The leader
A
YEAR of tackling great challenges.” In the
title of our review of the year (see page 21),
“tackling” is the operative word. Two great
challenges have dominated the past 12 months: the
ongoing covid-19 pandemic, and efforts to address
climate change, as embodied by the COP26 summit
held in Glasgow, UK, in November. Both have seen
significant progress – but only the most irrational
optimist could claim that what we have achieved
so far amounts to solutions.
Our retrospective leader of 2020 was devoted
to the promise that vaccines might bring a swift
end to covid-19. At the time, more than 70 million
people had fallen ill with the virus, and according to
(undoubtedly conservative) quasi-official estimates,
1.5 million had died. Today, those figures stand at
almost 270 million and over 5 million. The world
looks to be entering a significant fourth wave.
It could have been so much worse. Vaccines have
indeed been a triumph in terms of lives saved and
serious health consequences averted, for those who
have received them (see page 22). Looking to the
future, the success of mRNA vaccines should lead
to many more jabs against other diseases, and also
to a whole new kind of treatment for all sorts of
conditions that uses mRNA technology to get
our bodies to make therapeutic proteins.
That justifies the three rousing cheers for science
that we allowed ourselves last year. But in terms of
ending the pandemic, the vaccine-boosted optimism
of the early part of the year has been undone by manyfactors, not least evolution doing what evolution does.
The predictable emergence of new, more transmissible
variants has complicated things, and new variants
could well keep emerging indefinitely (see page 8),
although as the world’s collective immune system
builds strength against SARS-CoV-2 over the years to
come, new emergences should cause less disruption.
What remains true is that vaccination is our best
protection. This makes tackling sources of vaccine
scepticism and hesitancy more vital than ever. It also
means that a great failure of the past year, to distribute
doses equitably across the globe based on need rather
than nationality, must be addressed with urgency.
Global inequities also made for an uncomfortable
backdrop to COP26 (see pages 29 and 34). The failure of
higher-income countries to come up with $100 billion
of finance a year for lower-income nations to
mitigate the effects of climate change was a source
of bad blood in the run-up to and during the summit.
And yet the political penny seems – finally – to
have dropped on climate. That was driven in no small
measure by extreme weather events, from the “heat
dome” over the western US and Canada to wildfires in
Greece and Turkey to flooding in Germany and China,
hammering home that climate change is here and its
effects are real (see page 30). All the talk from leaders
in Glasgow was of “following the science”. While a
huge gulf remains between political action and what
science says is needed to limit global warming to
1.5°C, COP26 at least provided progress on issues such
as “phasing down” fossil fuels, getting to grips withA spark of light
Climate change and covid-19 dominated 2021, but there is cause for rational optimism
4 | New Scientist | 18/25 December 2021
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