Progress On the Pandemic 'Squandered'?

Sir Jeremy Farrar (Director of London's Wellcome Institute and a former scientific adviser to the UK government) suggests that, the emergence of Covid19's Omicron variant, "shows that the world is closer to the start of the pandemic than the end" (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/04/uks-progress-on-covid-now-squandered-warns-top-scientist). Farrar thinks that early progress in fighting Covid19 is "being squandered" by a lack of political leadership. His basic point, is that leaders in financially wealthy countries, have focused entirely on their own domestic situations. Politicians have convinced themselves that, the worst of the pandemic has passed, thanks to 'their' vaccination programmes and/or 'timely' travel restrictions. Farrar thinks that current vaccines will still protect those infected by the Omicron variant against serious illness. This he says, however, may well not be true of future variants. The surging of new Covid19 infections in both poor, largely unvaccinated countries and rich nations with higher vaccine uptakes, gives bags of scope for new viral mutations. The speed of viral replication is extraordinary. As many scientists (and the WHO) have been saying for ages, nobody is going to be 'safe', until the world is largely fully-vaccinated. Otherwise, every single Covid19 infection case is a mutations conveyor belt!