.
To date, 5,561,360 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Russia, with 5,035,518 patients having recovered from the disease. Russia’s latest data indicates 136,565 fatalities nationwide. The Russian government set up an Internet hotline to keep the public updated on the coronavirus situation.