COVID News Brief: The news you need to know

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AVAC's weekly COVID News Brief provides a curated perspective on what COVID news is worth your time.
"‘Two months ago, it looked as if Ebola would cast a dark shadow over the country well into 2023 as the outbreak reached major cities such as Kampala and Jinja, but this win starts off the year on a note of great hope for Africa."
-- WHO Africa Director Matshidiso Moeti in The Washington Post ([link removed])


** Share of People Who Completed the Initial COVID-19 Vaccination Protocol
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January 12, 2023
Source: Our World in Data ([link removed])


** Table of Contents
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* If You Are in a Hurry (#If You Are in a Hurry)
* Pandemic Preparedness (#Pandemic Preparedness)
* What’s Next for Mpox as Attention Shifts Away? (#What’s Next for Mpox as Attention Shifts Away?)
* Politics and Pandemics (#Politics and Pandemics)


* Tracking Human Respiratory Infections (#Tracking Human Respiratory Infections)
* The Latest on Omicron (#The Latest on Omicron)
* COVID-19 in China (#COVID-19 in China)
* Animals and SARS-CoV-2 (#Animals and SARS-CoV-2)

There is good news for Uganda: Last year’s Ebola outbreak is officially over. With a death toll of at least 55, including seven healthcare workers the outbreak was serious, but was relatively quickly contained. Washington Post ([link removed]) (US) reports The WHO and the Ugandan government have declared the country Ebola-free. “Health Minister Ruth Aceng told journalists that no new cases had been registered in the past 42 days. This outbreak was the first in a decade of the less common Sudan strain which, unlike the Zaire strain that has caused outbreaks in neighboring Congo in recent years, has no proven vaccine or therapeutics…. ‘With no vaccines and therapeutics, this was one of the most challenging Ebola outbreaks in the past five years,’ WHO Africa director Matshidiso Moeti said. ‘Two months ago, it looked as if Ebola would cast a dark shadow over
the country well into 2023 as the outbreak reached major cities such as Kampala and Jinja, but this win starts off the year on a note of great hope for Africa.’… Plans to test three potential vaccines for the Sudan strain…will go ahead in Uganda…global health experts will meet Thursday to decide on when and how the trials should begin.”




** If You Are in a Hurry
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* Read Jerome Kim in STAT ([link removed]) on what’s missing in global pandemic preparations.
* Read STAT ([link removed]) on concerns about missing new mpox cases as cases decline in many countries and attention shifts from the outbreak.
* Read Foreign Policy ([link removed]) on the pandemic failures of all types of governments.
* Read Nature ([link removed]) on the latest Omicron subvariant and what’s its spread could mean.
* Read Dhruv Khullar’s comment in The New Yorker ([link removed]) (US) about what an outbreak that “touches a sixth of humanity” could mean for COVID-19 spread and new variants.




** Pandemic Preparedness
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Jerome Kim, the director general of the International Vaccine Institute, writes in a STAT ([link removed]) (US) opinion piece, “We are in an age of epidemics and pandemics. Ebola was the latest in the wave of global contagions seen in the first decades of the 21st century, which COVID-19 has put an exclamation point on…. With the ease of global travel today, the growth of cities, deforestation, and the impacts of climate change, the risk of infectious disease outbreaks is increasing with no end in sight. I see four gaps in the global response to COVID-19 — diagnostics, vaccine supply, vaccination, and leadership — that highlight the international community’s failures. The first three are straightforward technical and funding propositions; the gap in pandemic leadership is at once the broadest and most intractable.”



** What’s Next for Mpox as Attention Shifts Away?
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STAT ([link removed]) (US) reports, “As the trajectory of the outbreak has shifted, mpox has faded from the public discourse. But the dwindling case counts obscure an important reality: The global footprint of a disease that until a few years ago could only be contracted in remote parts of a few countries in West or Central Africa has expanded substantially. The risk still remains very low for most people, but one can now catch mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) in Europe, in North, Central or South America, or elsewhere. In fact, in Paraguay, Panama and El Salvador, case reports are rising. Last August, a family of four — father, mother, two young daughters — contracted the virus in Southern France, French researchers reported recently…. ‘The explosive period of the outbreak is now over, but the outbreak itself is not,’ said Rosamund Lewis, the World Health Organization’s point person on poxviruses.
‘The future is going to look different from the past. The poxviruses are here with us to stay. We will learn a lot more about them, and they still reserve many surprises for us,’ Lewis told STAT.”

CIDRAP ([link removed]) (US) reports, “A large study of patients seen at sexual health clinics in London found low numbers of mpox cases after vaccination with one dose of modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA-BN) vaccine. A team from the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) reported their findings this week in BMJ Sexually Transmitted Diseases ([link removed]) . In other research developments, a team led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today reported that though cisgender women only made up less than 3 percent of US mpox cases, Black and Hispanic patients were disproportionately affected, similar to the pattern seen in men.



** Politics and Pandemics
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The politicization of COVID-19 and COVID-19 information continues in 2023. Washington Post ([link removed]) (US) reports, “House Republicans on Monday commissioned a special investigative panel focused on the coronavirus pandemic, hoping to leverage their new, powerful majority to press scientists and federal officials about the origin of the public health crisis and the government’s response to it…. At the center of GOP criticism is the suspicion that the coronavirus originated out of laboratory experiments in Wuhan, China, potentially backed by US money — a view at odds with peer-reviewed scientific papers pointing to a more likely origin in a Wuhan market…. The official charter ([link removed]) for the 12-member subcommittee tasks it with exploring the origin of the pandemic as well as federal funding for
‘gain-of-function research.’”

STAT ([link removed]) (US) looks at the prospects of a US government response to pandemics spurred by COVID-19. “Whether Congress takes public health reform seriously could determine whether America can break out of the boom and bust cycle of funding preparedness efforts, and shape the field for the crises to come. But many reform advocates think an overhaul of the United States’ public health system may be years away, if it happens at all…. The efforts so far to address the failures of America’s public health infrastructure during the COVID-19 pandemic have been piecemeal and sparsely funded.”

Al Jazeera ([link removed]) (Qatar) reports, “A British politician from the ruling Conservative Party has been suspended for comparing COVID-19 vaccines to the Holocaust. Andrew Bridgen, MP for North West Leicestershire, said the vaccine rollout marked ‘the biggest crime against humanity” since millions of Jews were killed by Nazi Germany during World War II…. ‘Misinformation about the vaccine causes harm and costs lives. I am, therefore, removing the whip from Andrew Bridgen with immediate effect, pending a formal investigation,’ [Conservative chief whip Simon] Hart said.”

Foreign Policy ([link removed]) (US) reports that the failures of China to contain COVID-19 in no way means democracies responded well to the pandemic. “COVID-19 stress-tested democracies and autocracies alike—and most failed in different ways. The United States and China are the most prominent examples, but systems from Peruvian democracy to Russian autocracy botched their pandemic responses. In some cases, competition between political systems can be beneficial. The race between the United States and the Soviet Union to land a man on the moon, for instance, gave a big lift to science spending and pushed the boundaries of microelectronics technology, which was needed for a moon mission. But a pandemic calls for countries to share information, coordinate lockdowns, and work jointly on vaccine development. None of that occurred.”



** Tracking Human Respiratory Infections
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The Guardian ([link removed]) (UK) reports on a new genome project to track respiratory viruses in the UK, building on work that was developed to track COVID-19 variants. “The Respiratory Virus and Microbiome Initiative will lay the groundwork for large-scale genomic surveillance of multiple respiratory viruses, including influenza, RSV, adenovirus and rhinovirus, as well as monitoring for emerging threats. ‘It comes out of the simple idea that what we’ve done for COVID, we should now be doing for all respiratory viruses, because if we can establish a better understanding of these viruses, we can be in a better place to understand their transmission and how to develop vaccines against them,’ said Dr Ewan Harrison at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, who is leading the initiative.”



** The Latest on Omicron
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Nature ([link removed]) (UK) reports on the spread of the latest Omicron subvariant, XBB.1.5, which “now makes up around 28 percent of US COVID-19 cases… and its prevalence is on the rise globally…. Scientists caution that XBB.1.5’s impact, in the United States and beyond, is still far from clear. The variant might not cause a big surge in infections or hospitalizations in many countries, thanks to high immunity built up from exposure to earlier waves of COVID-19 and vaccinations, particularly recent boosters for individuals most at risk of severe disease. However, even if XBB.1.5 does not cause big COVID-19 waves, it will be important to track the lineage closely, researchers say. The subvariant bears a rarely seen mutation that might enhance its infectivity — and create an opportunity for further evolutionary gains.”

As XBB1.5 spreads in the US, CNN ([link removed]) (US) reports the Biden administration renewed the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency, quoting a public health official: “The COVID-19 Public Health Emergency remains in effect, and as HHS committed to earlier, we will provide a 60-day notice to states before any possible termination or expiration…. The decision to terminate the COVID-19 (public health emergency) will be made by the HHS secretary based on the best available data and science. Any suggestion that a specific end date has been established is untrue.”

The Washington Post ([link removed]) (US) reports on the peer reviewed and published ([link removed]) reports of a controversial lab experiment from Boston University. “In a lab experiment, the researchers combined the spike protein of an early lineage of omicron with the backbone of the original strain that emerged in Wuhan, China. The work, though not significantly different from numerous other experiments, drew media attention and set off fears that such manipulation of the coronavirus could unleash a more dangerous variant.” The researchers were seeking to see what characteristics of Omicron might make it less likely to create severe illness that previous strains. The research team now “claim to have found at least one missing piece of the puzzle: a mutation involving a protein called nsp6. ‘The reason that paper is important, it’s the first time where there is another gene that is
encoded by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is shown to be involved in pathogenicity,’ said Ronald Corley, chair of microbiology at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. ‘That represents a target protein for therapeutics.’”

Eric Topol writes in an opinion piece in Washington Post ([link removed]) (US), “The new dominant strain shows that the virus is always evolving to spread more quickly and infect us more efficiently. That should serve as a wake-up call for the country to re-invest in new vaccines, treatments and pandemic monitoring…. The implications of XBB.1.5 are also much bigger than just this formidable variant. The virus is talking to us, and it is telling us it has many more ways to evolve. It is revealing that it not only can fake out or elude our immune response, but can also get better at penetrating our cells. What will happen next? Will we see a whole new family of variants arise that are distinct from the omicron family? It is entirely possible. And we’re not ready for it. Genomic surveillance around the world has dropped 90 percent since early 2022, as reflected by sequenced samples deposited at the Global Initiative
on Sharing Avian Influenza Data.”



** COVID-19 in China
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(UK) reports, “The World Health Organisation said a lack of data was making it challenging to help China manage the risks of a COVID-19 surge over the Lunar New Year holiday, as the world's second-largest economy reopens after three years of isolation. The WHO said it still does not have enough information from China to make a full assessment of the dangers of the surge. ‘We've been working with our China colleagues,’ said Abdi Rahman Mahamud, director of the WHO's alert & response coordination department, who said the country has a number of strategies around people travelling from high-risk to low-risk areas, as well as around testing and clinics.”


In a Comment in The New Yorker ([link removed]) (US) physician and journalist Dhruv Khullar writes, “In the past month in China, hospitals, pharmacies, and funeral homes have been overwhelmed, but the scale of the misery is anyone’s guess. The country no longer tallies asymptomatic infections or reliably reports COVID-19 deaths—employing not the distortion of statistics but their omission…. An outbreak that touches a sixth of humanity creates countless opportunities for the virus to mutate into more transmissible forms, and to drive repeat infections and fresh surges around the world.”


The Atlantic ([link removed]) (US) notes that new policies in many countries requiring people traveling from China to provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test are not likely to have the intended effect of slowing COVID-19 cases. “there is little evidence to suggest that the restrictions will be effective. More important, it wouldn’t matter if they were: COVID-19 is already spreading unchecked in the US and many of the other countries that have new rules in place, so imported cases wouldn’t make much of a difference. The risk is particularly low given the fact that 95 percent of China’s locally acquired cases are being caused by two Omicron lineages—BA.5.2 and BF.7—that are old news elsewhere. ‘The most dangerous new variant at the moment is from New York—XBB.1.5—which the US is now busy exporting to the rest of the world,’ Christina Pagel, a mathematician who studies health care at University College Lo
ndon, told me. ‘I’m sorry, but this is fucking ridiculous.’”



** Animals and SARS-CoV-2
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National Geographic ([link removed]) (US) reports that researchers now believe SARS-CoV-2 can infect a wide range of mammals, which “amounts to a hidden panzootic—the animal version of an epidemic—with almost entirely unknown effects…. Infected animals often appear to have mild symptoms, but experts know almost nothing about how the various variants of the virus affect most animals. Sometimes, infections are deadly. The virus appears to kill a small percentage of infected mink, and three snow leopards died due to complications from COVID-19 at the Lincoln Children’s Zoo in Nebraska.”
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