Harpreeth Randhawa is now in Delhi for a week with his parents, his brother and his childhood friends.

The scientist from Singapore has not seen her for almost two years because of Corona.

In between, relatives died from the pandemic.

He desperately sent them an oxygen device that he had bought over the Internet in Hong Kong.

He spent hours completing the customs formalities.

"At the moment, at most every second person here is wearing a mask, perhaps every tenth student among the schoolchildren," he says on the phone, astonished about his hometown.

His family is aware of the danger of an approaching omicron wave.

"But, those who toil in the informal economy can hardly protect themselves anyway."

And that is almost 80 percent of those able to work in India.

In an immense effort, the country with almost 1.4 billion people vaccinated around 530 million people for the second time, mainly with the vaccine from Astra-Zeneca, under the local brand name Covishield.

In other words: a good 800 million people on the subcontinent are hardly prepared for another wave.

"Boosters" or the vaccination of children are not yet possible, the more effective vaccines from Biontech / Pfizer or Moderna are not accessible to the masses.

After the catastrophe of the second wave in spring, when the pyre with the dead along the riverbank no longer wanted to go out, relaxation nevertheless set in - through getting used to: If more than 4,000 corona deaths were officially complained in May, there are currently 264. Less The country has 50,000 new infections, but the Omicron variant is beginning to spread.

A global vaccination campaign is needed

Due to the constant change in the infection situation, such numbers in the pandemic are only a snapshot.

As in India, where more than half of the people have not been offered a vaccination, it is in much of the world.

In the poorer countries of Asia and Africa, efforts by the world community to launch a global vaccination campaign have hardly borne fruit.

The more unsuccessful this is, the greater the likelihood that the corona virus will remain unpredictable due to further mutations and that new vaccines will be necessary.

Successful vaccinations in affluent countries are digging away their own foundations because global solidarity is not working as it should.

"This is due to a supply shortage," said Joseph Stiglitz, neo-Keynesian professor at Columbia University in New York and Nobel Memorial Prize winner, of the FAZ on the phone.

One of the main reasons for this is the intellectual property rights that keep manufacturers from making vaccine.

The few developers of vaccines combined the profit.

"Your economic incentive is to maintain monopoly prices."