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AVAC's weekly COVID News Brief provides a curated perspective on what COVID news is worth your time.
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"The work ahead will be more challenging than ever and requires well designed, adequately funded, and strategically coordinated efforts at the national, regional, state, and local levels. The time is now to recognize health equity is the work of everyone and for each one of us to do our part on the journey."
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Share of People Who Completed the Initial COVID-19 Vaccination Protocol
April 5, 2022
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Much of the world seems determined to move on from the COVID pandemic, even as new variants emerge and hopes of fully vaccinating the world fade. POLITICO (US) reports, “Global health organizations are considering changing their COVID-19 vaccination pledges—a move that could leave millions of people without first shots as countries reprioritize at-risk groups…. Now, many health organizations involved in the global vaccination effort aim to immunize 90 percent of vulnerable populations in every country—a move that seems to undercut the WHO’s 70 percent target.” ONE Campaign’s Gayle Smith is quoted: “The 70 percent target is still smart. But the practical reality is that there are not going to be sufficient vaccines plus the resources that are necessary to deliver them to get to 70 percent at the same pace that we’ve been able to do in wealthier countries.”
This potential shift in global vaccination plans comes as the US government’s support for global vaccine efforts is faltering. PBS Newshour (US) reports, “Senate bargainers reached agreement Monday on a slimmed-down $10 billion package for countering COVID-19 with treatments, vaccines and other steps, the top Democratic and Republican negotiators said, but the measure dropped all funding to help nations abroad combat the pandemic.”
If You Are in a Hurry
- Read Mitchell Warren in The Hill on the need to boost delivery of interventions for COVID, TB, HIV and other diseases where poverty is entrenched.
- Read a report from the Black Coalition Against COVID that looks at the consequences of the pandemic for Black America.
- Then read NBC News on a Social Science and Medicine study that found White Americans cared less about pandemic safety precautions when they knew the pandemic was disproportionately affecting Black people and other people of color.
- Read Nature on Pfizer denying access to its COVID treatment drug to a critical trial in 10 African countries.
- Read Jon Cohen in Science on research that showed Donald Trump could influence some people to be vaccinated.
- Read Washington Post on a move to reform the US CDC following what has been categorized by some as a disastrous response to COVID.
- Read Vox on how to prepare vaccines and treatments for the next pandemic and Nature on models to help determine vaccine doses for the next pandemic.
- Read CNN (US) on data from the first human challenge trial for COVID published in Nature Medicine.
- Read Devex on a coming report from WHO on excess mortality that some countries don’t want published.
- Read The New York Times on a large study that shows ivermectin does not work against COVID.
Vaccination Rates and Vaccine Supply
Axios (US) reports, “COVID vaccine supply struggles are easing, but in 44 countries—most of them in Africa—less than 20 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. In 19, the rate is under 10 percent.” Most of these countries have or have access to vaccine doses, but “after a year of waiting for vaccine doses, the primary concern is now delivery.” Bloomberg (US reports), “The African Union and COVAX… decided not to obtain more of the [Moderna] vaccine as developing nations struggle to turn supplies into inoculations. Lower-income countries left behind in the global rollout are now grappling with a lack of funds, hesitancy, supply-chain obstacles and other factors that are hampering distribution.”
Boosting Equity for Global Health
In an opinion piece in The Hill (US) Mitchell Warren writes, “COVID-19 has shown us the fragility of our efforts to end diseases in places where poverty is entrenched…. We invest hundreds of millions in large trials but nothing similar on how to disseminate the results to achieve public health impact. This is not unique to any one disease: We have seen it in the lack of global vaccine equity in the COVID-19 response and we’ve seen it in TB and HIV…. We are achieving breakthroughs in developing new medicines and vaccines, but we are failing to deliver them with equity and with impact. It is well past time to do better—to reduce the time from discovery to impact and to ensure that the impact is equitably distributed.”
COVID Treatment Access
Nature (UK) reports, “Researchers in a pivotal African clinical trial have been denied access to a key COVID-19 antiviral drug, frustrating efforts to test the treatment in African populations and in combination with therapies that could potentially expand its utility on the continent…. DNDi’s inability to obtain medicine for clinical trials compounds ongoing inequities in access to vaccines and treatments, including Paxlovid, in low- and middle-income countries, says Brook Baker, a law professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, who specializes in global access to medicines and vaccines. ‘This is a trial in a population that needs to be studied,’ he says. ‘Why don’t we get on with it?’”
A New Way to Reach Some Vaccine Skeptics
And it’s backed by research. Science (US) reports, “A creative effort to use former President Donald Trump to persuade people to get a COVID-19 vaccine shot appears to have paid off. An online advertisement created by a team of political scientists and economists that featured Trump recommending COVID-19 shots led to increased uptake of the vaccines in US counties that had low vaccination rates, concludes a new analysis…. Trump wasn’t always persuasive. In about half the counties in which the ad was seen, support for Trump was at 70 percent or higher in 2020. But they observed the most new vaccinations in the other half of the counties, where support for Trump was less intense. That suggests even a message coming from Trump had little impact on some of his most committed supporters.”
US CDC Under Fire Moves to Reform
The Washington Post (US) reports, “[CDC] Director Rochelle Walensky announced plans Monday to revamp the agency that has come under blistering criticism for its performance leading the US response to the coronavirus pandemic, saying, ‘it is time to step back and strategically position CDC to support the future of public health.’”
An opinion piece in The Guardian (UK) from The People’s CDC… a collective of public health practitioners, scientists, healthcare workers, educators, advocates and people from all walks of life who care about reducing the harmful impacts of COVID-19” argues that new CDC guidelines are minimizing the true continued risk from the virus. “Some claim that the White House and the CDC are ‘following the science’ and doing the best they can in these times. But if the goal is to prevent infection and suffering, the updated recommendations do not align with science or equity. It’s more accurate to say they’re following the money. They’ve put the desires of corporate America above the needs of our people, and especially our most vulnerable.”
Meanwhile, National Geographic (US) reports, “A trove of government documents obtained by National Geographic provides the first behind-the-scenes look at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) investigation into a suspected COVID-19 animal-to-human spillover event in Michigan in late 2020. The documents, and the agency’s statements in response to them, make clear the CDC was aware that mink on a fur farm may have infected humans at least three months before it quietly updated its website in March 2021.”
Preparing for the Next Pandemic
Vox (US) looks at what’s needed to speed development and deployment of vaccines and treatments for the next pandemic. "Such a plan would launch research and development efforts targeting pathogens with pandemic potential, stand up an infrastructure to accelerate the testing of candidate vaccines and antivirals, and pump funding into both. The virus next time will require a faster response from governments and a longer view from policymakers, who need to see that a dollar spent on prevention today will save many more dollars and lives in the future. Speed and time are of the essence. The reality, as we see this pandemic fade in the rear view, is that the fight against the next one begins now.”
Nature (UK) reports, “For vaccine dosing decisions, past experience and best guesses won the day in the mad rush to beat back the pandemic. Modelling tools might have made a difference…. A growing number of scientists think that the industry can do better. With an eye towards optimizing immune responses, they have been developing mathematical and computational models over the past several years to inform dose decision-making for vaccine trials. Not everyone is convinced the models are ready for prime time; many aren’t even aware that the platforms exist. But those who embrace the technology say that, if companies had simply capitalized on all the tools at their disposal, COVID-19 vaccines might be doing an even better job at containing viral spread and limiting collateral damage.
The Star (Kenya) reports, “World Health Organization is inviting Kenyans to give views regarding a proposed global treaty to prevent future pandemics. President Uhuru Kenyatta first mooted the treaty alongside 24 other world leaders in March last year… [Health CS Mutahi] Kagwe said Kenya believes that equity should be both a guiding principle and a goal. ‘We have failed in a sense to appreciate that this disease is an attack at a global level, no respecter of national boundaries and affects all countries indiscriminately. The world must work like a single army defending ourselves against a common enemy with each member state being the other’s keeper.’”
Understanding the True Death Rates from COVID
Devex (US) reports, “Officially, over 6 million people around the world have died of COVID-19. But that does not capture the true impact of the pandemic, as many countries simply don’t have the capacity to record deaths accurately and the global toll does not account for deaths that occurred as collateral damage due to health systems being stressed beyond their capacity.” WHO is expected to publish estimates of global excess deaths in April and a Devex editor’s sources “say these estimates place the actual death toll at more than double the 6.14 million figure, at a minimum…. Not all countries are expected to appreciate this new information because they feel ‘it’s either blaming them for incompetence or for obfuscation of data,’ says Ariel Karlinsky, a data scientist who co-created the World Mortality Dataset and is part of a WHO technical advisory group on assessing COVID-19 mortality.”
Times of India (India) reports, “An imminent World Health Organization (WHO) report is likely to label India as the country with the highest number of COVID deaths. The report, expected in early April, will likely announce an estimate for India that’s at least four times the current toll of 5.2 lakh…”
The Star (Singapore) reports, “Singapore saw excess deaths last year, which experts said reflected not just COVID-19 fatalities but also how the pandemic might have indirectly caused some people to receive medical help later due to the crisis…. In Singapore, the number of deaths each year usually goes up by a few hundred, in line with both an ageing and growing population. But last year, it went up by 2,220.”
COVID and Diabetes
Nature (UK) reports, “People who get COVID-19 have a greater risk of developing diabetes up to a year later, even after a mild SARS-CoV-2 infection, compared with those who never had the disease, a massive study of almost 200,000 people shows…. ‘When this whole pandemic recedes, we’re going to be left with the legacy of this pandemic—a legacy of chronic disease’ for which health-care systems are unprepared, says study co-author Ziyad Al-Aly, chief researcher for the Veterans Affairs (VA) St Louis Healthcare System in Missouri.”
The New York Times (US) reports, “After older people and nursing home residents, perhaps no group has been harder hit by the pandemic than people with diabetes. Several studies suggest that 30 to 40 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the United States have occurred among people with diabetes, a sobering figure that has been subsumed by other grim data from a public health disaster that is on track to claim a million American lives sometime this month.”
Human Challenge Studies Provide Data
CNN (US) reports on a Nature Medicine published study “hat deliberately infected healthy volunteers with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.” Among 36 young, healthy participants who “got a tiny drop of fluid containing the originally detected strain of the virus through a long, thin tube inserted into their nose…a total of 18 participants became infected, two of whom never developed symptoms. Among the people who got sick, their illnesses were mild. They had stuffy noses, congestion, sneezing and sore throats…”
This Week’s Fact Check
It’s impossible to catalog and counter all of the misinformation about COVID that appears on social media, but fact checkers are working hard to combat much of the viral disinformation. Reuters (UK) reports, “Social media users are sharing the false claim that people aged 25 to 44 in the United States experienced an 84 percent increase in excess mortality due to the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.” Reuters Fact Check Team’s verdict: “Misleading. There is no evidence that there was an 84 percent increase in excess deaths for people aged between 25 and 44 due to COVID-19 vaccines, as claimed in a video on social media. CDC data shows excess deaths related to COVID-19, not COVID-19 vaccines. CDC told Reuters other factors may also have contributed to excess deaths in millennials.”
New Viral Subtypes in UK and China
Bloomberg (US) reports Chinese state media is “reporting a case infected with a new subtype of the omicron variant. The new iteration of the virus, isolated from a mild COVID-19 patient … evolves from the BA.1.1 branch of the omicron variant… The report said the subtype doesn’t match other coronavirus that’s causing COVID in China nor those submitted to GISAID, where scientists around the world share the coronavirus they sequenced as a way to monitor mutations.”
ABC News (US) reports, “A new COVID-19 variant has been identified in the United Kingdom, but experts say there is no cause for alarm yet. The variant, known as XE, is a combination of the original BA.1 omicron variant and its subvariant BA.2. This type of combination is known as a ‘recombinant’ variant…. An early indication from the UK suggests XE could be slightly more transmissible than BA.2, but the World Health Organization said more research is needed.”
Continued vigilance in funding and tracing variants is critical to helping to end the pandemic. Nature (UK) reports, “Many countries sequencing SARS-CoV-2 genomes are sharing only a fraction of them on public repositories—and many sequences are missing important information, according to a global analysis of genomic surveillance. But the study also found that despite these challenges, countries have become faster at sharing sequences over the course of the pandemic.”
Racial Inequities
A report from the Black Coalition Against COVID looks at the consequences of the pandemic for Black America. “This report draws attention to the continued disproportionate burden experienced by members of the Black community and will help guide advocacy and policy efforts to address these inequities—both during the current pandemic and beyond.” Among the findings: “The severity of COVID-19 among Black Americans was the predictable result of structural and societal realities, not differences in genetic predisposition. Black Americans are overrepresented in essential worker positions which increased their risk of getting COVID-19. … Black Americans are also more likely to live in multi-generational homes, live in crowded conditions, be incarcerated, and reside in densely populated urban areas compared to White Americans, which made social distancing difficult. Pre-existing structural and social inequities that have long driven disparities were key risk factors for COVID-19. Those factors included exposure to environmental toxins, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease—contributing to greater risk for infection and serious illness. The higher prevalence of these risk factors is a result of differential access to high quality care and health promoting resources necessary to prevent, diagnose, and appropriately manage chronic conditions.”
WebMD (US) reports, “American Indian and Alaska Native populations admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 have experienced higher death rates than Black and white patients, according to a study published Wednesday by JAMA Network Open…. Authors noted that as of November 2021, American Indian and Alaska Native populations were 1.6 times more likely to have COVID-19, 3.3 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 2.2 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than non-Hispanic White Americans.”
NBC News (US) reports on a Social Science and Medicine published study which “found that White people surveyed in the United States in fall 2020 cared less and were even more likely to shun pandemic safety precautions after learning about the disproportionate ways it impacts Black communities and other communities of color. ‘When White people in the US were more aware of racial disparities in COVID-19, they were less fearful of COVID-19,’ said Allison Skinner-Dorkenoo, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Georgia and co-author of the study. ‘We found evidence of less empathy for people who are vulnerable to COVID-19 and we also found evidence of reduced support for safety precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19.’ She added that the findings show that White people tend to care less about COVID and its impact when they believe it is ‘not a White people problem.’”
More Evidence Ivermectin Does Not Work
The New York Times (US) reports, “The anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, which has surged in popularity as an alternative treatment for COVID-19 despite a lack of strong research to back it up, showed no sign of alleviating the disease, according to results of a large clinical trial…. The study, which compared more than 1,300 people infected with the coronavirus in Brazil who received either ivermectin or a placebo, effectively ruled out the drug as a treatment for COVID, the study’s authors said."
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