In Missouri, for example, legislators are considering a measure exempting private school students from vaccine requirements. In Louisiana, a bill in the House would prohibit vaccinations on school property and at school-sponsored events.
Fewer than 10% of the bills will likely gain any traction, but the volume of attempts to roll back vaccine requirements is alarming, said Rekha Lakshmanan, director of advocacy and public policy at the Immunization Partnership, a vaccine education organization.
“Those are all chipping away at one of the end goals for anti-vaccine activists, which is completely doing away with school requirements,” said Lakshmanan. “That’s what people need to be paying very close attention to.”
All states require specific childhood vaccinations for illnesses such as polio, measles, and mumps, but exemptions vary. They all allow exemptions for people with medical concerns, 44 states allow religious exemptions, and 15 allow philosophical exemptions, according to 2021 data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Vaccinations are central to public health efforts at disease control and are foundational to the country’s social and economic system, said Brian Castrucci, CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, a public health advocacy organization.
“Politicians are poking holes in our public safety net,” Castrucci said of the onslaught of anti-vaccine legislation. “Vaccines, in and of themselves, are not medicine. It’s all of us collectively protecting each other.”
To be sure, anti-vaccine activists have existed as long as vaccines. And legislation to limit requirements to vaccinate against diseases such as polio, measles, and meningitis are not new. But, according to public health experts, the movement has gained momentum amid the coronavirus pandemic, boosting the reach of high-profile anti-vaccine activists.
“If you had told me that a pandemic — and what I would consider a miraculous vaccine for that disease — would trigger an anti-vax surge, I would never have believed it,” said Tracy Russell, executive director of Nurture KC, which works to improve children’s and family health in the Kansas City area of Missouri and Kansas. “But that’s exactly what happened.”
One pending Kansas bill would mandate that vaccine exemption requests be accepted without scrutiny if based on religion or personal beliefs. Currently, the state leaves it to day care centers and school districts to accept requests for religious exemptions.
State Sen. Mark Steffen stands behind amendments he pushed nullifying Kansas’ childhood vaccine requirements. The Republican, who said he is “not an anti-vaxxer in any shape or form,” lamented mandates he said were a vestige of a “kinder, gentler time” and suggested that individual rights supersede mandates designed to protect public health.
Steffen, an anesthesiologist who said he is under investigation by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts for prescribing ivermectin to covid patients, said suggestions that a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases could occur if vaccination rates fall amount to fearmongering by people paid off by the pharmaceutical industry.
But Andy Marso, a Kansas vaccine advocate who launched a Facebook page to organize pro-vaccine Kansans, called such assertions insulting and said he doesn’t take any money from drug companies. He contracted meningitis B in 2004 before vaccines against it were available. He was in a coma for three weeks and had parts of all four limbs amputated.
“For me, this has been part of what helped me move on from that trauma,” Marso said. “I have a story that people need to know about.”
The legislative efforts to nullify the requirements fly in the face of widespread public support for vaccines and vaccine mandates, nationally and in Kansas, said Russell. More than 9 in 10 Kansas voters believe wellness vaccines are safe and support vaccine requirements, according to a survey conducted this year for Nurture KC. Kansas voters overwhelmingly support religious exemptions, but a majority say they support tightening existing exemptions, according to the survey.
Before the pandemic, outbreaks of measles in Kansas, Minnesota, Washington, and other states, as well as outbreaks of pertussis, had reinforced the idea that preventing disease spread required consistently high vaccination rates. And mandates, in part, helped create the mechanism for public health authorities to make vaccines widely available and accessible, said Erica DeWald, spokesperson for Vaccinate Your Family, an advocacy organization.
“Lost in what has become a political conversation around requirements is the danger of these vaccine-preventable diseases,” said DeWald. “All it takes is one case.”
Previously, anti-vaccine activists relied on long-since-debunked narratives that vaccines cause autism, said Renée DiResta, the research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which studies cyber policies and how people use the internet. But in the years leading up to the pandemic, the movement began to shift its focus to align more with the populist ideology of “individual freedoms” put forward by Second Amendment advocates and the tea party.
Donald Trump expressed vaccine skepticism long before becoming president. But it was when the then-president was said to be considering naming Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known anti-vaccine activist, to “investigate” vaccine safety that the movement found its footing, said Timothy Callaghan, assistant professor in the health policy and management department at Texas A&M University. The embrace of anti-vaccine messaging by prominent politicians — whether because they are “true believers” or just see it as political necessity — has “lent legitimacy that the movement lacked before,” Callaghan added.
The similarity of bills from state to state raises red flags to vaccine advocates because it suggests that a coordinated effort to dismantle vaccine requirements and public health infrastructure is underway.
“Because the anti-vax movement is becoming aligned with the far right, I think those information-sharing channels are becoming more sophisticated,” said Northe Saunders, executive director of the SAFE Communities Coalition, a pro-vaccine organization. “Their ability to attract far-right politicians who see vaccines as a cause has grown. That gets them attention, if not votes.”
Not all Republicans find common cause with anti-vaccine activists, said Kansas state Rep. John Eplee, a Republican and family physician. He said he voted against some covid-related restrictions, like a statewide mask mandate, because he believed doing so might help defuse pandemic tensions. But he advocates for all vaccines, including covid shots.
Enough others in the Kansas legislature agreed in the case of one bill: Language targeting vaccines, under the auspices of parental rights, was ultimately removed before it was passed. Some observers are cautiously optimistic the House won’t pass the other bills as written.
While Eplee hopes the “passions” inflamed by covid die down with distance from the early days of the pandemic, he’s concerned that voters have forgotten the damage done by vaccine-controllable diseases, making them susceptible to disinformation from determined anti-vaccine activists and the politicians among their ranks.
“I hate to see human nature play out like that,” said Eplee. “But if people are vocal enough and loud enough, they can swing enough votes to change the world in a not-so-good way for public health and vaccinations.”
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.
As the United States relaxes pandemic restrictions, advising some 70% of Americans they no longer need to wear a mask, many parents of young children are desperate to know when they can expect a vaccine to be authorized for kids under 5.
But opaque communication from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and drugmakers, on top of whiplash over the shifting timeline and unexpected delays, has led to confusion and angst. Some parents are obsessively tracking every press release, investor report and social media announcement to glean information, and a few have even lied about their kids’ ages to get their children vaccinated. Many feel they are on their own.
“I just feel like we are being left on Pandemic Island,” said Jen Wendeln, mother to a 3-year-old boy in Cincinnati. “They’ve sent rescue boats several times and then told us: ‘Never mind, none for your children. Don’t worry, we’ll come back, just keep waiting.’”
Parents have been told that vaccines for little ones are coming “soon” over and over. In September, Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla said that two-shot data for 2- to 4-year-olds would be available “before the end of the year,” with submission to the FDA soon after. That data turned out to contain mixed news, and timelines got pushed out as Pfizer added a third shot. Parents grew hopeful when Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested authorization could happen sometime in February, and momentum seemed to be gathering as the FDA scheduled a meeting of outside experts to review Pfizer’s data on Feb. 15 to consider authorizing two doses first while waiting for data on the third. In the latest twist, however, the FDA then delayed that meeting, saying that new information had led it to decide it was better to wait for more data.
All of this happened as first the delta variant, then omicron, sent an increasing number of children to the hospital, filling up pediatric wards. Some parents, hearing experts urge the public to get vaccinated as soon as possible to prevent catching the highly infectious variant, were frustrated not to have that option for their children. “I put my kids in car seats. I laid them on their back when they were babies so they wouldn’t suffocate,” said Dr. Amy Cho, an emergency room physician in Minnetonka, Minnesota. Knowing that vaccines are preventing deaths in kids over 5, it pains her that one isn’t available yet for her 3-year-old. “I couldn’t live with myself knowing I didn’t do everything I could to prevent that outcome,” she said.
Thousands of parents have turned to Facebook groups to share information and seek answers to their questions: Why the delay? When would the data become public? What is going on with the trials? Conspiracy theories have blossomed and rumors are rampant.
To bring some clarity to the conversation, I dug into FDA policy and asked officials at the agency, Moderna and Pfizer as well as pediatric vaccine experts the questions parents most want answered. What I learned dispels a widespread myth, adds context to the factors officials are deliberating and provides an update on timing.
Why Do Parents Want a Vaccine?
While children under 5 are much less vulnerable to the coronavirus than adults, they are not invulnerable to serious consequences. In the United States, more than 460 children under 5 have died of COVID-19, according to the CDC. They’ve been hospitalized and have died at a higher rate than kids ages 5 to 11, according to the agency. “It’s very frustrating for us, writing off kids who have died — what’s the acceptable number of child deaths for people?” asked Dr. Scott Krugman, vice chair of pediatrics at the Herman & Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital at Sinai. “If it’s preventable, it should be zero.”
A source of anxiety for many parents is that it’s hard to predict which kids may have bad outcomes. While children with asthma or other lung conditions are more likely to suffer from pneumonia if they are infected, researchers still don’t know what puts a child at higher risk of suffering from multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C. The condition, in which many different organs including the heart, lungs, kidneys and brains become inflamed, can be serious and even deadly. Children with no preexisting conditions are often the ones who experience MIS-C, Krugman said: “They’re perfectly healthy 4- or 5 year-olds who randomly show up with cardiac enzymes through the roof and who need close monitoring and support.” Some other children also experience symptoms that last for months.
Experts have been telling parents that they can keep their little ones safe by surrounding them with people who are vaccinated, boosted and masked. But many parents point out that restrictions are easing and people are becoming more active, so the risk is actually increasing for their children. As schools drop mask mandates as well, some parents are also worried that their vaccinated older kids could bring the virus home to their unvaccinated younger siblings.
“Things are getting less safe for those of us who cannot vaccinate our family members — knowing there are even fewer people wearing masks makes everything that much more dangerous for us,” said Chris Nammour, father of a 2-year-old in Puyallup, Washington. So far, he’s chosen not to send his daughter to day care. “Our world is very small.”
What Exactly Does the FDA Consider Before Approving the Vaccine?
Many parents who want a vaccine say they don’t expect perfection: They don’t expect it to prevent infection, but want to lower the risk of the worst outcomes for their children, like hospitalizations or Long COVID. Emily Whittington is one of them. Her 4-year-old son, Jeremy, was born with a rare gene mutation that causes brain malformations and is particularly at risk of experiencing a seizure if he gets sick. Whittington lives in rural West Virginia and said that the low vaccination rate in her area has made her have to keep Jeremy out of pre-K to avoid exposure. “Can any of those doctors or advisory boards look me in the eye and say, ‘Your son is better off getting COVID without the vaccine than with some protection?’”
But the agency isn’t considering Whittington’s situation in isolation; it has a far more complicated calculus to make. “In addition to those people who are really excited about getting their kids vaccinated, there are also a lot of people out there that are like … I really want to know that, if the FDA tells me I’m going to have to give this to my kid or I should give this to my kid, I want to know that it really works,” an FDA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me. Only 1 in 4 children ages 5 to11 was fully vaccinated as of March 1, and polling has shown that about a third of parents want to “wait and see,” while another third do not plan to get their child the shot.
“The challenge we have is, if we take something forward where there’s tremendous controversy because the data are not really clear, there can be a lot of confusion in the public, and ultimately, it can be counterproductive for getting the population vaccinated,” the official said.The FDA also considers what’s going on in real time. When cases of omicron were surging and more and more kids were being hospitalized, the agency made an unprecedented move by saying it would consider authorizing two shots of the Pfizer vaccine for kids under 5 while waiting for the rest of the efficacy data on a third shot. The thinking was that those kids could get a head start on the vaccine series before the third shot was authorized. But the plan also hung on the presumption that the third dose would do the trick. What if Pfizer’s three doses still weren’t enough? Some experts worried that it was a risky move for the agency to take.
“If it didn’t work out, the price they could pay could be a lack of confidence not just in the COVID-19 vaccinations but a spillover into other childhood vaccinations,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. And what if a fourth or a fifth dose was ultimately needed? asked Dr. C. Buddy Creech, professor of pediatrics and director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program. “Do side-effect profiles go up when we do that? Does it change over time if you keep hammering the immune system with the same antigen over and over again?”
Pfizer, which was gathering data in real time, reportedly found that its shots were less effective against the omicron variant. With this new information in hand, the FDA decided to delay and wait for data from all three shots to come in before considering authorization. One factor in the decision was that risk for children overall has dropped as omicron cases have fallen. “In the midst of a huge surge, the benefit/risk [calculation] could be different than when you’re now coming towards the tail of a surge,” the FDA official said. “It doesn’t change our essential considerations, which are that the vaccine has to show the safety that we need … but it is true that the efficacy that we would expect, that could be a little bit different depending on the amount of disease that was circulating at a given time, the amount of hospitalizations, etc.”
The agency has a challenging job of balancing the need for thoroughness with speed, said Dr. Paul Spearman, director of the division of infectious diseases at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Children are not just little adults — their immune systems are different — so you can’t just scale down the existing vaccine proportionally and presume it’ll be both safe and effective. It’s not unusual for children’s vaccine trials to take longer than adults’ because of additional steps needed to find the correct dosage for different age groups, Spearman said. “There’s more care taken about safety and finding a precise dose, and more scrutiny, because it’s a vulnerable population.”
Ian Stone, parent of a 4-year-old in San Diego, said he’s willing to wait for a vaccine. “I want it to be safe. I want it to be effective. I don’t want it to be pushed forward because we have to have something,” he said. But Stone, who works in public relations, said he thinks the unexpected delay “may cause more harm than good. It’ll make people question and scrutinize it that much more. If it wasn’t ready, I wish they hadn’t gotten hopes up because you’ve drawn unwanted attention.”
Is “Age De-escalation” a Real FDA Vaccine Policy?
Misinformation has further confused parents, causing unnecessary concern that vaccines will be further delayed.
In December, Pfizer said that two shots were found to be safe for all kids under 5, but while children under 2 generated antibody levels similar to what has been seen in 16- to 25-year-olds, the 2- to 4-year-olds did not hit the same bar for effectiveness. In response to the results, the drugmaker said it would start testing a three-shot regimen to see if that could increase the level of protection.
For parents of children under 2, the obvious question was: Why not authorize the shot for the babies first?
It was surprisingly hard to get a clear answer to this question. A myth sprung up and circulated around the internet, printed in traditional media and repeated by doctors, that the FDA had a policy that prohibited it from authorizing vaccines for age groups out of order. It was referred to as an “age de-escalation policy.”
Age de-escalation describes how some clinical trials are run, including the COVID-19 vaccine trials. Adults are enrolled first, and once the vaccines are proven safe and effective, then the trial extends to younger and younger age groups. This is important for a number of reasons including safety — adults and teens are better able to articulate side effects they may be experiencing, so if a side effect is identified as related to the vaccine, researchers can look out for that symptom in younger kids who may not be as articulate; a fussing baby, as every parent knows, can be difficult to interpret.
But when it comes to authorizing vaccines, that doesn’t apply. “There’s no such policy, and we would have been happy to skip an age group,” the FDA official told me.
I also asked Pfizer why, then, it hadn’t sought authorization for kids under 2 first. The oblique answer I got from a spokeswoman was: “We’re continuing to study a third dose in this population.” I asked for more information and was told, “If successful, we will pursue a three-dose series based on the ongoing late stage study.”
So Pfizer is pursuing a three-dose series for all kids under 5. But why do that, if two doses had worked for the younger age group?
The FDA is tightlylimited by regulation and cannot publicly discuss trial data before approval outside of specific circumstances, such as an advisory committee. That has accounted for much of the agency’s reticence. The official could only tell me, enigmatically, that “eventually it will become clear that there was not a way to skip an age group here.” Perhaps something in Pfizer’s data in infants made the drugmaker or FDA determine it wasn’t sufficient for authorization, but until data becomes public, it is impossible to know.
As for Moderna, authorization of its vaccine for 12- to 17-year-olds has been held up in the U.S. because of concerns that it could cause myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle. Moderna is now testing a smaller dose for adolescents and 6- to 11-year-olds, but in the meantime, the company has said that it expects data from its trial of kids under 5 in March.
Parents, again confused by the supposed age de-escalation policy, have speculated that Moderna could not ask the FDA for authorization for the youngest kids before the teens had access to the vaccine.
Not so, a Moderna spokesperson told me: “Once the data are available in this age group, Moderna will review the data and decide whether to file for Emergency Use Authorization independent of whether other EUA submissions currently under review have already been approved.”
What’s Next for Vaccines for Small Children?
Here’s the good news: Two companies could have data on vaccines in kids under 5 in a matter of weeks. Pfizer has said it’ll have data on three doses “in spring” and Moderna has said it’ll have data by the end of March. If the data looks good, there’s nothing to stop the FDA from authorizing a vaccine for kids of a certain age group, even if an older cohort misses the mark or hasn’t yet gotten the green light. Creech, who is also a principal investigator for Moderna’s pediatric vaccine trials, and Spearman both told me they expect authorization by April or, in a worst-case scenario, May.
The bad news is that this far into the pandemic, communication is still floundering in the face of a public that is increasingly distrustful of scientists and federal health agencies.
It’s true that the FDA is legally limited in discussing data particulars and manufacturers are traditionally secretive about ongoing trials. But nobody has acknowledged that the legal and conventional restrictions mean that answers to basic questions like, “Why was this review delayed?” tend to result in impenetrable answers like, “We realize now in data that came in very rapidly because of the large number of cases of omicron that at this time it makes sense for us to wait until we have the data from the evaluation of a third dose.” None of this helps the public understand the scientific process.
What is apparent is that while many parents would like to see more data, what they want even more is to be reassured that their kids’ health is a priority.
“They’ve never spoken to parents of underage kids to say: ‘We’re sorry this is so hard. It grieves us too that it’s been so complicated,’” said Jennifer Martin, a parent of three in Seattle. “There’s a lack of urgency,” said Samirah Swaleh, parent to a 9-month-old boy in the Los Angeles area. “They just don’t seem to care about babies and toddlers?!” wrote Wendeln, the mother in Cincinnati. Cho, the emergency room physician, longs for a clearer timeline. “If you’re running a marathon and you know there’s an end, people can do amazing things. But it’s really, really hard when you don’t know if there’s an end in sight.”
I brought these sentiments to the FDA official I spoke to. The response hit many of the notes the parents said they wanted. I wish it could have come earlier, more often and been on the record, but I hope it provides some parents a bit of reassurance that they’ve been heard.
“We are going to work as expeditiously as possible,” the official said. “What does that mean? In general — though I can’t promise anything — you’ve seen that after an EUA [application] in this area, we generally are trying to take action in two to four weeks.”
The official emphasized: “We’re not going to be sitting on anything here.”
“I would want parents to know that we understand their concerns. We’re parents too,” the official added. “We are going to move as fast as we can once we have the data in our hands.”
My grandmother, Ila Bose, passed away in October after several days in the hospital. The exact trajectory leading to her death is not known — she had pneumonia towards the end — but my mother (also a physician) suspects she may have had lingering effects from a previous Covid case.
As horrible as it is to say this, our family were the lucky ones. My grandmother was well-off compared with most people in India, and while she faced adversities throughout her life, access to medical care was not among them. She even received two doses of one of India’s vaccines.
The country’s large vaccine industry is being depended upon to meet the minimal goals of COVAX, the international public-private partnership that is meant to initially vaccinate up to 20 percent of the populations of Global South countries.
This initiative, doomed from the start, has failed poor countries. The African Union reports that only 11 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated in all of Africa; only 16 percent have received any shot at all. Even so, these countries don’t have vaccines to spare: 64 percent of the vaccine supply has been used up.
Can you imagine looking at these numbers if your loved ones lived in Africa? This is vaccine apartheid: the deep-seated inequality of global vaccine distribution along national lines that reflect racial and economic divisions.
The COVAX plan was orchestrated by U.S. billionaire Bill Gates, who has somehow parlayed a career at Microsoft into becoming an influential figure in global public health.
It Hurts U.S. Too
The emergence of the omicron variant reveals how vaccine apartheid directly affects those of us in wealthy countries too. It has created petri dishes where the coronavirus can further evolve and then spread in all countries, rich and poor.
Or to put it another way: an injury to one is an injury to all. Unless we come together to stop what is a global problem, we will not reach a solution for any of us.
Labor has a crucial role to play. Our status as workers gives us power, and it also gives us a basis for solidarity across borders.
National Nurses United has made a good start — joining 27 sister unions worldwide to bring a petition against vaccine apartheid to the United Nations. That union helped push the Biden administration into supporting a relaxation of intellectual property rules at the World Trade Organization, which would make vaccines more widely available in the long run.
The Cuba Solidarity Campaign, a labor-backed nonprofit in the U.K., has been raising funds to assist the blockaded Cuban government to acquire raw materials, medicines for treatment, and syringes and vials. This doesn’t just benefit Cuba — the five vaccines developed there could offer the Global South an alternative source for vaccines besides the ones developed by rich countries.
A Shared Future
For those of us in richer countries, building union support for a fight against vaccine apartheid can be part of developing a broader common sense in our unions about how global inequality hurts us all.
To the virus, we are all hosts. To our bosses, we are expendable for profits and can be turned against each other. For example, the accounting industry has used the opportunity of the pandemic to dramatically increase offshoring while laying off workers in the U.S.
When the omicron wave began, the Biden administration immediately banned travelers from several southern African countries — while still allowing them from countries like the U.K. and Israel that also had omicron cases.
These sorts of divisive moves are unacceptable if we are going to have a shared future on the planet. We can say instead that we will live as one.
In October 2020, India and South Africa issued a landmark proposal at the World Trade Organization that parts of its Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement be waived during the pandemic so that the intellectual property behind Covid-19 treatments could be shared freely to scale up production of life-saving vaccines.
The Biden administration eventually stated its support for a TRIPS waiver in early May, but has since stood passively by, declining to advance the proposal in recent WTO meetings. Covid-19 vaccine recipes and technologies of treatments like Moderna’s, developed with the co-participation of the National Institute of Health, have still not been shared with other countries, and in the past few months the Omicron variant has emerged and spread while vaccinations rates remain low in many parts of the world.
The Biden administration’s statement in favor of a TRIPS waiver received immediate pushback from Republicans in Congress. On May 20, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the ranking member of the Committee on Finance, which has jurisdiction over reciprocal trade agreements, filed an amendment that sought to make it harder for the U.S. to agree to waive the TRIPS Agreement for Covid-19 vaccines.
The amendment would have required an evaluation process among U.S. departments and congressional approval for any TRIPS waiver, seeking assurances it would not extend to Russia or China, which it posed as threats to U.S. intellectual property. “I am concerned the Administration did not — because it could not — provide any evidentiary support for its claim that a waiver would facilitate access,” Crapo said.
Over 100 countries have joined in support of the proposed TRIPS Agreement waiver introduced on Oct. 2, 2020. About 73% of Covid-19 vaccine doses have gone to people in high- and upper-middle-income countries.
The pharmaceutical industry stridently opposes the waiver, with top lobbying groups PhRMA warning such a move would “compromise safety” and BIO calling it a “dangerous precedent” that would “delay the equitable delivery of needed COVID vaccines to people around the globe.”
A report from the Congressional Research Service states that if the WTO were to adopt a TRIPS waiver, it would not change its members’ domestic IP protections automatically — each country would still have to decide whether or how to change their laws in order to implement the waiver.
The Crapo amendment was co-sponsored by 17 Republican senators, including Mitt Romney of Utah, Richard Burr of North Carolina, and John Cornyn of Texas, who are among the top recipients of campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical and health products industry to U.S. senators, according to OpenSecrets.
The 18 GOP senators have received, on average, nearly twice as much in pharmaceutical and health products campaign donations over their careers as have the 32 GOP senators who did not co-sponsor it, according to a Sludge review of OpenSecrets data. The signers have received an average of $708,442 in contributions from the pharmaceuticals and health products industry, 1.9 times more than the $372,000 average for non-signers.
Sen. Crapo has raised nearly $714,000 from the pharmaceuticals and health products industry, putting him 13th among current Republican senators. His amendment was co-sponsored by other large recipients of drugmaker donations, including retiring Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania with nearly $875,000, and Todd Young of Indiana, with over $745,000. The fourth-term Crapo, his state’s senior senator, filed for reelection last month, though he has not officially announced his intention to run. He was endorsed by former President Trump earlier this year, before he voted in favor of the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Trump slammed.
On May 25, Crapo’s amendment received 53 yeas to 46 nays, but did not advance because it needed 60 votes to pass. The vote was largely party-line, with four Democratic-aligned senators joining the Republicans: Democrats Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Independent Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats. John Kennedy of Louisiana, who did not join the Crapo amendment, did not vote. The first-term Kennedy, who is running for re-election next year, has received a relatively low $136,527 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry.
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis has sent multiple letters to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai expressing his concerns about the TRIPS waiver proposal. His most recent letter was a response to another letter from groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge that urged Biden to make sure that a Covid-19 TRIPS waiver would apply to all forms of intellectual property, not just patents. “The inclusion of copyright is both unsubstantiated and unwarranted, and would impose devastating consequences on American creators, businesses and workers,” Tillis wrote.
Over his career, Tillis has received $689,116 from the pharmaceuticals and health products industry, according to OpenSecrets. He was backed in his close 2020 election contest by over $475,000 in contributions from pharmaceutical and health products industry PACs.
In the weeks before Biden’s announcement, 10 Democrats and Democrat-caucusing senators including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin signed a letter supporting the TRIPS waiver, reaffirmed last month.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has formally requested that the United States Supreme Court lift lower court orders that have halted the enforcement of the Biden administration’s requirements for certain health care workers to get vaccinated.
The White House rules require workers in health care facilities that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding to be vaccinated for protection against coronavirus. The mandate for health care workers was made in conjunction with a similar rule for workers at companies with 100 employees or more which required employees to either get vaccinated for COVID-19 or test weekly to ensure they weren’t spreading the virus. That rule, too, is being blocked by some lower courts.
Earlier this week, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a nationwide block of the mandate on health care workers that was made previously by a federal judge but kept it in place for the 14 states that were part of the original lawsuit. Separately, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has kept in place another block of the health care mandate that affects 10 other states. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, meanwhile, has ruled that the Biden administration had the authority to issue the mandate.
On Thursday, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar asked for the court orders blocking implementation of the rule to be put on hold while the appeals process continues, citing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and its death toll.
Currently, health officials are reporting over 1,280 individuals are dying from COVID-19 each day on average across the U.S., an increase of 23 percent compared to two weeks ago. Ensuring that the vaccine rule for health care workers remains in place, Prelogar said in her filing, would “save hundreds or even thousands of lives each month” while the appeals process goes on.
Prelogar also maintained in her brief to the Court that the mandate, officially issued by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, was necessary to protect from further spread of the virus.
“The Secretary of Health and Human Services exercised his express statutory authority to protect the health and safety of Medicare and Medicaid patients by requiring healthcare facilities that choose to participate in those programs to ensure that their staff are vaccinated,” Prelogar said.
The Supreme Court has indicated in the past that it is more inclined to let vaccine mandates stand than to rule against them, at least at the local and state levels.
It rejected a challenge to New York’s state mandate that also required health care workers to get vaccinated. That mandate is even more restrictive and does not carve out exceptions for religious objectors, while the federal rule does. The High Court also refused to temporarily block a mandate in Maine back in October in spite of the fact that the rule in the state would be implemented before appeals could be heard on it.
How the Court ruled on those states’ actions, however, might not be how it rules on the federal mandate for health care workers, should the lawsuits continue to make their way through the appellate process. Critics contend that the federal mandate goes beyond what is statutorily allowed.
According to a fact sheet from the White House, the mandate on health care workers to get the vaccine would apply to 17 million workers at around 76,000 facilities across the U.S. Those workers would have to be fully vaccinated for protection against COVID-19 by January 4.
Most health care workers are already vaccinated. According to research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 30 percent of health care workers still need their shots, although that number may have decreased since it was published in November, due in part to the new omicron variant of the virus as well as the deadline to get fully vaccinated fast approaching.
In the first week that the Omicron variant sparked global fears of a new wave of infections, a small handful of investors and executives with Pfizer and Moderna — currently the world’s preeminent makers of Covid-19 vaccines — saw over $10 billion in new wealth, with the Moderna’s CEO alone adding over $800 million to his personal fortune.
Based on data compiled by Global Justice Now and released Saturday, “just 8 top Pfizer and Moderna shareholders” added a combined $10.31 billion to their fortunes last week after stock prices soared in response to the emergence of Omicron. According to a statement by the group:
Moderna’s shares skyrocketed after the announcement and settled at $310.61/share on Wednesday 1 December, up 13.61% from $273.39/share since Wednesday 24 November, the day before the announcement. Pfizer’s shares rose by 7.41% from $50.91/share to $54.68/share.
Moderna’s CEO, Stephane Bancel, personally became more than $824m richer in the week after the announcement, with the value of his shares rising from $6,052,522,978 to $6,876,528,630. He sold off 10,000 shares for $319 each on 26 November, the day after the variant was announced, cashing out $3.19 million.
At close of business on Tuesday, Bancel’s shares had grown by $1.7 billion since the announcement, before falling after the company lost a legal dispute over patents.
Bancel has refused to share the recipe for Moderna’s vaccine with the World Health Organisation to help scale-up manufacturing of mRNA vaccines through its new hub in South Africa. WHO scientists are now trying to reverse-engineer the vaccine. His company is also waging a legal battle to erase the role of massive public funding and public scientists in developing the jab.
With nations in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and others continuing to block a demand for a vaccine patent waiver at the World Trade Organization, public health campaigners have hammered government leaders for doing the bidding of the pharmaceutical industry. Anger has become especially harsh because the emergence of new and dangerous variants was predicted as the likely outcome if nations did not move swiftly to vaccinate the world by making shots universally available.
“Pharmaceutical companies knew that grotesque levels of vaccine inequality would create prime conditions for new variants to emerge,” said Tim Bierley, pharma campaigner at Global Justice Now. “They let Covid-19 spread unabated in low and middle-income countries. And now the same pharma execs and shareholders are making a killing from a crisis they helped to create. It’s utterly obscene.”
“At every turn,” he continued, “these companies have obstructed efforts to more equitably distribute vaccines around the world. They have made more than enough money from the pandemic, selling two of the most lucrative drugs in history. It’s time to hand over the recipe for these essential medicines to the WHO so we can finally end this pandemic.”
When is a new covid variant good news? When you're a pharma shareholder, obviously!https://t.co/uWbzrAPcwR
While a scheduled decision on the WTO patent waiver was postponed last week, progressives worldwide have insisted that there will be no end to the global pandemic until vaccine apartheid is brought to an end.
Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and trade expert Lori Wallach argued in an op-ed last week that the pandemic cannot be defeated until the waiver is approved.
“As the Omicron variant shows, as long as there are raging outbreaks anywhere, Covid-19 will mutate and the possibility of more infectious or deadly strains increases,” the pair wrote. “That’s why, unless people everywhere are vaccinated, we face the prospect of an endless pandemic.”
When the “underlying problem is a lack of global supply,” they argued — and more vaccines and boosters will be needed to fend off variants — the WTO waiver “is an obvious way of increasing supply and helping put an end to the pandemic for good.”
And as Bierley said, “It’s long past time for the UK and the EU to stand on the side of global health instead of vaccine billionaires — and get behind an intellectual property waiver on Covid-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments.”
The SNP Westminster leader has challenged Boris Johnson to “do the right thing” and help ensure the world’s poorest nations can produce coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccines.
Ian Blackford demanded that the UK prime minister “stop blocking” the vaccine intellectual property waiver so that developing nations can manufacture vaccines themselves.
The SNP MP raised the issue in a letter to the Conservative leader. He stressed that there needs to be a “truly effective global vaccine strategy” if coronavirus is to be defeated.
Access to vaccine patents
While the UK is rolling out booster vaccines to the population, the proportion of those in the Global South who have been jabbed is much lower.
At the end of November it was reported some 54.2% of the global population had had at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine. But in low-income countries this falls to just 5.8%.
Blackford insisted:
We will not defeat this virus if developing nations are left to rely on vaccine donations alone…
All countries must have the tools to allow them to produce Covid vaccines on home soil and ramp up production if we are to have a truly effective global vaccine strategy. That means ensuring they have access to the vaccine patents.
So I am urging Boris Johnson to do the right thing and stop blocking the vaccine intellectual property waiver – at least temporarily – to allow developing nations to manufacture the vaccines themselves.
‘Blocking the waiver’
The SNP Westminster leader added:
This is a matter of global leadership, and with over 100 states, including the USA supporting the proposal, it is clear the UK is becoming increasingly isolated in blocking the waiver to support access to vaccines around the world.
Indeed, it is the least the UK Government can do after it brutally slashed aid and hindered humanitarian projects around the world.
The emergence of the new Omicron variant has shown us that, until we achieve vaccine equality, new variants could continue to appear.
Therefore, it is in everybody’s interests that we share vaccine patents – it will be an essential step in beating Covid-19.
23 million out of 100 million
In June 2021 at the G7 summit, the government pledged to donate 100 million vaccine doses by mid-2022. But a No 10 spokesperson claimed the goal for this year was to donate “30 million doses”. 23 million have been donated so far, which leaves around 77 million doses still outstanding to be donated between now and June 2022.
The Independent also reported last month that the UK discarded 600,000 vaccine doses at the end of August. These doses were allowed to expire instead of being donated.
The No 10 spokesperson said:
The UK has been a world leader in ensuring developing countries can access vaccines, through our early support to the Covax scheme and commitment to donate surplus vaccines.
We are on track to meet our goal of donating 30 million doses by the end of this year, and more next year. We have donated 23 million doses already, of which 18.5 million have gone to Covax to distribute to developing countries.
The UK is engaging constructively in the Trips waiver debate at the World Trade Organisation and we continue to be open to all ideas that have a positive impact on vaccine production and distribution.
‘The wrong side of history’
Meanwhile Oxfam Scotland welcomed Blackford’s letter to the prime minister. Jamie Livingstone, head of Oxfam Scotland, said:
It’s hugely significant that the SNP’s Westminster Leader has answered our call, by adding his voice, to the growing chorus of those who are demanding urgent action to stop pharmaceutical companies from artificially rationing global vaccine supply, by holding lifesaving vaccine recipes and technologies hostage.
Vaccine inequality is both morally wrong and it places people across Scotland at additional risk from the emergence of dangerous new variants, like Omicron, with epidemiologists warning all along that no one is safe until we all are.
The UK Government is looking more and more isolated as it continues to stubbornly stand on the wrong side of history by choosing to put protecting patents and big pharma’s profits above saving people’s lives.
The Prime Minister must now act: a failure to do so would be short-sighted, self-defeating and shameful.
Unvaccinated women who suffered with coronavirus (Covid-19) during their pregnancies have told “terrifying” stories of having the virus, from being rushed to hospital to having emergency C-sections.
The women appear in a video sharing their experiences of severe Covid-19 during pregnancy. It’s part of a new campaign encouraging expectant mothers to get the vaccine.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said 98% of pregnant women in hospital with symptomatic Covid-19 are unvaccinated.
The video features three women who experienced serious complications after contracting coronavirus before they were vaccinated. It also features the doctors and frontline staff who treated them, to warn of the dangers of the virus for pregnant women and their babies.
“It was terrifying”
Christina, a mental health therapist from Guildford who was admitted to hospital with Covid-19 in her third trimester, said:
I had to give birth via emergency C-section because there was concern that I could have a stillbirth. It was terrifying.
I don’t know what the future holds for me and my baby; I’m still suffering with symptoms now along with the anxiety of not knowing how or when I’ll recover.
I would urge pregnant women to get vaccinated because I don’t want anyone to experience what I went through.
‘Not everyone’s as lucky as I am’
Tanviha, who works in anaesthesiology and research in Manchester, spent two months in hospital with Covid-19 following an emergency C-section. She said she caught Covid-19 during her second pregnancy in February, adding:
At the time, the vaccine wasn’t available to me and I quickly took a turn for the worse.
I was rushed into hospital and went straight into intensive care where my condition deteriorated and my son was delivered by emergency C-section.
I was put to sleep and intubated, and my family were told it was unlikely I’d survive and to prepare for the worst.
The day after I was intubated, the nurse told them they were going to switch the machine off, but instead I was transferred to an Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine, which is a last resort for patients with severe heart and lung failure, and it saved my life.
The first time I saw my son he was two months old. It’s the scariest experience of mine and my family’s life but I’m just grateful that me and my son are alive.
If you’re unsure about getting vaccinated please come forward and get your jab, not everyone’s as lucky as I am.
Tanviha, who works in anaesthesiology and research, speaking about her experiences after she suffered with Covid-19 during her pregnancy (UKHSA/PA)
“I just wish I’d been vaccinated sooner”
Joanne, a make-up adviser from Lincolnshire, suffered complications with her pregnancy after catching Covid-19. She said:
I had been unsure what was the right thing to do about getting vaccinated while pregnant.
I was planning on having the jab after my daughter was born but I caught Covid-19 when I was 35 weeks pregnant and became seriously ill, I couldn’t get out of bed for a week.
I had nearly recovered but something just didn’t feel right. I couldn’t feel my baby kicking so I made an urgent appointment to see my midwife.
The team at the hospital quickly spotted the baby’s growth had dropped and her fluid was low.
Her heartbeat was going down and down so the consultant rushed me off for an emergency caesarean when Mollie-Ann was born.
I’m so grateful to the maternity team for keeping me and my baby safe and I just wish I’d been vaccinated sooner.
Joanne suffered complications with her pregnancy after contracting Covid-19 (UKHSA/PA)
‘Book in your vaccine without delay’
The DHSC said nearly one in five coronavirus patients who are most critically ill are pregnant women who have not had the vaccine.
Of those pregnant women in hospital with symptomatic Covid-19, 98% are unvaccinated. And no fully vaccinated pregnant women went into intensive care with Covid-19 in England between February and September 2021.
Around one in five women admitted to hospital with the virus need to be delivered preterm to help them recover. Moreover, one in five of their babies need care in the neonatal unit, the DHSC said.
Since April 2021, around 84,000 pregnant women have received one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. More than 80,000 have received two doses.
Professor Lucy Chappell, chief scientific adviser at the DHSC and honorary consultant obstetrician, said:
The stories shared as part of this film are heartbreaking and provide invaluable, first-hand insight into why accepting the offer of a Covid-19 vaccine is so important for mothers and their babies.
Getting the vaccine is one of the most vital ways in which you can protect yourself and your baby from Covid-19, which can be really dangerous for pregnant women – of those pregnant women in hospital with symptomatic Covid-19, 98% are unvaccinated.
Watch the film, speak to your clinician or midwife if you have any questions or concerns, and book in your vaccine without delay.
There is global concern and widespread alarm at the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.1.529, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has called Omicron.
The WHO classified Omicron as a “variant of concern” because it has a wide range of mutations. This suggests vaccines and treatments could be less effective.
Although early days, Omicron appears to be able to reinfect people more easily than other strains.
Australia has followed other countries and regions — including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and the European Union — and banned travellers from nine southern African countries.
Australians seeking to return home from southern Africa will still be able to do so. But they will enter hotel quarantine and be tested. Those who have returned from the nine countries — South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, the Seychelles, Malawi and Mozambique — in the past 14 days will have to isolate.
But Omicron has already been detected in other regions, including the UK, Germany, Israel, Hong Kong and Belgium. So while a travel ban on southern African countries may slow the spread and buy limited time, it’s unlikely to stop it.
As the Australian government and others act to protect their own citizens, this should be accompanied by additional resources to support countries in southern Africa and elsewhere that take prompt action.
When Was Omicron Detected?
The variant was identified on November 22 in South Africa, from a sample collected from a patient on November 9.
South African virologists took prompt action, conferred with colleagues through the Network of Genomic Surveillance in South Africa, liaised with government, and notified the World Health Organization on November 24.
The behaviour of this new variant is still unclear. Some have claimed the rate of growth of Omicron infections, which reflects its transmissibility, may be even higher than those of the Delta variant. This “growth advantage” is yet to be proven but is concerning.
“Kneejerk” Response vs. WHO Recommendations
African scientists and politicians have been disappointed in what they see as a “kneejerk” response from countries imposing travel bans. They argue the bans will have significant negative effects for the South African economy, which traditionally welcomes global tourists over the summer year-end period.
They note it is still unclear whether the new variant originated in South Africa, even if it was first identified there. As Omicron has already been detected in several other countries, it may already be circulating in regions not included in the travel bans.
Travel bans on countries detecting new variants, and the subsequent economic costs, may also act as a disincentive for countries to reveal variants of concern in future.
The WHO does not generally recommend flight bans or other forms of travel embargoes. Instead, it argues interventions of proven value should be prioritised: vaccination, hand hygiene, physical distancing, well-fitted masks, and good ventilation.
In response to variants of concern, the WHO calls on all countries to enhance surveillance and sequencing, report initial cases or clusters, and undertake investigations to improve understanding of the variant’s behaviour.
Omicron must be taken seriously. Its features are worrying, but there are large gaps in our current knowledge. While further analyses are undertaken, the variant should be controlled with testing, tracing, isolation, applying known public health measures, and ongoing surveillance.
What Can Wealthier Countries Do to Help?
Wealthy countries such as Australia should support African nations and others to share early alerts of potentially serious communicable disease threats, and help mitigate these threats.
[…] public health actors only see downsides from drawing attention to an outbreak that has the potential to spread.
The panel recommended creating incentives to reward early response action. This could include support to:
establish research and educational partnerships
strengthen health systems and communicable disease surveillance
greatly improve vaccine availability, distribution, and equity
consider financial compensation, through some form of solidarity fund against pandemic risk.
Boosting Vaccine Coverage Is Key
Vaccines remain the mainstay of protection against the most severe effects of COVID-19.
It’s unclear how effective vaccines will be against Omicron, but some degree of protection is presumed likely. Pfizer has also indicated it could develop an effective vaccine against a new variant such as Omicron within 100 days or so.
COVID’s persistence is partly attributable to patchy immunisation coverage across many parts of the world, notably those least developed. South Africa itself is better off than most countries on the continent, yet only 24% of the adult population are currently fully vaccinated. For the whole of Africa, this drops to only 7.2%.
Greater global support is urgently needed to boost these vaccination rates.
African institutions and leaders, supported by global health and vaccine experts, have argued for mRNA vaccine manufacturing facilities on the African continent. These would prioritise regional populations, overcome supply-chain problems, and respond in real time to emerging disease threats.
Yet developing nations face significant barriers to obtaining intellectual property around COVID-19 vaccine development and production.
While there is still much to learn about the behaviour and impact of Omicron, the global community must demonstrate and commit real support to countries that do the right thing by promptly and transparently sharing information.
Europe is in the grip of apotentially devastatingfourth coronavirus wave and the United States has nowrecordedmore Covid-19 deaths in 2021 than it did in 2020, heightening alarm among public health experts who fear another brutal winter surge.
Dr. Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe,warnedSaturday that the coronavirus could kill 500,000 more people in Europe by March if political leaders don’t take immediate action to forestall the current spread and increase vaccine uptake, which has been lagging in parts of the continent due,in some cases, to anti-vaccine sentiment.
“Covid-19 has become once again the number one cause of mortality in our region,” Kluge told theBBC.
In an effort to quell a major spike in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, the Austrian government announced Friday that it would institute anationwide lockdownand soon mandate coronavirus vaccinations for its entire adult population. Thus far, around 65% of Austria’s population has been fully vaccinated — one of the lowest rates in Western Europe.
“The virus is back with new rigor in Europe again and new catastrophic waves are imminent in Africa and Asia,”said Shailly Gupta, communications adviser with Doctors Without Borders’ Access Campaign, pointing to regions that have been denied adequate supplies of vaccines and therapeutics. “Wealthy nations need to understand that unless everyone everywhere is vaccinated, the situation is not going to change.”
“Countries need to stop hoarding tests, drugs, and vaccines and big pharmaceutical companies need to stop hoarding technology if they really want to control this pandemic,” she added.
Austria’s mandate, set to take effect in February, prompted immediate backlash. On Saturday, tens of thousands of people — including manyalignedwith the country’s far-right Freedom Party — took to the streets of Vienna to denounce the public health measure, which Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said is necessary to break the nation’s vaccination plateau and prevent further deaths.
“We have too many political forces in this country who vehemently and massively fight against this,” hesaidin a speech Friday. “This is irresponsible. It is an attack on our health system. Goaded by these anti-vaxxers and from fake news, too many people among us have not been vaccinated. The consequence is overfilled intensive care stations and enormous human suffering. No one can want that.”
TheAssociated Pressreportedthat “demonstrations against virus restrictions also took place in Switzerland, Croatia, Italy, Northern Ireland, and the Netherlands on Saturday, a day after Dutch police opened fire on protesters and seven people were injured in rioting that erupted in Rotterdam.”
“Protesters rallied against coronavirus restrictions and mandatory Covid-19 passes needed in many European countries to enter restaurants, Christmas markets, or sports events, as well as mandatory vaccinations,”APnoted. “The Austrian lockdown will start Monday and comes as average daily deaths have tripled in recent weeks and hospitals in heavily hit states have warned that intensive care units are reaching capacity.”
AsThe Week’s Ryan Cooper noted in arecent column, “There is a clear inverse relationship between shots and spread” in Europe.
“The countries sufferingtruly galloping outbreaks — mostly places to the south and east like Greece, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, and Slovakia — aretypically below70% full vaccination, often quite far below. By contrast, there appears to be a rough breakpoint near 75-80% vaccination where the rate of case growth is much slower. It’s surely not a coincidence Portugal and Spain are the most-vaccinated countries on the continent, and both have thus far mostly avoided a big resurgence.”
A year and a half after the coronavirus swept through Europe with devastating effect, the continent is once again the epicenter of the pandemic. Rioters set fires on the streets of Rotterdam on Friday and attacked police at a rally against Covid measures. https://t.co/9LmdcL5dhnpic.twitter.com/spzlXUjfow
In the U.S., meanwhile, data from the federal government and Johns Hopkins University show that the official Covid-19 death toll in 2021 surpassed 385,457 on Saturday, topping 2020 fatalities. The nation’s total death count currently stands at 770,800 — the highest in the world.
“The spread ofthe highly contagious Delta variantand low vaccination rates in some communities were important factors [this year],” theWall Street Journalreported. “The milestone comes as Covid-19 cases and hospitalizationsmove higher againin places such as New England and the upper Midwest, with the seven-day average for new cases recently closer to 90,000 a day after it neared 70,000 last month.”
The surge comes as few public health restrictionsremainin place across the U.S. Last week, the Biden administrationsuspendedenforcement activities related to its vaccination and testing mandates for private businesses after a federal appeals courttemporarily haltedthe requirements.
All U.S. adults are now eligible for booster shots, but public health experts have cautioned that the broad availability of third doses may not do much to stem the current spike in cases given that it’slargely being fueledby the unvaccinated. Less than 60% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to thelatest figuresfrom Our World in Data.
A recentanalysisby theFinancial Timesfound that more booster shots have been administered in rich countries over a three-month period than total doses have been given in poor countries in all of 2021. The head of the WHO called for amoratoriumon booster shots in August in an effort to bolster vaccination drives in poor countries, but the U.S. and other rich countriesdismissedhis demand.
Just5% of peoplein low-income countries have received at least one coronavirus vaccine dose.
“The evidence isn’t there that a large rollout of boosters is really going to have that much impact on the epidemic,”arguedIra Longini Jr., a vaccine expert and professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida.
Tom PhilpottofMother JoneswroteSaturday that “in the popular imagination, 2020 gets all the bad press, but this year has been no sunny day at the beach, either.”
“Sure, several effective Covid-19 vaccines emerged, but so did the highly contagious Delta variant, as well as new, more virulent strains of anti-vax sentiment, tightly yoked to conservative political ideology,”Philpott noted.“Worst of all, intellectual property hoarding has meant that the vaccines have so far largely bypassed low-income nations of the Global South, wreaking untold human misery and giving the virus ample opportunity to generate more contagious and/or more virulent strains.”
It’s been less than 24 hours since the Biden administration announced the deadline for companies to require their workers to be vaccinated against coronavirus or present weekly negative tests, but lawsuits have already been filed against the measure, with more likely to follow.
These lawsuits claim to be defending bodily autonomy — but they’re being filed by the same Republican-controlled states where this defense has been ignored in the fight for abortion rights.
The Biden rule, which will be enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), requires employers at companies with more than 100 employees on their payrolls to have their workers provide proof of vaccination. If a worker does not wish to be vaccinated, they must provide evidence of a negative COVID test each week at their own expense. Companies and workers have until January 4 to comply with the new rule.
Several states under Republican control have already filed lawsuits against the White House, including a joint suit by Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio — and at least 20 other states are planning to sue the Biden administration over the vaccine rule.
When announcing the lawsuit against the Biden administration on Friday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed that the “new vaccine mandate on private businesses is a breathtaking abuse of federal power.”
“The idea that the Constitution requires States to permit a woman to abort her unborn child is unsupported by any constitutional text, history or tradition,” Paxton claimed, disregarding five decades of precedent and case law.
The Texas abortion bill was signed into law earlier this year by Gov. Greg Abbott (R); last month, the governor signed an executive order forbidding any public or private sector entity from abiding with a vaccine mandate. Although federal rules and laws supersede this order, many have criticized Abbott for his inconsistency — especially because abortion affects only the individual who is undergoing the procedure, whereas actions related to the pandemic, like choosing to get vaccinated or wear a mask, can have an enormous impact on the health and wellbeing of others.
“They say it infringes upon their freedom if the government mandates that they wear their masks or if the government mandates they get a vaccine,” noted state Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas). “I don’t know what country they come from because the one that I grew up in, I couldn’t go to school until I got what I call my shots. We had to have vaccinations to go to school when I was a little girl. So it’s always been that way.”
OSHA has “a 50-year history of making these rules work,” Walsh said on PBS’s “NewsHour”, adding that both employers and the Biden administration are in “uncharted territory” when it comes to dealing with the pandemic.
Walsh also noted that the new rule is not a mandate because it still gives workers the choice to do what they want with their bodies.
“It was a well-written rule and put together. A lot of thought went into it,” Walsh said, adding that the administration is “confident” that the rule will stand up to judicial scrutiny.
Failure to tackle global vaccine inequality at this weekend’s G20 summit could prolong the pandemic, civil society groups have warned.
Fresh calls were made to tackle structural problems that campaigners say have so far been ignored. This has allowed coronavirus (Covid-19) doses to be “hoarded” by rich nations.
The People’s Vaccine Alliance is a coalition of more than 75 organisations including Oxfam, Amnesty International, the African Alliance, UNAIDS, and Global Justice Now. It urged G20 leaders to unblock global supply shortages by waiving intellectual property and sharing technology of vaccines, diagnostics and treatments.
G20 countries represent 62% of the world’s population but have used 82% of the world’s coronavirus vaccines. Meanwhile only 3.1% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose, said campaigners.
The alliance is calling on G20 leaders to pressure the UK and Germany to resolve the dispute. It said doing so would allow all World Health Organisation (WHO)-approved manufacturers to produce vaccines, unlocking the world’s productive capacity.
Anna Marriot, policy lead for the People’s Vaccine Alliance, said:
It’s an absolute scandal that the G20 has wasted a year ignoring a proposal, backed by the majority of its members, to break vaccine monopolies and ensure the life-saving vaccines can be made around the world to save countless lives.
The G20 is turning its back on the thousands of children orphaned every day by this pandemic. G20 leaders who support the waiver must not be silenced by the rich country members like the UK and Germany. It is beyond time to act.
“We have no more time to waste”
Tamaryn Nelson, adviser on right to health from Amnesty International said:
When the G20 met last year, 1.3 million people had died of Covid-19 and leaders vowed to spare no effort to ensure access to vaccines for all people.
A year later, not much has changed, except another 3.5 million people lost their lives to Covid-19. It’s unconscionable that G20 leaders are not taking sufficient action while tens of thousands of people continue to die every week.
Countries sitting on excess vaccines must redistribute these doses now and pharmaceutical companies need to share the know-how needed to scale up global production. Anything short of this is depriving billions of people of lifesaving vaccines and medicines. We have no more time to waste.
Nick Dearden, Director of Global Justice Now, said:
Armed with effective vaccines and abundant manufacturing capacity, we should be able to swiftly vaccinate the world from Covid-19.
The New York Times had an interesting piece about the prospects for getting Moderna and Pfizer to share the technology for producing their mRNA Covid vaccines. At one point, the piece cites Biden administration officials warning that efforts to use the Defense Production Act to force sharing could end in long legal battles delaying any technology transfer.
“Biden administration officials say that forcing the companies to act is not as simple as it sounds, and that an effort to compel them to share their technology would invariably lead to a drawn-out legal battle, which would be counterproductive.”
Actually, it should be possible to reverse the legal burden. Biden could offer to cover the legal expenses, and any subsequent damages, resulting from lawsuits by Moderna and Pfizer against former engineers for sharing their expertise with companies in the developing world or in other wealthy countries.
These engineers have all signed nondisclosure agreements, which they would likely be violating by sharing this information. However, if they shared the information first, knowing that they would be protected, Moderna and Pfizer could do nothing to prevent the technology transfer. (If they were sharing the technology with another manufacturer in the United States, these companies could probably get an injunction requiring that they stop, which would expose them to criminal sanctions if they continued. But, US courts would have difficulty imposing an injunction against actions taken in another country.)
In short, the Biden administration could find ways around the legal weapons that Moderna and Pfizer might use to block the transfer of the technology they use to produce mRNA vaccines.
One of the biggest struggles health care professionals are facing in states with high rates of COVID-19 is convincing more people to get vaccinated in order to protect themselves and others from the virus. In Georgia, that struggle is being compounded by the fact that public health workers at several vaccine clinics are being harassed and threatened by anti-vaccination protesters.
According to the office of Georgia’s top health official, Department of Public Health commissioner Kathleen Toomey, public health staff at vaccine events in the state “have been harassed, yelled at, threatened and demeaned by some of the very members of the public they were trying to help.”
In southern Georgia, for example, anti-vaccine activists (oftentimes colloquially referred to as “anti-vaxxers”) tracked down on social media health workers who were part of a vaccine clinic. Once online, those individuals harangued those workers with hostile messages, filling their pages with misinformation about vaccines, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
At another clinic held in the northern part of the state, vaccine workers decided to halt their event altogether following harassment by anti-vaxxers. After staff said they felt threatened by protesters who were yelling at them, organizers realized that anyone else who came to get a vaccine that day would feel similarly. Not wanting to put people seeking a vaccine in that position, the staff decided to close the event early instead.
“This is wrong. This is absolutely wrong,” Toomey said at a press conference on Monday. “These people are giving their lives to help others and to help us in the state. We in Georgia can do better.”
Toomey added:
Maybe it comes with the territory of someone in my position, but it shouldn’t be happening to those nurses who are working in the field to try to keep this state safe. We should be thanking these individuals for trying to get lifesaving vaccines to our state.
Only 41 percent of Georgia residents are fully vaccinated at this time, a rate that’s much lower than the 52 percent for the U.S. population overall. Georgia also ranks high in terms of how many new cases of coronavirus are being identified each day, on average, on a per capita basis, with only six other states in the country having higher rates.
The harassment of health care professionals and public health officials throughout the pandemic has, sadly, been commonplace. Just last month, for example, health care professionals who testified in favor of masking rules for schools in Franklin, Tennessee, were surrounded and shouted at by residents with anti-mask views, some of whom made direct threats toward them.
“We know who you are. You’ll never be allowed in public again,” one man said at that event.
Medicaid enrollees are getting vaccinated against covid-19 at far lower rates than the general population as states search for the best strategies to improve access to the shots and persuade those who remain hesitant.
Efforts by state Medicaid agencies and the private health plans that most states pay to cover their low-income residents has been scattershot and hampered by a lack of access to state data about which members are immunized. The problems reflect the decentralized nature of the health program, funded largely by the federal government but managed by the states.
It also points to the difficulty in getting the message to Medicaid populations about the importance of the covid vaccines and challenges they face getting care.
“These are some of the hardest-to-reach populations and those often last in line for medical care,” said Craig Kennedy, CEO of Medicaid Health Plans of America, a trade group. Medicaid enrollees often face hurdles accessing vaccines, including worries about taking time off work or finding transportation, he said.
In California, 49% of enrollees age 12 and older in Medi-Cal (the name of Medicaid in California) are at least partly vaccinated, compared with 74% for Californians overall.
Unlike some other large states, such as Texas and Pennsylvania, California provides its Medicaid plans with information from vaccine registries, which can help them target unvaccinated enrollees. But still, the rate of immunizations lags far behind that of the general population.
According to detailed reports showing vaccination rates by county and by health plan, rates around the state vary dramatically. In Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County, 63% of Medi-Cal members have been vaccinated, versus 38% in neighboring Stanislaus County. California health plans are working with community groups to knock on doors in neighborhoods with low vaccination rates and providing shots on the spot.
This fall, California — which has the nation’s largest Medicaid program, with nearly 14 million people — will offer its Medi-Cal health plans $250 million in incentives to vaccinate members. The state is also putting up $100 million for gift cards limited to $50 for each enrollee.
In other states — such as Kentucky and Ohio — health plans are giving $100 gift cards to members when they get vaccinated.
While more than 202 million Americans are at least partly vaccinated against covid, nearly 30% of people 12 and older remain unvaccinated. Surveys show poor people are less likely to get a shot.
More than two-thirds of Medicaid beneficiaries across the country are covered by a private health plan. States pay a monthly fee to the plan for each member to handle medical needs and preventive care.
Nationally, about 70% of Medicaid enrollees are at least 12 years old and eligible for the vaccines, according to a KFF analysis.
State Medicaid programs that can track their progress show modest results:
In Florida, 34% of Medicaid recipients are at least partly vaccinated, compared with 67% for all residents 12 and older.
In Utah, 43% of Medicaid recipients are at least partly vaccinated, compared with 68% statewide.
In Louisiana, 26% of Medicaid enrollees are at least partly vaccinated, compared with 59% for the state population.
In Washington, D.C., 41% of Medicaid enrollees are at least partly vaccinated, compared with 76% of all residents.
“We know how we are doing, and it’s not great,” said Dr. Pamela Riley, medical director of the D.C. Department of Health Care Finance, which oversees Medicaid.
Hemi Tewarson, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, said she “had hoped there would not be this much of a disparity, but clearly there is.”
Medicaid agencies in several states, including Pennsylvania, Missouri, New Jersey and Texas, said they lack complete data on vaccination rates and don’t have access to state registries showing who has been immunized. Health experts say that, without that data, the Medicaid vaccine campaigns are virtually flying aimlessly.
“Having data is step one in knowing who to reach out to and who to call and who to have doctors and pediatricians help out with,” said Julia Raifman, assistant professor of health law, policy and management at Boston University.
For years, Medicaid programs have worked with providers to improve vaccination rates among children and adults. But now, Medicaid officials need more direction from the federal government to set up “a more clear and focused and effective approach” to control covid, Raifman said.
Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said the federal government is giving extra funding to state Medicaid programs to encourage covid vaccinations. “We’re also encouraging states to remind people enrolled in their state Medicaid plans that vaccines are free, safe, and effective,” she said in a statement to KHN. Kennedy, of Medicaid Health Plans of America, said the job of getting shots to Medicaid enrollees is harder when states don’t share immunization data.
“We need access to the state immunization registries so we can make informed decisions to get those unvaccinated people vaccinated and identify those doing a great job, but it all starts with data sharing,” he said.
Medicaid agencies’ claims data doesn’t account for the many enrollees who get vaccinated at federal immunization sites and other places that don’t require insurance information.
California Medicaid officials said they can track enrollee vaccination by linking to the state Department of Public Health’s immunization registry, which captures residents’ inoculations regardless of where they occur in the state.
Data as of Aug. 8 shows rural Lassen County in northeastern California with the lowest vaccination rate among Medi-Cal enrollees, at 21%, and San Francisco with the highest, at 67%.
Medicaid enrollees’ vaccination rates fall short even compared with those of other people in the same county. In San Diego County, for example, 91% of residents are at least partially vaccinated, compared with 51% of Medicaid recipients.
Jana Eubank, executive director of the Texas Association of Community Health Centers, said her clinics would be grateful to know which Medicaid recipients are vaccinated to better target immunization campaigns. Having the data would also help providers make sure people get an additional dose, often called a booster, being recommended this fall.
“We have a pretty good sense, but it would be great to have more detail, as that would allow us to be more focused with our finite resources,” Eubank said.
Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services, which oversees Medicaid, said it requested vaccine registry data from the state health department in the spring but hasn’t received it. A health department spokesperson said her agency was working through legal issues to safeguard the registry’s personal health data.
“Getting accurate, comprehensive vaccination data for our Medicaid recipients is a priority, but we cannot do so based off claims and ad hoc data alone,” said Ali Fogarty, a Pennsylvania Medicaid spokesperson.
Dr. David Kelley, chief medical officer of the state’s Medicaid program, said the lack of immunization data hasn’t slowed the agency’s vaccination work: “We are continuing full steam ahead to get folks immunized.”
AmeriHealth Caritas, which operates Medicaid health plans in Pennsylvania, Florida and six other states and the District of Columbia, has about 25% of its Medicaid enrollees vaccinated, said Dr. Andrea Gelzer, senior vice president of medical affairs.
AmeriHealth is working with its doctors and community organizations to support vaccine clinics. It has offered free transportation and made vaccines available to homebound enrollees.
In Louisiana, the Medicaid program has offered bonuses to five health plans to spur vaccines. But so far only one, Aetna, has qualified.
Louisiana Medicaid is paying Aetna $286,000 for improving its vaccination rates by 20 percentage points from May to August, state and health plan officials said. Aetna had at least partly vaccinated 36% of its enrollees as of Aug. 16.
John Baackes, CEO of L.A. Care Health Plan, said he remains skeptical about paying people to get their shots and said it could upset enrollees who already have been vaccinated and won’t qualify for cash or a gift card. “We don’t think gift cards are going to move the needle very much,” he said.
As part of its strategy to increase vaccinations, the health plan has called members at high risk of covid complications to get them into walk-up or drive-thru immunization sites and helped homebound members get shots where they live. About half the plan’s eligible enrollees have received at least one dose.
Richard Sanchez, CEO of CalOptima, the Medicaid health plan in Orange County, California, said offering $25 Subway gift cards helped increase vaccinations among members living at homeless shelters.
As of mid-August, about 56% of its eligible enrollees were at least partly vaccinated. “We are not where we should be, and the nation is not where it should be,” Sanchez said.
People infected with the Delta variant of coronavirus (Covid-19) carry twice the risk of needing hospital treatment than those with the Alpha strain, a study has suggested.
Researchers looked at more than 43,000 cases in England between March and May. The Lancet, a leading medical journal, has published their findings.
Nearly three-quarters of coronavirus cases in the study were in people who were unvaccinated. Only 1.8% were those who had received both inoculations.
More than double the risk with Delta
The study said around one in 50 patients were admitted to hospital within two weeks of their first positive test. That’s 2.3% of Delta cases and 2.2% of those with the Alpha variant.
Researchers then adjusted these figures to take into account other factors. These included someone’s age, ethnicity and vaccination status. And they determined that the risk of hospital admission more than doubled with the Delta variant compared with Alpha.
Dr Gavin Dabrera is one of the study’s lead authors. He’s a consultant epidemiologist at Public Health England’s National Infection Service. He said:
This study confirms previous findings that people infected with Delta are significantly more likely to require hospitalisation than those with Alpha, although most cases included in the analysis were unvaccinated.
We already know that vaccination offers excellent protection against Delta and as this variant accounts for over 98% of Covid-19 cases in the UK, it is vital that those who have not received two doses of vaccine do so as soon as possible.
It is still important that if you have Covid-19 symptoms, stay home and get a PCR test as soon as possible.
Vaccines work
Moreover, the authors said it’s not possible to draw conclusions about risk among vaccinated patients who go on to develop infections. And studies have shown a link between vaccination and prevention of serious illness from coronavirus.
Dr Anne Presanis, one of the study’s lead authors and senior statistician at Cambridge University’s MRC Biostatistics Unit, said:
Our analysis highlights that in the absence of vaccination, any Delta outbreaks will impose a greater burden on healthcare than an Alpha epidemic.
Getting fully vaccinated is crucial for reducing an individual’s risk of symptomatic infection with Delta in the first place, and, importantly, of reducing a Delta patient’s risk of severe illness and hospital admission.
UK government data shows 88.2% of people aged 16 and over have had at least one dose of a vaccine. And 90.2 million doses have been given overall.
The UK must not take its “eye off the ball” with coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccinations, an expert has said as he warned the virus could come “roaring back”.
“Strategic”
Dr Chris Smith, consultant virologist and lecturer at Cambridge University, said a decision on booster jabs should not be “rash, (or) rushed”, and that the government is considering a more “strategic” approach. It comes as health secretary Sajid Javid said he is “confident” a booster vaccine campaign can start next month despite reports that experts want more time to consider whether they are needed.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Dr Smith said:
We all agree that (the pandemic) is not over until it is over in every corner of the world, because otherwise it will just come roaring back. Don’t forget we think that this started with a handful of cases in one city, in one corner of one country… and it then eclipsed the entire world.
But one must not take one’s eye off the ball here because it would be very easy to unstitch all of the good work we’ve done so far if it turns out with time we do lose immunity because the vaccines wane in their effectiveness.
As we go into winter, now is a critical period and I think that is why we haven’t seen a rash, rushed decision by the JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) and the Government.
(PA Graphics)
The UK’s vaccination programme has so far seen around three-quarters of adults fully vaccinated with two doses. NHS plans are in place to enable a rollout of third doses from 6 September alongside flu vaccines. Unlike in other countries such as Israel, no official decision on the booster programme has yet been taken.
It comes as research found more than three-quarters of adults in every age group say they would be likely or very likely to get a booster jab if offered. Overall, 87% of adults surveyed by the Office for National Statistics said they would be likely or very likely to get a third coronavirus jab. Likelihood increased with age, with 96% of those aged 70 and over indicating their interest, down to 78% of 16 to 29-year-olds.
Boosters
Dr Smith said although interventions in certain demographics may be more “strategic”, a decision on a booster campaign rollout needs to be made soon. He said:
While other countries are embarking on booster programmes, people are taking stock, they are looking at the data and maybe making a decision on how to intervene strategically in certain groups. They’re going to have to make a decision soon because winter is soon going to be upon us and it takes time for the programme to be rolled out and it takes time for the vaccines to actually have their effects in these people.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has argued that the priority should be ensuring people around the world are vaccinated rather than boosting the immunity of those already vaccinated. According toNature:
The World Health Organization (WHO) has called for a moratorium on COVID-19 boosters until the end of next month, with the aim of ensuring that at least 10% of people in all countries are vaccinated before extra doses are handed out. …
the case for boosters has not yet been proved. Most COVID-19 vaccines currently in use remain extremely effective months after administration, particularly against severe disease and death. In a period of vaccine scarcity, the choice to dole out boosters must be guided by evidence of benefit, and consideration given to the cost of delaying the delivery of vaccines to vulnerable people and health-care workers in other countries.
If vaccination levels around the world remain high, then the odds of a new variant emerging also remain high. The risk then is that a variant emerges which evades current vaccines.
Millions of vaccines manufactured in South Africa are being sent to Europe despite concerns about global vaccine inequality.
32m doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have been exported for distribution around Europe, while promises to vaccinate a third of Africans remain unfulfilled.
South Africa ordered 31m doses of the single shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but according to the New York Times, has only administered about 2m.
With the percentage of Africans fully vaccinated at just 1.7%, the exports to Europe have prompted renewed concern about vaccines not reaching where they’re most needed.
Out of South Africa
There was a condition in the contract between Johnson & Johnson and South Africa that the country would not be able to stop exports. This contrasts the US and the EU, which have imposed restrictions on exports of domestic vaccines.
The South African health ministry said they’d had to sign, or they wouldn’t have received any vaccines.
South African scientist Glenda Gray told the New York Times:
It’s like a country is making food for the world and sees its food being shipped off to high-resource settings while its citizens starve.
Vaccination in Africa
Much of the continent remains unvaccinated. In the Congo, for example, just 0.1% of the population have received at least one dose.
Meanwhile, Africa is fighting a vicious wave caused by the Delta variant. The WHO has said that coronavirus (Covid-19) deaths increased by 89% in July compared to June.
Johnson & Johnson announced in March 2021 that it had made a deal with the African Union to supply the continent with up to 400m doses. This built on its and other suppliers’ commitments to supply vaccines to the Covax programme for lower-income countries.
Covax inhibited
The programme currently aims to supply 520m doses to Africa before the end of 2021. But experts say it is likely the majority of people in the lowest-income countries will be left waiting until 2023 for their vaccine.
Wealthier countries began buying up vaccine doses before they were produced, which the WHO warned could affect or delay Covax’s effectiveness.
The WHO is currently recommending that instead of focusing on booster shots, rich countries should send their vaccines to poorer countries.
The UK is offering third doses and vaccinating teenagers while low-and middle-income countries are left fighting for scraps.
It’s an insult to the thousands dying each day from Covid-19.
Worse still, this is happening while our government obstructs efforts to enable these countries to manufacture their own vaccines by waiving intellectual property.
We’re keeping the global south dependent on donations while hoarding limited vaccine supplies for ourselves.
That the UK’s unused doses alone could cover the ten least-vaccinated countries on the planet shows the obscene injustice of our approach to global vaccination.
With the buying of booster shots, vaccine manufacturer Pfizer is projecting a revenue of $33.5bn by the end of the year. The sale of booster vaccines will only add to the huge profits vaccine companies have already made; profits that have already created nine new billionaires.
The hoarding of vaccine doses by rich countries and profiteering by companies has been described as a “vaccine apartheid“.
Writing for the BMJ, Health Justice Initiative founder Fatima Hassan, global health professor Gavin Yamey, and BMJ editor Kamran Abbasi said:
Covid-19 global vaccine allocation is based on power, first mover advantage, and the ability to pay. This moral scandal, enabled by corporate and political permission of mass death, is tantamount to a crime against humanity.
The official COVID-19 death toll in India is reported to be around 429,000, but many researchers believe it is at least five times higher. India experienced a devastating wave of infections in April and May, and less than 10% of the population has been fully vaccinated. “When we watch what’s happening in the U.S. … it is astounding that people who have access to vaccines are choosing not to get jabbed,” says Barkha Dutt, an award-winning Indian television journalist and author. “It’s anti-science. It’s self-indulgent. It’s a very First World white privilege.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The World Health Organization is warning over 100 million more people will be infected with COVID-19 by early next year as the Delta variant continues to rapidly spread. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus spoke Wednesday.
TEDROSADHANOMGHEBREYESUS: Cases and deaths continue to rise. Last week, the 200 millionth case of COVID-19 was reported to WHO, just six months after the world passed the 100 million reported cases. And we know that the real number of cases is much higher. As I said recently, whether we reach 300 million and how fast we get there depends on all of us. At the current trajectory, we could pass 300 million reported cases early next year.
AMYGOODMAN: Today we spend the rest of the hour looking at the pandemic in three of the hardest-hit countries: the United States, Indonesia and India. Over the past four weeks, the three countries have accounted for over a quarter of all COVID cases recorded in the world.
We begin in India, where the official COVID death toll is reported to be around 429,000, but many researchers believe it is at least five times higher. India suffered a devastating wave of infections in April and May.
We go now to New Delhi, where we’re joined by Barkha Dutt. She is an award-winning Indian television journalist and author, and author of This Unquiet Land: Stories from India’s Fault Lines. She’s an opinion columnist with the Hindustan Times and The Washington Post. Her latest piece for the Post is headlined “As an Indian, I am enraged by America’s refusal to set vaccine mandates.” Her father died of COVID in April.
First of all, Barkha, our condolences on the death of your father. Can you talk about what happened to your father — in fact, he had gotten one jab, or shot — is that right? — of the two shots — and how you feel about the level of resistance and hesitancy around vaccines in the United States, how you connect the two?
BARKHADUTT: Thank you, Amy.
Yes, my father had one jab and was scheduled to have the second vaccine, in fact, in the week that he tested positive and eventually had to be hospitalized. Now, like, I think, many daughters in India today, I am haunted by the “what if.” You know, what if I had managed to get him a vaccine in time? The truth is that he got a vaccine just as soon as he could. The truth is also that while I’m enraged, as I mentioned in the Post piece, at what’s happening in the United States, I was also somewhat enraged with my own government for not having anticipated the ferocity of the second wave and not having moved quickly enough to order, procure and manufacture more vaccines.
That said, you know, when we watch what’s happening in the U.S. from, let’s say, Delhi, it is astounding that people who have access to vaccines are choosing not to get jabbed. And, you know, it’s anti-science. It’s self-indulgent. It’s a very First World white privilege, because large parts of the world do not have access to vaccines. And the crisis in my country is that we do not have enough vaccines. Otherwise, our vaccination program has been quite a smooth rollout. So there are serpentine lines of people waiting to get a vaccine, and our problem is there are not enough vaccines to go around.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And, Barkha, the Modi administration has pledged to have every adult vaccinated by the end of the year. How likely is that? And what needs to happen in order to make sure that there are sufficient vaccines?
BARKHADUTT: So, just to give the audience some context, India otherwise manufactures 60% of the world’s vaccine. We have experience with mass immunization programs, which is why, you know, with the vaccines we have, our rollout has been pretty smooth. But we — and I need to underline this again and again, which is why my blood boils to see what’s happening in the U.S. — we simply do not have enough vaccines to go around.
So, to give you the numbers, we’re vaccinating, let’s say, on a good day, about 4 million Indians a day. We need to be vaccinating 9 million to meet the target that you just mentioned that has been set by the government itself — that is, all adults vaccinated by the end of the year. We cannot do that unless we have just an explosion of vaccines in either the production pipeline or the market.
And at the moment, rich countries, Western countries, have, in a sense, captured most of the vaccines. They have vaccines in surplus. And if their own citizens are not ready to use these vaccines, they need to send them over to countries that need them more.
NERMEENSHAIKH: Barkha, you’ve reported extensively from all across India about the impact the pandemic has been having, and also, of course, therefore, the urgency of getting vaccines. Can you explain what you’ve seen and, in particular, the impact of the poor — on the poor? As oxygen supplies have run out, you’ve talked about people lining up on the streets and dying on the streets waiting for oxygen, also increased numbers of people now below the poverty line. Could you talk about that?
BARKHADUTT: Yes. It’s important to sort of say that we might be in what some call the lull before the next storm. But certainly what we have emerged from is a nightmare like one I have never lived through in my adult life. You know, we were told that this virus is the great equalizer. There could be no bigger lie.
In the first wave of the pandemic, we saw millions of poor Indians having to leave the cities and walk, walk back to their villages during the lockdown, because India opted to close down public transport, in complete panic, when COVID-19 first hit us. And I documented that journey. And, you know, the humanitarian catastrophe was significantly, I would say, greater than the medical emergency.
In the second wave, because we thought there would not be a second wave, once again, it was the poor who were disproportionately hit. Most of them, families that I met, had to take loans, mortgage jewels, you know, family heirlooms, maybe sell the only piece of land that they have, just to be able to pay the exorbitant fees at hospitals, that then made them sign consent forms, which basically I call modern-day death warrants, because those forms said that if their loved ones were to die, let’s say, because there wasn’t enough oxygen in the hospital, there would be no legal liability that the hospital would have to face. And I literally saw people outside the shut doors of these hospitals dying on the streets, dying in ambulances, dying not from COVID, but dying, for example, because they couldn’t get a bed or because they couldn’t get access to oxygen.
So, we must recognize — and now we’re in the next phase, where, amid hopes of a recovery, you are seeing salaried Indian lose jobs. You are seeing, you know, daily wage workers unable to pay rent. You are seeing millions of poor children fall out of the education system as physical schools remain closed in large parts of the country. So, when we talk about COVID, we must stop saying that the virus is a great equalizer, because it is anything but.
AMYGOODMAN: Barkha Dutt, in the United States, there’s now discussion of the booster shot. It’s going to go first to the immunocompromised. Now pregnant women are recommended to have the shot, and it looks like children will be coming up next, under 12. The Wall Street Journal has reported that India is now looking to access Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson. Can you explain what the impediments are to reaching an agreement with these foreign companies to be able to get the mRNA vaccine in India, and what it means that they are so proprietary around their recipes, around their formulas?
BARKHADUTT: Mm-hmm, a great question. You know, personally, I’ve been advocating a lifting of the impediments and getting these vaccines to us as soon as possible. In particular, the mRNA vaccines have been tested for children, and we know them to be safe. And like I just mentioned, our schools — we’re probably the only country in the world where, mostly, physical schools have not opened for more than 500 days. And because of the digital divide, because only 11% of India has access to a computing device, for poor children, this means no education. It means losing — for millions of poor children, it means no education at all, because — and then, in particular, for girls. You know, in homes where, let’s say, there’s one smartphone, it means the boy will get the phone, and not the girl, and those girls are then being pushed into child managers. So, I’m just explaining all of this to underline why that mRNA vaccine is so desperately important for countries like mine.
The impediment is that the government is refusing to basically sign off a waiver of the liability of these companies, should they be taken to court. And the argument is that that liability waiver has not been provided to Indian vaccine manufacturers. There are some of us who are saying give it to everybody, because that’s what countries around the world have done. But, unfortunately, you know, we are seeing a protracted negotiation over this indemnity clause, and it is unfortunate because I do not think we have the time to be quite this bureaucratic and slow-moving about it as we’ve been.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And, Barkha, before we end, the last issue of the medical debts that millions of Indians have accrued as they’ve treated people suffering from COVID, could you talk about that and the state of hospitals and clinics now dealing with COVID patients?
BARKHADUTT: So, for the point at which we are, really, we’re sitting at the precipice of a third wave. We do not know what the nature of it would be. We are seeing localized waves in our country right now. What I mean by that is that instead of there being like this national sort of catastrophe, we are seeing this localized, and the maximum number of cases coming from specific states — the southern state of Kerala, the western state of Maharashtra and so on.
And in terms of the deaths, I just want to make the point that, again, we do not know a few things. Personally, my reporting makes it quite evident to me, and I think it’s evident to everybody now, that we have severely undercounted our dead. You know, we have seen mass graves of abandoned bodies suspected to be those of COVID patients in our northern heartland by the banks of the Ghaghara River. I’ve personally documented five such mass graves myself. We have seen underreporting and the absence of counting at cremation grounds and graveyards.
And, you know, it’s just important to say this, that we are a country where 1,300 people use die from tuberculosis, another 1,300 from cancer, every day. We are seeing a sharp fall in even the registration of those cases, which means that millions of Indians are not getting access to screening, to hospitalization for diseases other than COVID. And in my opinion, they are part of the casualty figures of this pandemic and should be counted as such. But we have no formal or official documentation of what might these fatalities be.
Public health experts are warning against the familiars of complacency that cost us so gravely in the second wave. They’re warning against that for the third wave. Nobody quite knows when the third wave will come. At the moment, the hospitals are not facing the kind of pressure and the kind of craziness that we saw, let’s say, in the month of May. So fingers crossed. We can’t afford to be complacent at all and desperately need those vaccines that so many Americans are refusing to take.
AMYGOODMAN: Barkha Dutt, we want to thank you so much. And again, our condolences on the death of your father.
BARKHADUTT: Thank you.
AMYGOODMAN: Also, you yourself had COVID. Award-winning Indian television journalist and author, founding editor of the independent digital news source Mojo Story. She is an opinion columnist with The Washington Post. And we’ll link to her latest piece, “As an Indian, I am enraged by America’s refusal to set vaccine mandates.”
Coming up, we go to Indonesia, where the COVID death toll has topped 112,000, with more than half the deaths occurring in the past two months. Stay with us.
A one-time 99% tax on billionaires’ massive pandemic wealth gains would raise enough revenue to pay for coronavirus vaccines for every adult on Earth — and provide each of the hundreds of millions of unemployed workers around the world with a $20,000 cash grant.
So finds an analysis released late Wednesday by Oxfam International, the Fight Inequality Alliance, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Patriotic Millionaires, progressive advocacy organizations that are pushing governments to tax billionaires to help fund critical pandemic relief measures.
According to the groups’ new report, global billionaires have seen their collective net worth soar by nearly 69% — from $8 trillion to $13.5 trillion — since the start of the pandemic, which has killed more than 4.3 million people and unleashed economic havoc worldwide, intensifying poverty, hunger, housing insecurity, and joblessness. Oxfam recently found that global deaths from hunger and malnutrition—as many as 11 per minute — are outpacing coronavirus fatalities.
Taxing billionaires’ pandemic wealth gains at a rate of 99%, the analysis shows, would raise $5.4 trillion in revenue and still leave the world’s 2,690 billionaires about $55 billion richer — roughly $37 million per billionaire — than before the crisis.
“Billionaire Jeff Bezos could personally pay for enough vaccines for the whole world, yet he would rather spend his wealth on a thrill ride to space,” said Max Lawson, the head of inequality policy at Oxfam International. Bezos, the richest man on Earth, has seen his wealth grow by more than $79 billion during the pandemic, from $113 billion in March 2020 to $192.4 billion today, the new analysis finds.
The organizations estimate that fully vaccinating the world’s entire adult population would cost around $70 billion, and a one-time $20,000 cash grant to all jobless workers would cost $4.4 trillion.
“Covid-19 is turning the gap between rich and poor into an unbridgeable chasm,” Lawson added. “The obscene levels of wealth gained from the pandemic by a handful of mega-rich individuals should immediately be taxed at 99% ― enough to fully vaccinate everyone on Earth and help millions of workers who lost their jobs due to Covid-19. Only with this kind of radical and progressive policymaking will we be able to fight inequality and end poverty.”
Njoki Njehu, Pan Africa coordinator at the Fight Inequality Alliance, said in a statement that “with a 99% tax on billionaires’ Covid-19 wealth gains, we are calling time on this age of greed.”
“Billionaire wealth is not earned,” Njehu continued. “It’s their money ‘earned’ by your sweat―and it’s high time that sweat began to pay off. Governments need to tax the rich for us to stand any chance of reversing the inequality crisis we’re in.”
More than 4.5 billion coronavirus vaccine doses have been administered across the globe thus far, but just 1.2% of those doses have gone to people in low-income countries — leaving billions without access to a single shot. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that at least 11 billion vaccine doses will be necessary to end the pandemic.
Because rich countries have blocked an effort to temporarily waive international patent protections, pharmaceutical companies have maintained a stranglehold on global vaccine production — and they’ve predictably sold most of their supply to wealthy nations, some of which are now rolling out booster shots despite the WHO’s call for a moratorium aimed at shrinking the persistent inoculation gap.
In May, The People’s Vaccine Alliance found that coronavirus vaccine profiteering has produced at least nine new billionaires with a combined net worth of $19.3 billion.
The new analysis of billionaires’ wealth gains shows that the richest people on the planet have seen their collective fortune grow “more over the past 17 months than it has in the past 15 years, and 325 new billionaires joined the ‘three-comma club’ since the pandemic began — equivalent to roughly one new billionaire minted every day.”
“The surge in global wealth during an unprecedented pandemic is morally repugnant,” said Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. “Taxing pandemic wealth windfalls to fund global vaccination is a just and practical way to address the suffering for millions who have lost their lives and livelihoods.”
A congressman who is suing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) over recently reinstated rules on masking on the floor of the House of Representatives has contracted COVID-19.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina), who received a $500 fine in May for refusing to wear a facial covering on the House floor, alleges that masking rules in Congress were unnecessary and unconstitutional. Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) are co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
“The masking requirement was an attempt to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, medicine, and science, despite a deep divide over these issues of opinion,” according to the lawmakers’ suit, adding that the masking rules were used by Pelosi and Democrats to force Republicans “to be instruments for fostering public adherence to this ideological point of view that Plaintiffs find unacceptable.”
On Thursday, Norman announced on social media that he had developed a breakthrough case of the virus, in spite of being vaccinated against COVID-19.
“After experiencing minor symptoms this morning, I sought a covid-19 test and was just informed the test results were positive. Thankfully, I have been fully vaccinated and my symptoms remain mild,” Norman wrote on Twitter.
One of the best ways to prevent the spreading of coronavirus is by getting vaccinated. But breakthrough cases can occur. When they do, they typically are less severe than cases in patients who have not been vaccinated.
The Speaker justified the reinstatement of the rules because Republicans weren’t doing their part to stop the spread of the virus.
“The Republican party has been delinquent in embracing the science that people need to be vaccinated,” Pelosi said in a statement. “That’s why when we talk about the masking policy in the House, we always just follow the guidance of the Capitol physician.”
Norman’s situation — a lawmaker getting sick in spite of having been vaccinated — is perhaps indicative of why Congress still needs rules on masking, to add another layer of protection against the spread of coronavirus within its halls.
White House officials on Thursday highlighted improving numbers on vaccinations in the United States, noting that rates have increased in the past few days as more Americans take note of the difficulties that have come about due to the Delta variant of coronavirus.
These figures were the highest single-day numbers of vaccinations seen in more than a month, Shahpar said.
Thursday just in: +864K doses reported administered over yesterdays total, including 585K newly vaccinated. Highest single day numbers in over a month! Unlike prior waves, we have safe and effective vaccines that can minimize the impacts of COVID-19. Let's get everyone protected!
In remarks he made to reporters, White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said that many of the new vaccinations were happening in states where the Delta variant was hitting people hardest — including states like Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri and Oklahoma.
“Importantly, we’re seeing the most significant increases in the states with the highest case rates,” Zients said. “We’ve more than doubled the average number of people newly vaccinated each day over the past three weeks in the states with the highest case rates.”
Americans are taking note of the risks of being unvaccinated, and “they’re responding by doing their part, rolling up their sleeves and getting vaccinated,” Zients added.
Still, there remain many difficulties in getting people who aren’t yet vaccinated to agree to it.
An Economist/YouGov poll published this week found that 18 percent of Americans have said they will never get vaccinated, while another 9 percent said they are unsure about doing so. When those saying they would never get a vaccine were asked what could be done to change their minds, the poll demonstrated that very few in that group could be persuaded to take the vaccine.
Just 6 percent of respondents in that subgroup said they would get the vaccine if their doctor told them to. Nine percent said a cash incentive of $100 would convince them, and only 13 percent said full Food and Drug Administration authorization would make them change their minds.
Even when shown that getting the vaccine would protect their families from COVID, only 16 percent of those who said they’d never get vaccinated expressed any interest in adjusting their views and getting the shots they need in order to give their families that protection.
The Biden White House on Wednesday rejected the World Health Organization’s call for a temporary moratorium on coronavirus booster shots, arguing that the provision of third doses for fully vaccinated people in rich countries is not in conflict with the U.N. body’s goal of urgently getting more jabs to poor nations.
“We feel that it’s a false choice and that we can do both,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said during a media briefing. “We announced just yesterday that we hit an important milestone of over 110 million vaccines donated to the world. That is more than any other country has shared, combined.”
But public health advocates have warned that the Biden administration is not doing nearly enough to help close the massive inoculation gap between rich and poor nations, which is allowing deadly coronavirus variants to develop and rip through undervaccinated regions of the world, from Africa to South America to Southeast Asia.
While Psaki touted the more than 100 million Covid-19 vaccine doses the U.S. has sent overseas, Public Citizen’s Peter Maybarduk pointed out earlier this week that “100 million doses amount to only one one-hundredth of the current global need.”
“The president has said that the U.S. will serve as a vaccine arsenal for the world,” Maybarduk said in a statement Tuesday. “Ten thousand people die each day waiting for ambitious action to match this vision.”
The Biden administration is also refusing to do everything in its power to facilitate the transfer of key vaccine-making technology to overseas manufacturers that say they are prepared to begin mass-producing doses if given the opportunity. The U.S. government currently owns the patent for critical spike-protein technology developed by the National Institutes of Health — technology that has been used by at least five companies in the development of coronavirus vaccines, including Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson.
However, despite pressure from advocacy groups and experts — including a leading NIH scientist who helped develop the spike-protein technology — the Biden administration has thus far declined to leverage its ownership of the patent to require pharmaceutical giants to share their vaccine formulas with manufacturers in low-income countries.
President Joe Biden has also faced accusations of taking a backseat in World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations over a temporary patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines, a proposal that has gone nowhere since Biden endorsed it in May.
Asia Russell, executive director of the advocacy group Health GAP, said last week that the Biden administration is guilty of “abetting” European nations’ ongoing obstruction of the waiver by failing to exert enough pressure on the U.S. allies.
“It is unconscionable that high-income nations of the WTO would continue to turn their backs on people of the Global South, desperate for immunity from the highly transmissible Delta variant,” said Russell.
In a speech on Wednesday, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — who has embraced the patent waiver proposal — said that “we cannot accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it, while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected.”
Tedros called for a moratorium on coronavirus booster shots until at least the end of September with the goal of getting first and second shots to the billions of people around the world who currently lack access.
“Low-income countries have only been able to administer 1.5 doses for every 100 people, due to lack of supply,” Tedros said. “We need an urgent reversal, from the majority of vaccines going to high-income countries, to the majority going to low-income countries.”
The U.S. — which has wasted around a million doses since December — has not yet begun administering boosters, but last week the Biden administration bought up an additional 200 million doses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine to prepare to offer third shots to certain at-risk individuals, including the elderly and the immunocompromised.
Germany and France, meanwhile, pushed ahead with their booster-shot campaigns on Wednesday, rebuffing the WHO’s call for a moratorium. An official with Germany’s Health Ministry pointed to the country’s pledged vaccine donations to poor countries — 30 million to date — and said it can both administer third doses and help low-income countries accelerate their vaccination drives.
As around a dozen rich nations begin rolling out booster shots, around 3.5 billion people across the globe have yet to receive a single vaccine dose. Of the 4.31 billion doses administered globally thus far, just 1.1% have gone to people in low-income countries.
“The priority now must be to vaccinate those who have received no doses and protection,” Tedros said last month. “Instead of Moderna and Pfizer prioritizing the supply of vaccines as boosters to countries whose populations have relatively high coverage, we need them to go all out to channel supply to COVAX, the Africa Vaccine Acquisition Task Team, and low- and low-middle income countries, which have very low vaccine coverage.”
President Joe Biden on Thursday urged state and local governments to use financial incentives, in the form of $100 payments, to convince their residents to receive coronavirus vaccines.
“Treasury stands ready to give technical assistance to state and local governments so that they may use the funds effectively to support increased vaccination in their communities, and Treasury will partner with the Department of Health and Human Services throughout this effort,” a statement from the Treasury Department said.
The incentives would only apply to those who haven’t yet received the vaccine — it doesn’t appear that those who are already vaccinated would be paid retroactively. Biden acknowledged that paying people now and not being able to pay vaccinated people retroactively “might sound unfair.” However, he said, the payments remain a key tool in pushing for more vaccinations.
“Here’s the deal: if incentives help us beat this virus, I believe we should use them. We all benefit if we can get more people vaccinated,” Biden said.
But would a financial incentive actually work? There’s some evidence that it can. Polling in late April and early May by Morning Consult asked unvaccinated Americans whether being paid to get their shots would encourage them to do so. The poll asked whether respondents would be more likely to get vaccinated if they were paid $1,000. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said a $1,000 payment would motivate them to get inoculated.
Even smaller financial incentives would work to some degree, the poll found. When asked if a $50 incentive would do, 43 percent of respondents said that amount would be enough.
More recent polling, however, shows that the financial incentive Biden is proposing may not result in huge changes. When an Economist/YouGov poll in late July asked if a $100 payment would change people’s minds, only 8 percent of unvaccinated respondents said that would convince them to get vaccinated.
Still, that incentive proved more appealing than a number of other ideas the poll offered. Only 6 percent of unvaccinated respondents said they’d be convinced by a recommendation from their doctor to get vaccinated. Only 5 percent respondents would be convinced to get vaccinated if someone close to them contracted COVID. And only 2 percent would be convinced by a plea for vaccination from former President Donald Trump.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Biden administration is expected to change their recommendations on mask-wearing Tuesday, pushing for individuals to revive the wearing of face coverings indoors in certain parts of the country — including for those who have received vaccinations — to protect against the coronavirus.
The likely change in recommendations comes as the number of “breakthrough” infections (positive COVID-19 test results among those who are vaccinated) has risen alongside the spread of the Delta variant of the virus.
The revised approach expected to be announced soon is a departure from recommendations made back in May, when the CDC had said that those who had received their vaccinations could go unmasked in virtually every possible scenario. Those earlier recommendations, however, were made with the assumption that unvaccinated individuals would still wear masks until they received their shots.
Over the past couple of weeks, the rate of new cases of coronavirus being reported has increased by 144 percent nationwide. The seven-day average of new cases being reported daily currently sits at around 56,000.
Not surprisingly, there appears to be a direct correlation between areas of the country where vaccination rates are low and the new COVID hotspots. Of the 10 counties in the U.S. currently seeing the highest numbers of new cases, all have a fully-vaccinated rate among residents that is below 50 percent, with six of them having rates that are lower than 35 percent.
“I think they should say we made a mistake with our guidance earlier because we were reliant on the honor system and the honor system didn’t work,” former Baltimore health commissioner Leana Wen said to NBC News. “As a result, too many people are unvaccinated and the Delta variant spreads and we have a different situation in our country now.”
With spectators barred from the Olympic Games because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and cases rising in areas around the world, particularly among unvaccinated people, rich governments face growing pressure to take bolder steps to address what critics have called “vaccine apartheid.”
As the Games formally kicked off Friday — following the launch of a new “Stop Playing Games” campaign to demand that wealthy countries invest in a global vaccine manufacturing plan — dozens of members of Congress called for including additional funding in the reconciliation package to produce and distribute Covid-19 vaccines worldwide.
The call was spearheaded by Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). It is based on the Nullifying Opportunities for Variants to Infect and Decimate (NOVID) Act that Krishnamoorthi and some of the co-signers introduced last month.
Friday’s letter (pdf), signed by more than 70 lawmakers, was addressed to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Shumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). It was also sent to the budget committee chairs in both chambers — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) — who play a key role in developing the reconciliation package that Democrats are working to pass alongside a bipartisan infrastructure deal.
The Delta variant is here! It’s vital that we ramp up global vaccine distribution. I led 70 of my House and Senate colleagues in requesting that the upcoming Congressional package include funding for production of COVID vaccines for global distribution.https://t.co/sW35uhyo9Q
— Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (@CongressmanRaja) July 23, 2021
“No investment in the fight against Covid-19 is more urgent and cost-effective now than an investment in getting the world vaccinated as quickly as possible,” the lawmakers wrote to congressional leadership.
“Even assuming wealthy countries will be fully vaccinated by mid-2021, the global economic cost of not vaccinating lower-income countries is estimated to be $9 trillion per year, or nearly 10% of global GDP,” they continued. “$34 billion is a small price to pay to help return the U.S. and global economy to normalcy, and we request that such an amount is included in the upcoming spending package.”
While recognizing the contributions that the United States has already made to COVAX, a global initiative co-led by the World Health Organization focused on equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines, the letter also emphasizes that the U.S. has not done its fair share and details how a $34 billion investment could help address the facts that “only 1% of people in low-income countries [are] vaccinated and over 6 billion worldwide… have yet to receive a dose.”
As Krishnamoorthi put it in June: “Despite the progress we’ve made here at home, the coronavirus continues to devastate other parts of the world, and these outbreaks represent a threat to Americans with an increased risk of double and triple mutation variants which the vaccines we have today may not be able to stop.”
Less than 1% of Covid vaccines have gone to low-income countries.
Meanwhile, rich countries have freezers full of more doses than they could ever use. #PeoplesVaccine
— The People's Vaccine (@peoplesvaccine) July 23, 2021
The letter says that “estimates indicate that it will cost up to $25 billion to create enough vaccine manufacturing capacity around the world to vaccinate 60% of the populations in the COVAX countries, plus another $8.5 billion to ensure end-to-end delivery of the vaccines.”
The lawmakers’ call for greater U.S. investment in vaccine equity comes as the highly contagious Delta variant is spreading across the globe — including in the United States — and uncertainty over an emergency waiver of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO) for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments so that countries worldwide can ramp up production.
Earlier this week, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said that text-based negotiations on the TRIPS waiver proposal “are moving slowly at this time, as members try to reconcile differing views and approaches. We are currently working hard to see how we can help members bridge their gaps and move these negotiations forward.”
As Common Dreamsreported Tuesday, WTO’s TRIPS Council is not scheduled to meet again until September, almost a year after India and South Africa first proposed the waiver.
Although U.S. President Joe Biden was widely praised in May for shifting course and endorsing a TRIPS waiver, he has since faced criticism for not doing enough to convince leaders of other rich countries to follow suit — particularly Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
As rich countries begin to open up, only 1 in 10 people in the Global South will be vaccinated this year.
Covid-19 cases are increasing in parts of the United States; the vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths are among unvaccinated Americans.
As mask mandates and other public health measures are being considered in communities across the country, the New York Timesreported Friday that “Biden administration health officials increasingly think that vulnerable populations will need booster shots even as research continues into how long the coronavirus vaccines remain effective.”
While the Biden administration — already accused of hoarding vaccines by global justice campaigners — weighs a potential third shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines for people who are age 65 or older or those with compromised immune systems, the president faces pressure from around the world to approach the pandemic as a global problem.
“Dear Pres. Biden, It is past time to launch a vaccine manufacturing program to meet global need and end the pandemic,” tweeted Peter Maybarduk, Access to Medicines director at Public Citizen, one of the groups behind the new #StopPlayingGamescampaign.
“If we can come together for the Olympic Games during a pandemic,” Maybarduk said, “we can come together to end vaccine apartheid.”
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases and President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, stated over the weekend that vaccines were working to help eliminate the threat of COVID-19 to the general public, citing statistics on deaths currently associated with the virus to prove his point.
Since the pandemic began, more than 605,000 Americans have died from coronavirus. That number has fallen significantly since vaccines became available earlier this year. In June 2021, there were about 10,200 deaths. For comparison, in June 2020, closer to the start of the pandemic in the U.S., the number of deaths were almost double that number with 19,700 Americans succumbing to the coronavirus then.
Last month’s numbers also pale in comparison to how many perished at the height of the crisis, in January 2021, when around 97,200 Americans died in just one month.
As the rate of COVID deaths has slowed significantly, Fauci sought to give coronavirus vaccines their due credit on Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program, noting that most of those who are dying now are people who have not received their vaccinations.
“If you look at the number of deaths, about 99.2 percent of them are unvaccinated,” Fauci explained to host Chuck Todd. “About 0.8 percent are vaccinated.”
“No vaccine is perfect,” Fauci, who is also the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “but when you talk about the avoidability of hospitalization and death, Chuck, it’s really sad and tragic that most, all of these are avoidable and preventable.”
Fauci added that “there are going to be some people … you’ll see some who are vaccinated and still get into trouble and get hospitalized and die.” But the best way to combat the virus and prevent one’s own chances of getting infected is to get vaccinated, he insisted.
“The overwhelming proportion of people who get into trouble are the unvaccinated. Which is the reason why we say this is really entirely avoidable and preventable,” Fauci explained.
While news of the vaccine working for millions of Americans is great, there are worrisome trends starting to come about. The rate of new cases being reported daily is up by 5 percent from where it was just two weeks ago, and the number of Americans who are fully vaccinated remains below 50 percent at this time.
Polling also indicates that there are still challenges in getting people vaccinated. According to an Economist/YouGov poll from late June, 19 percent of Americans say they absolutely will not get vaccinated while another 11 percent say they are unsure about doing so — meaning there’s a potential that 30 percent of the general population won’t ever get protected against the virus.
Several localities throughout the U.S. are also seeing higher rates of hesitancy than others, which means those places will be more impacted by the refusal of some to get vaccinated (22 states are currently below a rate of 50 percent of residents receiving at least one dose of a vaccine, for example).
Many have suggested that the hesitancy to get vaccinated is politics-based, as data has demonstrated that supporters of former President Donald Trump are less likely to get their shots than are supporters of Biden. Indeed, as MSNBC senior producer Kyle Griffin pointed out, the 2020 presidential election map seems to be a fairly accurate indicator of where vaccine hesitant residents are more likely to live.
“Of the 19 states (including DC) that have already hit 70% of adults with at least one vaccine dose, Joe Biden carried every single one in 2020,” Griffin tweeted over the weekend. “And of the 17 states that have yet to surpass even 60%, Trump won them all with one exception: Georgia.”
Anti-poverty groups, climate campaigners, and public health experts reacted with outrage and howls of disappointment Sunday after the G7 leaders who spent the weekend at a summit in Cornwall, England issued a final communique that critics said represents an extreme abdication of responsibility in the face of the world’s most pressing and intertwined crises — savage economic inequality, a rapidly-heating planet, and the deadly Covid-19 pandemic.
“This G7 summit will live on in infamy,” declared Max Lawson, Oxfam’s head of inequality policy, in a statement responding to the G7 communique at the conclusion of the weekend summit — a gathering characterized by the global progressive movement as an unmitigated disaster compared to what could have been achieved.
“Faced with the biggest health emergency in a century and a climate catastrophe that is destroying our planet,” Lawson said, the leaders of the richest nations “have completely failed to meet the challenges of our times. Never in the history of the G7 has there been a bigger gap between their actions and the needs of the world. In the face of these challenges the G7 have chosen to cook the books on vaccines and continue to cook the planet. We don’t need to wait for history to judge this summit a colossal failure, it is plain for all to see.”
While the G7 statement vows to “[e]nd the pandemic and prepare for the future by driving an intensified international effort, starting immediately, to vaccinate the world by getting as many safe vaccines to as many people as possible as fast as possible” — and the member nations pledged a collective 1 billion doses will be donated to benefit middle- and low-income nations — public health experts have been adamant voluntary charity and empty rhetoric — especially in the the absence of a joint commitment to lift patent protections for life-saving vaccines at the World Trade Organization — makes clear the richest nations would still rather protect the profits of the pharmaceutical industry than serve the world’s poor or see the pandemic eviscerated.
This was a missed opportunity for #G7 countries – who have done most to fuel the crises of Covid, climate & inequality – to take responsibility & act with the urgency or scale of action needed. Rehashed promises & inadequate action fails people & planet https://t.co/JZ9wZQ2cQP
On Sunday, Global Justice Now executive director Nick Dearden — who has been on the ground in Cornwall throughout the summit — called the communique “shameful,” a document that “stresses ‘vaccines are a public good’ and ‘we need equitable access’ while then reinforcing the intellectual property system which enshrines the very opposite principles.”
“The G7 is not fit for purpose,” Dearden tweeted. “They have operated without any concern for lives around the world — or even for our own ability to end this pandemic.” Dearden said it was now clear that “profits first” is the true commitment of U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the other G7 leaders, and Global Justice Now suggested the only people who will be celebrating the bloc’s lack of ambition will be Big Pharma and its allies:
Success! I blocked a plan to make billions of Covid jabs as fast as possible, to protect big pharma profits.
— Global Justice Now (@GlobalJusticeUK) June 13, 2021
Meanwhile, the G7’s specific response to the climate crisis was seen as paltry, even if a modest step in the right direction. Thousands of climate activists demonstrated Saturday to demand the G7 leaders finally match their actions with some of their recent promises, but again the ambitions put forth Sunday by U.S. President Joe Biden, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and the other powerful leaders was seen as more of the same kind of failure that has become all to familiar.
“This summit feels like a broken record of the same old promises,” said John Sauven, Greenpeace UK’s executive director. “There’s a new commitment to ending overseas investment in coal, which is their piece de resistance. But without agreeing to end all new fossil fuel projects— something that must be delivered this year if we are to limit dangerous rises in global temperature — this plan falls very short.”
The G7 plan touted by its members on Sunday, said Sauven, “doesn’t go anywhere near far enough when it comes to a legally binding agreement to stop the decline of nature by 2030. And the finance being offered to poorer nations is simply not new, nor enough, to match the scale of the climate crisis.”
Despite the G7 communique’s new pledge to end future financing of coal projects worldwide and restating its Paris Agreement pledge to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 ºC by 2050, those promises fall intensely short of what the scientific community says is necessary to address the climate emergency.
“The G7 has now fallen squarely behind what leading economists, energy analysts, and global civil society has shown is required: an end to public finance for all fossil fuels,” said Laurie van der Burg, senior campaigner for Oil Change International, on Sunday. “Our climate cannot afford further delay, and the failure of the G7 to heed these demands means more people impacted by the ravages of our climate chaos.”
“Between 2017 and 2019, G7 nations spent $86 billion in public finance for fossil fuels,” van der Burg continued. “Every single cent of that makes it harder to reach our climate goals. That’s why more than one hundred economists as well as hundreds of civil society organizations from around the globe called on these leaders to end this public support for dirty fuels and shift this money to real solutions. Unfortunately those calls were not met with action, and our climate and communities — particularly the most vulnerable in the Global South—will feel the consequences.”
David Turnbull, Oil Change’s strategic communications director, put specific emphasis on Biden’s responsibility heading into the summit — his first overseas trip as U.S. President — and his failure to seize the historic moment or establish himself as a truly transformational leader on the global stage.
“Biden’s first trip abroad unfortunately can be chalked up as a missed opportunity,” Turnbull said. “Despite strong statements about ending U.S. international support for all fossil fuels in the first few months of his administration, President Biden has yet to turn those statements into true action. The G7 was a key moment to show that the U.S. can be a leader in moving the world forward on bold climate action, and unfortunately that leadership has not yet revealed itself.”
The lack of funding for climate adaptation for poorer nations — those that have done the least to create the climate threat but suffer the most because of it — was also highlighted by Oxfam International.
“This plan could support green development in poorer countries,” said Oxfam’s climate change lead Nafkote Dabi, “but it is lacking in detail including on who will foot the bill. It also appears to champion infrastructure to reduce emissions, while many communities are screaming out for support to adapt to the impacts of climate change — an area that remains woefully underfunded.”
Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, made the explicit connection between poverty, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the climate emergency.
“Everyone is being hit by Covid-19 and worsening climate impacts,” Morgan said, “but it is the most vulnerable who are fairing the worst due to G7 leaders sleeping on the job. We need authentic leadership and that means treating the pandemic and the climate crisis for what they are: an interconnected inequality emergency.”
“The solutions to the climate emergency are clear and available,” she continued, “but the G7’s refusal to do what’s needed is leaving the world’s vulnerable behind. To fight COVID-19, supporting a TRIPS waiver for a People’s Vaccine is crucial. To lead us out of the climate emergency, the G7 needed to deliver clear plans to quickly phase out fossil fuels and commitments to immediately stop all new fossil fuel development with a just transition.”
Where, she asked, “is the clear national implementation with deadlines and where is the climate finance so urgently needed for the most vulnerable countries?”
According to the global movement for climate action and a just solution to the pandemic, such things are not to be found in anything that came out of Cornwall over the weekend.
Welcoming President Joe Biden’s new pledge to share 80 million coronavirus vaccine doses with other nations as a positive first step, dozens of House Democrats on Friday said the White House has an obligation to go much further to help redress enormous inequities in global vaccine distribution and bring the deadly pandemic to an end.
Specifically, 42 Democratic lawmakers are calling on Biden to support a $25 billion investment in the production of roughly eight billion mRNA vaccine doses, which would be enough to vaccinate half of the world’s population.
“As you know, wealthy countries have administered more than 80% of global vaccines while low-income countries have received just 0.3%,” the House Democrats wrote in a letter to Biden. “The New York Times editorial board recently issued a dire warning that ‘without a major course correction, the rest of the world will have to wait until 2023 or later for large-scale vaccination initiatives’ — a preventable humanitarian catastrophe that heightens the risk of the emergence of a vaccine-resistant viral strain that could impact all Americans.”
On Thursday, Biden unveiled his plan to donate 80 million excess U.S. coronavirus vaccine doses to countries around the world by the end of the month. The White House said that 75% of the doses will go to COVAX, the World Health Organization-backed global vaccination initiative that has struggled to meet its distribution targets due in part to inadequate supply.
In a press release, the Biden administration indicated that the first tranche of 25 million doses will soon go out to India, Brazil, African nations, and other countries that have struggled to vaccinate their populations as pharmaceutical companies maintain their profitable stranglehold on vaccine production.
House Democrats’ new letter — signed by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), and others — calls on the Biden administration to release the 80 million doses immediately and review the massive U.S. vaccine stockpile to distribute even more vaccines around the world.
The letter also demands that Biden use “all available tools of U.S. influence, persuasion, diplomacy, and legal authorities to facilitate the rapid and widespread transfer of technology and expansion of vaccine production; including directing the National Institutes of Health to participate in the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool program, and negotiating and securing vaccine licensing agreements with existing manufacturers to enable broad sharing of vaccine technology and industrial processes to scale up production.”
“The world cannot wait. It is imperative that the United States act quickly and deploy every tool in our arsenal,” the letter reads. “Now is the time to build international cooperation and solidarity in ways we have never seen before, including using the full force of U.S. diplomacy, economic and commercial leadership, legal authorities,and membership in multilateral institutions. The fate of our own health and safety in the U.S. is inextricably connected to the wellbeing and protection of the most vulnerable among us worldwide.”
Early last month, progressive lawmakers and global humanitarian groups applauded Biden for endorsing a temporary patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines at the World Trade Organization, a proposal that would lift a key legal barrier preventing factories across the globe from ramping up vaccine production.
But the proposed waiver, introduced last October by India and South Africa, remains in the negotiation phase as wealthy European countries, Canada, and other nations continue to object to suspending vaccine-related intellectual property rights — a move that would threaten the pharmaceutical industry’s bottom line.
The failure to suspend vaccine patents and rich nations’ hoarding of doses and key manufacturing technology have left much of the developing world highly vulnerable to Covid-19 and its spreading variants, which experts fear could undercut vaccination campaigns worldwide.
The New York Timesreported earlier this week that “as rich nations like the United States prepare for a return to normalcy — at least half of the populations there and in Britain and Israel have received at least one dose of a vaccine, sending cases plummeting — some poorer nations, scrambling for shots and heaving under weary health systems and exhausted economies, are seeing their worst outbreaks since the start of the pandemic.”
“This is the case in Malaysia, Nepal, and other nations in Asia,” the Times continued. “But in few places is the situation as bleak as South America, which has the highest rate of new infections in the world, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia, and Paraguay have all ranked in the top 10 in cases per 100,000 residents over the past week.”
In a tweet on Friday, Jayapal — chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — stressed that “a global pandemic isn’t over until it’s over everywhere.”
“We have the power to be a world leader and save lives — we can and must act,” Jayapal added.
The Biden administration’s decision to support waiving World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property rules to help fight COVID-19 has the potential to help shift the global power balance toward governments and their people and away from mega-corporations.
At Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, an organization founded to dismantle corporate overreach of our “trade” and globalization policies, we celebrate the Biden-Harris administration’s departure from decades of U.S. trade officials relentlessly attacking other countries’ access-to-affordable-medicines initiatives on behalf of Big Pharma.
While this announcement was historic, there is more work to do to ensure that Big Pharma doesn’t weaken or delay the waiver.
The road leading to the Biden administration’s decision was paved by dozens of health, faith, labor and consumer advocacy organizations, over 100 members of the U.S. Congress and millions of people around the world who took action. Here’s the story of how that happened.
The U.S Campaign for an Emergency COVID-19 WTO TRIPS Waiver
The WTO requires its 159 member nations to provide pharmaceutical firms certain monopoly rights in a text called the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property or “TRIPS.” These monopoly protections mean that pharmaceutical corporations control how much and where vaccines, tests and treatments are made.
Last Autumn, it became clear that most people in low- and middle-income countries would not get vaccinated until at least 2022, and those in the world’s poorest countries might have to wait until 2024 for mass immunization, if it happens at all. Current production capacity would not supply nearly enough vaccines, treatments or diagnostic tests to meet global needs. Those concerns proved true: By early May, global vaccine production had not reached 1.5 billion doses, while 10-15 billion doses are needed. Creating greater supply capacity is critical.
Recognizing the unprecedented urgency of the fight against COVID-19, in October 2020 India and South Africa proposed a temporary waiver of TRIPS rules to increase global production of COVID-related health technologies. The Trump administration, doing Big Pharma’s bidding, promptly organized a handful of mostly wealthy countries to block even negotiations of the waiver.
Organizations representing the interests of the Global South, such as Third World Network and South Centre, global advocacy groups like Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam, and Public Citizen launched an international campaign supporting the waiver. But here in the U.S. and around the world, many thought reversing the U.S. blockage of negotiations was a long shot.
When Joe Biden took office in January 2021, a small group of organizations started strategizing about how to encourage the new administration to reverse the Trump position, which also was increasingly the focus of some Democratic members of Congress.
Public Citizen began by coordinating thousands of letters from our members to Congress and hosting a series of meetings with other U.S. groups that also hoped to make the waiver a reality. Public Citizen, Oxfam, Partners in Health, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, Doctors Without Borders, Health GAP, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the nurses and teachers unions, Avaaz, Right2Health, Be a Hero, and a host of other groups started to coordinate with the goal of reversing the U.S. position. (This truly was a feat achieved by hundreds of organizations. Any omissions are due to word limits and not the limited value of the work of our incredible allies!)
Regardless of the odds stacked against us, this ad hoc coalition sought to build the political pressure needed to take on the Big Pharma lobby and help create a path for the Biden-Harris administration to take action.
To educate and activate organizations who might be interested, we wrote and circulated a U.S. sign-on letter, which after hundreds of emails and calls, was signed by 400 U.S. organizations from Democratic Party base groups like Indivisible and MoveOn to dozens of national unions, consumer, faith, health, human rights, development and other civil society groups. The broad support for the letter inspired new constituencies to join the coalition to fight toward our increasingly realistic goal.
The next step was to prove strong political support for the waiver within Congress. Working with public health champions, Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois), Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) and Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), as well as allies in the Senate, the coalition helped to educate members of Congress in Washington and in their districts to build support for a letter to President Biden.
Our campaign continued to pick up steam, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) sent a letter to Biden signed by 10 senators, and campaigners staged protests outside of Big Pharma shareholder meetings and at the homes and offices of brazenly anti-waiver, pro-Pharma members of Congress. After the story had been featured in the print press and on Democracy Now! and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, the mainstream media finally began covering the waiver.
In the same week, Data for Progress released a poll showing that 60% of U.S. voters support the waiver. Be a Hero, working with More Perfect Union, produced a powerful video featuring health activist Ady Barkan reminding the president of his campaign promise to remove intellectual property barriers that block access to COVID-19 vaccines.
And finally, after months of hundreds of individuals hosting thousands of meetings, phone calls and direct email exchanges with members of Congress, the majority of House Democrats had signed onto the Schakowsky-Blumenauer-DeLauro letter calling on Biden to support the waiver and enter text-based negotiations at the WTO.
All of this campaigning was gaining momentum leading up to the critical decision point, a May 5 meeting of the WTO. That afternoon, U.S Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai shocked the world with her announcement that the U.S. would not only reverse its blockage, but would engage in negotiations in support of a waiver. Some countries that had joined the U.S. in blocking negotiations reversed quickly. Others are reconsidering their positions. Some doubled down on the pro-pharma position. For instance, Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel came out harshly opposed to the waiver, which has made the European Union an obstacle to progress.
The Fight Is Not Over
Public Citizen, in coalition with national and international partners, will continue to organize until a waiver is enacted and we secure the funding to ensure more vaccines, treatments and tests are manufactured and people worldwide have equitable access. This will be a hard fight.
At least 100 Big Pharma lobbyists have been swarming Washington to fight the U.S. position change. Their goal now is to ensure the waiver either never is agreed upon or is gutted of all substance.
That’s why it is critical that U.S. activists keep pushing back against the Pharma lobby. And our partners in other countries must help the administration deliver on its promise to persuade the remaining countries still on the wrong side of the issue to stop blocking negotiations. Once talks begin, we need the fastest possible agreement on a waiver text that eliminates all intellectual property barriers on all of the health technologies needed to stop the spread of COVID-19, including diagnostic tests, treatments, vaccines and the equipment to make them.
The announcement from USTR notably only mentioned support for waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines. A comprehensive waiver that removes intellectual property obstacles to the needed production of much greater volumes of COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests is essential to U.S. residents being safe from COVID-19 and our economy reviving, as well as the health and economic recovery of the world.
Global vaccine apartheid could cost millions of lives, push tens of millions more into poverty and spawn mutated virus variants that evade vaccines. There can be no end to the public health disaster or economic crises anywhere if people in developing nations are not vaccinated. There is more the U.S. can and should do, in addition to the waiver, to help the world produce billions more vaccine doses.
The announcement from the United States is something to celebrate, but our work does not stop here.
Note:Mariana Lopez contributed to this op-ed. Please visit Rethink Trade’s website to get involved in the campaign and follow updates from Global Trade Watch on Twitter.
