As more and more countries attempt to move on from the COVID pandemic—even as COVID cases in many of those countries are rising—global COVID vaccination efforts are likely to suffer.
POLITICO (US) reports, “With a more than $4 billion request stalled in Congress, USAID officials are now forced to plan for the possibility that their funding will run dry in the next few months, limiting their ability to vaccinate vulnerable populations in dozens of countries…. The lack of funding threatens to undermine Biden’s June 2021 pledge to help end the pandemic worldwide by providing an ‘arsenal’ of vaccines. And it would limit USAID’s ability to fulfill its mission—to help save lives—at a time when millions of people are still unprotected and at risk of getting COVID.”
A comment in
Nature (UK) argues, “Speeding up development of new vaccines won’t help much in the next pandemic, unless world leaders work faster to roll out vaccination globally…. [Delays in vaccination] translate into millions of avoidable hospitalizations and deaths. They are mainly the result of inadequate global supplies of vaccine doses, and the challenges of planning, resourcing and implementing vast vaccination programmes in countries with already strained health systems.”
If You Are in a Hurry
- Read Stephanie Nolen in The New York Times on trying to understand the true impact of COVID in Africa.
- Then read Nature on data from Zambia that suggests the cases and deaths there are much higher than reported.
- Read STAT on the US NIH’s slow start on long COVID research.
- Read Global Health Now on spillover vaccine hesitancy from COVID to HPV in Zimbabwe.
- Read an interview in Slate with David France on his new documentary How to Survive a Pandemic.
- Read an editorial in Nature that argues now is not the time to stop COVID surveillance programs.
- Read Science on a scary uptick in harassment of scientists during the pandemic.
Pandemic Twitter
Science (US) reports, “the pandemic prompted many scientists—and the public—to turn to social media to share and learn about hot new findings. COVID-19 ‘changed the game’ because the threat ‘immediately connects with the public, [so] there’s a much bigger natural audience’ for information about pandemic science than for most areas of research, says Michael Thelwall, a data scientist at the University of Wolverhampton, City Campus, who studies social media. In particular, Twitter has become a go-to resource for anyone trying to make sense of the torrent of pandemic studies—and for those intent on quickly pushing back against misinformation…. As the pandemic wanes, scientists on Twitter may wonder whether the platform can also advance their own research or careers. The evidence is mixed. Before and during the pandemic, studies by Costas Comesana and others found little correlation between the attention a publication gets on social media and its number of citations—the usual measure of scholarly impact.”
Getting to the True Impact of COVID on Africa
Nature (UK) reports, “Almost one-third of more than 1,000 bodies taken to a morgue in Lusaka in 2020 and 2021 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, implying that many more people died of COVID-19 in Zambia’s capital than official numbers suggest. Some scientists say that the findings further undermine the ‘African paradox’, a narrative that the pandemic was less severe in Africa than in other parts of the world.”
Stephanie Nolen reports in
The New York Times (US), “The low rate of coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths in West and Central Africa is the focus of a debate that has divided scientists on the continent and beyond. Have the sick or dead simply not been counted? If COVID has in fact done less damage here, why is that? If it has been just as vicious, how have we missed it? ... Into Year Three of the pandemic, new research shows there is no longer any question of whether COVID has spread widely in Africa. It has.”
More on COVID and Racial Inequities
Healio (US) reports in the US, “Black patients with cancer had worse COVID-19 outcomes than white patients, according to results of a retrospective cohort study published in
JAMA Network Open…. Researchers concluded that, despite having similar cancer statuses as their white counterparts, Black patients with cancer and COVID-19 demonstrated worse preexisting comorbidities, more severe COVID-19 at presentation and worse outcomes. ‘This is a call for action to eradicate root causes of racial inequities, within the causal framework of structural racism, to reduce the disproportionate burden of diseases, such as COVID-19 and cancer, among Black patients and, possibly, other minority racial and ethnic groups,’ Fu and colleagues wrote.”
Healio (US) reports, At-home testing for COVID-19 more than tripled during the omicron wave in the United States, but there were disparities in the tests’ use, according to a study published Friday in
MMWR. Data showed at-home testing was less common among people who were older, Black, had a lower income and a high school education level or less…. ‘Rapid, at-home diagnostic testing can provide convenient access to assessment of SARS-CoV-2 infection,’ Rader and colleagues wrote. ‘Providing reliable and low-cost or free at-home test kits to underserved populations with otherwise limited access to COVID-19 testing could assist with continued prevention efforts.’”
Long COVID
STAT (US) reports on critiques of the US NIH’s long COVID program. “Fifteen months ago, Congress showered the agency with a massive $1.2 billion to research the mysterious cases of patients who never fully recover from COVID-19 infections. But so far the NIH has brought in just 3 percent of the patients it plans to recruit. Critics charge that the NIH’s missteps are even bigger: that it is acting without urgency, that it is taking on vague, open-ended research questions rather than testing out therapies or treatments, and that it is not being fully transparent with patient advocates and researchers.”
Nature (UK) looks at the potential impact of drugs on reducing the risk of long COVID. Some researchers, “are hoping to learn more about whether treatments given during the acute phase of COVID-19 can reduce the risk of experiencing symptoms months later. ‘It’s an urgent and pressing health need that people need to start focusing on,’ says intensive-care specialist Charlotte Summers, at the University of Cambridge, UK…. Beyond vaccination, it’s unclear whether any existing COVID-19 therapy has an effect on long-COVID risk. In theory, a drug that reduces disease severity might reduce the severity of long-term symptoms, says Altmann. But long COVID is not always associated with serious acute illness. ‘There are loads of people out there who are really destroyed by long COVID and had asymptomatic or near asymptomatic infections,’ he says. ‘It’s really hard to grapple with.’”
Documenting the Pandemic
Slate (US) reports on journalist and director David France’s documentary
How to Survive a Pandemic, a ‘sequel of sorts” to his HIV documentary
How to Survive a Plague. “The movie’s first half focuses on the race to develop the vaccine, featuring many scientists who cut their teeth on HIV research. (Anthony Fauci looms large in both movies, but now France knows him well enough to conduct their interview over a glass of wine.) Midway through, an ominous “Part II” caption appears on screen, the transition to when the issue is not whether the vaccine exists but whom it’s available to, and the people who won’t take it even though they can. The movie briefly acknowledges both vaccine hesitancy and more militant anti-vax sentiment in the United States, but its real focus in the second half is on the rest of the world, especially countries outside Europe and North America, where vaccines have been prohibitively priced or simply impossible to obtain. It’s a sobering reminder, even as the US rushes to get back to pre-pandemic normal, how far we’ve let others fall behind and how impossible it is to separate our fates from theirs.”
COVID and Data
Nature (UK) looks at lessons learned from creators of data dashboards about communicating science through the pandemic. “COVID-19 dashboards mushroomed around the world in 2020 as data scientists and journalists shifted their work to tracking and presenting information on the pandemic — from infection and death rates, to vaccination data and other variables. ‘You didn’t have any data set before that was so essential to how you plan your life,’ says Lisa Charlotte Muth, a data designer and blogger at Datawrapper, a Berlin-based company that helps newsrooms and journalists to enrich their reporting with embeddable charts. ‘The weather, maybe, was the closest thing you could compare it to.’”
An editorial in
Nature (UK) argues, “From the way political leaders in many high-income nations are talking and acting, it would be easy to think that the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer worth keeping track of…. Surveillance and reporting of the virus’s movements are starting to slow just at a time when a highly infectious subvariant of Omicron, BA.2, is spilling out across the world and case rates and hospitalizations are creeping back up. These cutbacks are not based on evidence. They are political, and they could have disastrous consequences for the world. Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead for COVID-19 at the World Health Organization (WHO), says it’s crucial that ‘the systems that have been put in place for surveillance, for testing, for sequencing right now be reinforced, that they are not taken apart’.”
Omicron and China
AP (US) reports, “China began its most extensive coronavirus lockdown in two years Monday to conduct mass testing and control a growing outbreak in Shanghai…. China’s financial capital and largest city with 26 million people, had managed its smaller previous outbreaks with limited lockdowns of housing compounds and workplaces where the virus was spreading. But the citywide lockdown that will be conducted in two phases will be China’s most extensive since the central city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, confined its 11 million people to their homes for 76 days in early 2020. Millions more have been kept in lockdown since then.”
Nature (UK) reports that while China appears to be trying to maintain a “zero COVID” policy, “All eyes are on China as it attempts to quash its largest COVID-19 outbreaks since the early days of the pandemic. More than 62,000 people across all 31 of its provinces are infected, most of them with the fast-spreading BA.2 Omicron variant…. China’s large domestic economy has made a zero-COVID strategy more sustainable than it has been in places with smaller populations, such as New Zealand and Singapore. But it can’t last forever. The stock market index is falling, suggesting that China’s economy is suffering, and Cowling says that disruptive outbreaks will become more frequent as the virus circulates freely elsewhere.”
COVID and Ukraine
The Atlantic (US) reports, “With its 35 percent vaccination rate, Ukraine was especially vulnerable even before the invasion forced 10 million people from their homes. That much of the population must now cram together in packed train cars and basement bomb shelters will not help matters. WHO’s Paul Spiegel says of refugees he is seeing in Poland: “So far, at least from what we’re seeing, we’re not yet aware of an increase in epidemics with the refugee movement. It’s often characterized—
really stigmatized and stereotyped—as ‘refugees spread diseases.’ And it’s not the refugees. It depends on what the prevalence may have been where they’re coming from. But if there is spread, it’s because of the conditions and the vulnerabilities and risk factors that they’re exposed to…. Right now we’re seeing a surge in some parts of Europe, and therefore we might see an increase in certain countries where the Ukrainians are now, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that that’s occurring because of the Ukrainian refugees.”
Increased Harassment of Scientists
Science (US) reports, “When, in March 2020, a science story became the biggest news story in the world, scientists became household names overnight, even celebrities. But many also became the targets of new and extreme levels of harassment, intimidation, and threats. UK Chief Medical Advisor Chris Whitty was
accosted by two men in a London park; disease ecologist Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance received a
letter containing white powder that resembled anthrax; Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst and his family were moved to a safe house after he was
threatened by a former soldier who was later found dead in a national park.” A
Science survey of more than 500 researchers who have published on COVID found “38 percent reported at least one type of attack, ranging from insults to death threats, delivered on social media, by email or phone, or sometimes even in person. Those who were harassed described a range of effects on their lives, including workplace problems and mental health issues.”
Flu and COVID
CIDRAP (US) reports, “Adult COVID-19 patients also infected with the flu are four times more likely to require mechanical ventilation and 2.4 times more likely to die than if they had COVID-19 alone, finds a UK
study published late last week in
The Lancet.” A study author argues, “We expect that COVID-19 will circulate with flu, increasing the chance of co-infections. That is why we should change our testing strategy for COVID-19 patients in hospital and test for flu much more widely."
Possible Impact of COVID Drugs
Vox (US) reports, “The new oral antivirals, which arrived with considerably less fanfare than vaccines in late 2020, have the potential to reshape the contours of the pandemic going forward—not just for those at high risk, but also in surprising ways for those who aren’t. Their arrival also marks a potential new era of renewed investment in broadly useful antivirals that could fight not just COVID-19, but also other deadly viruses that have yet to emerge. However, delivering them equitably and in a very short time frame, and the looming threat of resistance, suggest that they face a road pockmarked with challenges.”
Tobacco Ties Damage Canadian Vaccine’s Adoption
Reuters (UK) reports, “Canadian vaccine maker Medicago's COVID-19 vaccine, approved last month in Canada, is facing limited growth in the near-term after the World Health Organization said it would not review the vaccine because the company is partly owned by US-Swiss tobacco company Philip Morris, health experts say. The WHO said at a briefing this month and in a follow-up statement to Reuters that it has not accepted an application for the vaccine because of its 2005 public health treaty requiring no involvement with any company that produces or promotes tobacco-based products.”
Vaccine Hesitancy
Global Health Now (US) reports in Zimbabwe, “While COVID-19’s impact on prevention and treatment of cervical cancer hasn’t yet been rigorously studied, ‘anecdotal reports point towards reduced utilization of services,’ according to
a Pan African Medical Journal article published last year by the University of Zimbabwe Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences’ Grant Murewanhema…. As the country gradually returns to the normal school calendar, health authorities are looking to scale up HPV vaccination again. But they face a new challenge: creeping mistrust in vaccines caused by misinformation spread on social media.”
Botswana Plans Vaccine Manufacturing
Bloomberg (US) reports, “Corbevax, a COVID-19 vaccine developed in Texas, has been approved for use in Botswana, according to US biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong. Doses of the vaccine currently in production have been reserved for the country, he said at a ceremony on Monday in the southern African nation’s capital, Gaborone. It will ultimately be made at a local factory called Pula Corbevax, Botswanan President Mokgweetsi Masisi said.”
