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Category: Coronavirus Vaccine

  • State CDC Data Shows Persisting Racial Disparities in Vaccination

    A woman rolls up her sleeve to recieve The Vaccine

    Black Americans’ COVID-19 vaccination rates are still lagging months into the nation’s campaign, while Hispanics are closing the gap and Native Americans show the highest rates overall, according to federal data obtained by KHN.

    The data, provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in response to a public records request, gives a sweeping national look at the race and ethnicity of vaccinated people on a state-by-state basis. Yet nearly half of those vaccination records are missing race or ethnicity information.

    KHN’s analysis shows that only 22% of Black Americans have gotten a shot, and Black rates still trail those of whites in almost every state.

    Targeted efforts have raised vaccination rates among other minority groups. Hispanics in eight states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are now vaccinated at higher rates than non-Hispanic whites. Yet 29% of Hispanics are vaccinated nationally, compared with 33% of whites.

    While 45% of Native Americans have received at least one dose, stark differences exist depending on where they live. And Asian vaccination rates are high in most states, with 41% getting a shot.

    The analysis underscores how vaccine disparities have improved as availability has opened up and Biden administration officials have attempted to prioritize equitable distribution. Still, gaps persist even as minority groups have suffered much higher mortality rates from the pandemic than whites and are at risk of infection as states move to reopen and lift mask mandates.

    Despite these lingering gaps, the CDC said last week that those who are fully vaccinated don’t need to wear masks in most indoor and outdoor settings or physically distance. Only 38% of Americans are fully vaccinated.

    “Every day we do not reach a person or a community is a day in which there is a preventable covid case that happens and a preventable covid death in these communities,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California-San Francisco.

    KHN requested race and ethnicity data from the CDC on people who have received at least one dose of a covid vaccine since mid-December for all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The data covers shots as of May 14 given to 155 million people that were administered through federally run programs and federal agencies as well as by state and local authorities.

    Eight states — Alabama, California, Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming — either refuse to provide race and ethnicity details to the CDC or are missing that information for more than 60% of people vaccinated. Those states are excluded from the KHN analysis, though the CDC includes all but Texas in its published national rates.

    Some states display race and ethnicity for vaccine recipients separately, making it difficult to compare rates for Hispanics to non-Hispanic whites, for example. But the CDC data allows for direct comparisons. It reports numbers for Hispanics, who can be of any race or combination of races, as well as numbers for non-Hispanic people of single-race or multiracial categories.

    The data for Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders is unreliable, making it difficult to draw conclusions on the vaccination rate in that population.

    Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, wasn’t surprised that Black Americans’ vaccination rates were still lagging, citing a complex combination of access issues, hesitancy and structural inequity.

    Benjamin pointed to the early challenges in securing an appointment online and the initial placement of vaccination sites — which he noted the Biden administration had worked to improve.

    “We’re going to be judged whether or not we did it equitably at the end of the day,” he said. “Right now, I still think we’re failing.”

    Dr. Utibe Essien, a health equity researcher and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, stressed that targeted outreach must involve multiple institutions in a community.

    “It’s not just the Black doctor, it’s not just the barber, it’s not just the pastor, kind of these traditional folks who have been the big messengers. We have to be broad,” he said. “It’s investing in folks who know the neighborhood, the small-store owner who gets to see all the 12- to 15-year-old kids come through the store getting snacks before they head off to school.”

    Why Native Americans Lead in Vaccinations

    Nationally, Native Americans and Alaska Natives have been vaccinated at significantly higher rates than other groups. Tribes administered doses quickly, prioritizing elders with culturally important knowledge, said Meredith Raimondi, director of congressional relations and public policy for the National Council of Urban Indian Health. The rollout was imbued with urgency: Native Americans have died of covid at more than double the rate of white Americans, according to the latest CDC data.

    Native vaccination rates are higher than white rates in 28 states, including New Mexico, Arizona and Alaska, where many receive care from tribal health centers and the Indian Health Service. In states such as South Carolina and Tennessee, where IHS access is more limited and Native residents are more likely to live in urban areas, vaccination rates are far lower than for white residents.

    Groups in those areas reported problems finding health care providers to administer shots. Tribal organizations compiled lists of retired nurses to tap for clinics. At one point, staffers from an Oklahoma City clinic for Native Americans offered to fly to Washington, D.C., to help vaccinate Indigenous people living around the nation’s capital, Raimondi said.

    “It became an issue of, ‘Well, we could get you the vaccine, but we don’t know who is going to administer them,’” Raimondi said.

    The council and Native American Lifelines, a nonprofit providing health services, partnered with the University of Maryland-Baltimore for a vaccination site exclusively for Native Americans living in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. It launched in April.

    While the vaccination rates for Native Americans surpass those of whites in some states due in part to IHS, that infrastructure does not exist for Black Americans, said Rhonda BeLue, the department chair of health management policy at Saint Louis University.

    At the beginning of the pandemic, people were shocked by how much more likely Black Americans were to die from covid, she said.

    “However, the same structural inequities that caused that disproportionate mortality in covid are the same structural inequities that predated covid and caused disproportionate burdens of morbidity and mortality,” she said. “This isn’t new.”

    Easing Fears in Hispanic Communities

    Some states are reporting higher vaccination rates among Hispanics than white and Black residents, which Bibbins-Domingo said fits with surveys showing high enthusiasm for vaccination among Hispanics. It also indicates that some of the reported barriers may have been addressed more effectively in those states, she said.

    Paul Berry, chair of the Virginia Latino Advisory Board, partly attributes Virginia’s success to targeted outreach efforts. The state and certain counties also increased Spanish-language resources to boost sign-ups.

    Connecting with every community cannot be an afterthought, said Diego Abente, president and CEO of St. Louis’ Casa de Salud, a health care provider focused on immigrant communities. Community buy-in, effective social media use and language programming from the start have been essential, he said. Hispanics have a higher vaccination rate than whites in Missouri.

    But nationally, a dearth of transportation options, an inability to take off from work to get a vaccine, and concerns about documentation and privacy have dampened uptake among Hispanics, according to experts.

    “To me it’s more about access to health care,” Berry said. “If you don’t live close to health care, you’re just going to shrug it off immediately. ‘I can’t get that vaccination. I’m going to miss work.’”

    To reduce fear among Idaho agricultural workers that may be part of mixed-immigration status families, public health workers emphasized messaging that documentation wouldn’t be required, said Monica Schoch-Spana, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. She has helped lead its CommuniVax project seeking to boost uptake among Black, Hispanic and Indigenous communities.

    It’s also important to engage trusted institutions to administer vaccines, Schoch-Spana said: “Is it a familiar place, does it feel safe, and is it easy to get to?”

    Federal efforts have placed sites in underserved neighborhoods. About 60% of shots at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s vaccination sites and at community health centers were given to people of color, federal health officials said this week.

    Incomplete Data Collection

    Race or ethnicity information is still missing for nearly 69 million vaccinated people — or 44% — in the CDC data, despite vows by federal officials to improve outdated systems to better inform their response.

    CDC spokesperson Kate Fowlie said their efforts, including sharing strategies for capturing demographic data and reducing data gaps with state and local governments, have resulted in improvements in data collection. Officials are also planning to allow agencies to update previously submitted vaccine records. The true national rates by race or ethnicity group would each be higher with complete data.

    Unlike the federal government, North Carolina made it nearly impossible for providers to submit vaccine data without recording race and ethnicity. As a result, it has the most complete demographic data of any state.

    Adding that step was not an easy sell — providers and other vaccinators were initially resistant, said Kody Kinsley, the chief deputy secretary for health at the North Carolina health department. But it has paid off in the state’s ability to target its response to populations getting left behind, he said.

    Bibbins-Domingo said the federal government and states need to make collecting this vaccination data by race mandatory, because data drives the response to the pandemic.

    “The feds know how to do this. They do it every 10 years for the census,” she said. “That we somehow cannot figure it out in public health data is quite simply unacceptable.”

    KHN reporter Victoria Knight contributed to this report.Targeted efforts have raised vaccination rates among other minority groups.

    Visit the Github repository to read more about and download the data.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pelosi Says Masks to Remain, Since Most GOP Lawmakers Aren’t Vaccinated

    Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi checks out the mask of Rep. Jason Crow during a news conference outside the Capitol on May 13, 2021.

    Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced new guidelines on Thursday that gave fully vaccinated Americans the go-ahead to remove masks in almost every situation, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) said that the House of Representatives would not be relaxing its rules anytime soon due to Republican members’ refusal to get vaccinated.

    The new guidance from the CDC states that individuals who are fully vaccinated — that is, they have received two shots of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, or the single shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and it has been two weeks since their final injection — do not have to wear masks outdoors or indoors, except when they are in highly-crowded areas.

    “If you are fully vaccinated, you can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic,” the CDC website says, while noting that people still have to follow rules and regulations that are in place within their local jurisdictions.

    After the CDC issued the updated guidance, reporters asked Pelosi whether mask rules would be eased within the House of Representatives. “No,” Pelosi said. House members are currently required to wear a mask on the House floor.

    “Are they all vaccinated?” she added, referring to lawmakers in the House.

    Seventy-two percent of House members are currently vaccinated, but there is a wide discrepancy between both parties on their separate rates of vaccination. While every member of the Democratic Party’s 219-member delegation is fully vaccinated, only 95 out of 212 Republicans are the same, amounting to just 44.8 percent of their caucus.

    It isn’t as if lawmakers aren’t at risk of the virus. Earlier this year, Rep. Ron Wright, a Republican from Texas, passed away after being diagnosed with coronavirus. Wright was not vaccinated.

    The rate at which Republicans have received their vaccinations is comparable to the number of Americans overall who have received at least one shot (47 percent) to protect against the virus. But while lawmakers in Washington D.C. have been able to get vaccinated for several months now, most adults in the U.S. have only been eligible to get their shots since mid-April.

    The vaccinations so far appear to be effective in suppressing the virus. Since April 14, a month ago, the seven-day average of new cases of coronavirus being reported per day has dropped by around 45.3 percent. The seven-day average death rate has also decreased by close to 18.4 percent.

    Most Americans have either received one or two doses of vaccines, but there remains a large segment that says they will absolutely not get vaccinated (17 percent), and a comparable portion who aren’t sure yet (14 percent), according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll.

    Much like in Congress, hesitancy against the vaccines in the U.S. is strongest among those on the right. Within that same poll, 42 percent who identify as conservatives said they are either unsure about getting their shots or won’t do so, compared to just 13 percent of self-identified liberals and 26 percent of moderates who say the same.

    Conservatives are less likely to get vaccinated, some medical observers have opined, because they view it as a way to show their loyalty to former President Donald Trump. Indeed, data appears to show that states with higher rates of Trump voters also have lower vaccination rates.

    While the vast majority of Americans have received or are planning to get vaccinated, the rate at which people are refusing to get their shots is troubling. It’s estimated that between 70 to 90 percent of the population must gain antibody resistance to COVID-19 in order to reach herd immunity. If every person who is hesitant in the Economist/YouGov poll’s findings decided against getting the vaccine, that would mean the U.S. would be on the lower end of or slightly below that suggested threshold.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Health Experts Say Expanding Vaccine Access Requires More Than Patent Waivers

    D.C. Health Nurse Manager Ashley Hennigan fills a syringe with a dose of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine during a walk-up clinic at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' outdoor Reach area on May 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

    Biolyse Pharma Corp., which makes injectable cancer drugs, was gearing up to start making generic biologic drugs, made from living organisms. Then the pandemic hit.

    Watching the covid death toll climb, the company decided its new production lines and equipment could be converted to making vaccines for poorer countries without the means to do so.

    John Fulton, a consultant for the Canadian company, emailed Janssen, the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that makes the vaccine, which employs a live, though disabled, virus. Biolyse sought a license so it could produce 20 million of J&J’s shots.

    When J&J’s rejection form letter finally arrived, it misspelled his name: “Dear Mr. Folton, Thank you for your interest …”

    Smaller companies like Biolyse may command more attention from the big corporate vaccine manufacturers after the Biden administration announced support Wednesday for a proposal to waive patent protections for covid-19 vaccines and therapies.

    As coronavirus deaths ravage Brazil and India and other countries across the globe, pressure to force J&J, AstraZeneca, Novavax, Pfizer and Moderna to waive their intellectual property protections and share their technology reached a crescendo this week.

    Yet while Biden’s support of the waiver might be good optics, experts said, it won’t be enough.

    Moderna, which did not respond to requests for comment, announced in October that it would not enforce its covid-related patents during the pandemic. Even so, no known independent producer has used the available patents to replicate the company’s mRNA vaccine. Experts say that’s telling.

    “You can’t manufacture its vaccine unless you have access to trade secrets as well as the patents,” said Brook Baker, a law professor at Northeastern University who participated in early conversations on the creation of the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, or C-TAP. To date, no vaccine technology has been added to the pool.

    The patents alone wouldn’t be enough. A manufacturer would also need access to internal processes: the technology and know-how that bring a vaccine to life. They’d need skilled scientists and technicians from the original company to train their staff for months. On top of that, every manufacturer in the world would be on the hunt for the limited supplies of single-use bioreactor bags, vials and adjuvants.

    In the best-case scenario, sharing patents is only a tiny step in the vastly complex work of making a covid vaccine, which relies on sophisticated new technologies. At its worst, they say, waiving patents would strain already taxed supply chains and encourage counterfeiting and shoddy production that could result in dangerous or ineffective vaccines, besmirching the reputation of vaccination for years.

    Instead of focusing on patents, some say, global leaders should subsidize additional production of existing vaccines at discount prices through groups like Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which already funds billions annually in discounted vaccines for the developing world.

    Dr. Stanley Plotkin, the inventor of the rubella vaccine and a consultant to vaccine makers, said allowing inexperienced companies to produce vaccines “could be a disaster for covid vaccines and for vaccines in general.”

    Plotkin proposed that an intellectual property transfer be allowed to happen only if a regulatory authority, such as the Food and Drug Administration, inspected the receiving company and agreed it was competent.

    Proponents of the waiver argue that without urgent action, many more people will die. “At this pace,” 9 of 10 people in the developing world will remain unvaccinated this year ― and it could be “at least 2024” before many nations achieve mass immunization, according to an open letter to President Joe Biden last month from more than 170 Nobel laureates, former prime ministers and heads of states.

    “I think we’re going to find very soon that this Canadian company is just a drop in the bucket,” said Niko Lusiani, a senior adviser for Oxfam America who helped gather signatures. “There are many manufacturers ready to come on line.” Even more, he said, there is capacity to be built if those technologies are available and the investors are not facing trade sanctions for doing so.

    U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s statement on Wednesday was carefully worded, saying the U.S. will “actively participate in text-based negotiations” on the global stage to support the waiver. It would require the approval of all 164 member nations.

    Tai, picked by Biden in December, met with more than two dozen parties integral to the global vaccine supply chain, including executives of AstraZeneca, Novavax, J&J, Pfizer and Moderna as well as nonprofit proponents of the waiver and Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder and philanthropist, who helped establish global vaccination efforts, has come out in opposition to the waiver. Gates had urged Oxford to commercialize its vaccine after it initially promised to donate the rights to any drugmaker to manufacture for the public good. Oxford gave AstraZeneca sole rights, with no guarantee it would be offered at a low cost, and retained a stake in the profits.

    Michael Watson, a longtime vaccine industry official and current consultant to Moderna, called forcing companies to give away their licenses a “dangerous precedent.”

    “The problems that we are trying to solve are reliability, quality, cost and access to vaccine supply,” he said. “These can all be done through established market mechanisms of partnerships, licensing, disruptive innovation, tax breaks, incentives and government funding without attacking the market mechanisms that made all of this possible in the first instance.”

    Bio Farma, the state vaccine producer in Indonesia, is planning to produce one of the Chinese vaccines. The Brazilian company Fiocruz is making AstraZeneca’s vaccine, as is the Serum Institute of India. All these deals involve technology transfer and training, as well as raw materials.

    Dr. George Siber, a vaccine expert currently consulting with six vaccine companies worldwide, including mRNA vaccine maker CureVac, said that without the technology transfer “we’re talking about years of work” to figure out how to replicate a vaccine.

    Vaccine manufacturers have partnered across the globe — and it has been akin to a high-end matchmaking process with the vaccine makers signing voluntary licensing deals only with trusted manufacturers.

    Thomas Cueni, director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, said that with each partnership the original vaccine manufacturer is stretched “to the limits because really there’s a lot of hand-holding, there’s a lot of knowledge sharing, training of skilled workers.”

    To emphasize the work involved, Cueni pointed to the mRNA vaccine of Pfizer-BioNTech, which has more than 280 components and 86 suppliers from 19 countries.

    It’s not likely, Cueni added, that the covid vaccine makers will willingly partner with a company unless they mutually agreed to do so.

    “Do you think that if you try to coerce companies already stretched out, they would then give you not just the recipe, the blueprint, but really show you how to do it?” he said.

    J&J spokesperson Jake Sargent declined to confirm the email interaction with Biolyse. But he said in an email that only a limited number of manufacturers can produce its vaccine safely, with high quality, and to scale. J&J assessed nearly 100 production sites and, in the end, selected fewer than a dozen.

    For the manufacturers, supplies are also a hurdle. As more companies get into the game of making vaccines globally, there simply won’t be enough ingredients.

    Pfizer’s Sharon Castillo wrote in an email that if companies begin to buy up scarce supplies in the hope of manufacturing a vaccine using technology developed by others, “it will make it harder, not easier, to manufacture vaccines in the near term.”

    Through COVAX, Castillo said, Pfizer will deliver up to 40 million doses in 2021 to countries across the globe such as Bosnia, Tunisia, Rwanda, Peru, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and Ukraine.

    Nicole Lurie, a senior adviser at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, said the waiver does not address the short-term need for supplies or the potential for countries to donate excess doses.

    Manufacturers have already announced that they hope to supply up to 14 billion doses of vaccines globally in 2021 ― that’s triple the previous annual vaccine output, according to a discussion paper posted by IFPMA and organized for an international summit on shortages.

    The report warned that a shortage of supplies may result in several current covid manufacturers not being able to meet current vaccine manufacturing commitments. There’s concern about the need for single-use bioreactor bags used for cell culture and fermentation for all vaccines. And, the lipid nanoparticles used to create mRNA vaccines are also in tight supply, with only a few capable suppliers currently operating at scale.

    So far, more than 1.21 billion vaccines doses have been administered worldwide, but mostly in the U.S. and other wealthy countries. Canada’s Biolyse said that if it can manufacture the J&J vaccine, a small developing country has committed to buying it.

    Without a voluntary consent from the manufacturer, though, Biolyse is now working to obtain a compulsory license to produce the J&J vaccine, which would force J&J to waive its intellectual property rights. Such a legal maneuver is allowed under current international law, but the Canadian government would have to support Biolyse’s license application. So far, it has not.

    Canadian officials have met with Biolyse and other companies, as well as international vaccine developers, about the feasibility of making their products in Canada, said Sophy Lambert-Racine, a spokesperson for Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada.

    The “existing Canadian biomanufacturing assets were deemed to be of an insufficient scale or utilized technology platforms which were not suitable to the needs of these firms,” said Lambert-Racine, adding that the Canadian government is now investing more than $1 billion into covid vaccine and therapeutics research and development.

    Biolyse is a small company with about 50 employees, including “scientists who have spent their working lives producing vaccines,” Fulton said. The company has said it still needs about $4 million in financing to finish setting up manufacturing lines.

    Claude Mercure, a co-founder of Biolyse, said that even if the company doesn’t share the patent and the technology, he is confident his company can figure out how to make the J&J vaccine, which uses a disabled adenovirus to deliver instructions to the body on fighting the coronavirus. In recent weeks, though, other independent scientists have reached out to collaborate and potentially develop a new vaccine.

    Trying to remake the J&J vaccine without a technology transfer and partnership would potentially take years, but with a strategic partnership Biolyse could be making vaccines within four to six months, Biolyse executives said.

    Regardless of what happens with the waiver, the tenor of international conversation about intellectual property rights puts pharmaceutical companies on notice, said Mara Pillinger, a senior associate in global health policy and governance at Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.

    “Large parts of the world are not going to suffer with covid until [the industry] gets around to prioritizing them,” she said.

    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.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AS COVID Cases Soar in India, Advocates Urge Biden to End “Vaccine Apartheid”

    Bodies of victims who died due to the COVID-19 coronavirus are seen before cremation at a cremation ground in New Delhi, India, on May 2, 2021.

    The U.S. is facing sustained calls to end its opposition of a proposal to temporarily lift intellectual property rules for Covid-19 vaccines and related technology as soaring coronavirus cases ravage India and new reporting spotlights a debate within the Biden administration over whether to support the patent suspension effort to help tackle the global pandemic or prioritize Big Pharma’s interests.

    At issue, as the Washington Post reported Friday, is a proposal India and South Africa submitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) last October to suspend Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) rules on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments to boost manufacturing capacity. It’s now cosponsored by 60 nations and backed by over 100 countries as well as hundreds of U.S. and international civil society organizations, former world world leaders and Nobel laureates, and some U.S. lawmakers.

    In addition to the U.S., other wealthy nations including the U.K. and Canada are blocking the proposal — which needs consensus to pass.

    The WTO’s TRIPS panel met Friday to discuss the proposal, and it’s now being revised by its cosponsors.

    Asked Friday whether the U.S. would continue its opposition, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration has not yet confirmed its stance and said the White House’s “overall objective is to provide as much supply to the global community and do that in a cost-effective manner.”

    According to the Post: “The debate has reignited decades-old tensions in global health, pitting such influential figures as Pope Francis, who backs the patent-waiver proposal, against philanthropist Bill Gates, who’s opposed. It has also challenged U.S. officials who have prioritized this nation’s coronavirus response but know that the virus’s continued spread and mutation overseas will eventually pose risks to Americans.”

    White House chief medial adviser Anthony S. Fauci and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai discussed the proposal last week, the Post reported, with Fauci indicating support for it and Tai considering it. She indicated an openness last month when she told a virtual WTO conference that “we have to consider what modifications and reforms to our trade rules might be necessary.”

    She also got input on the matter from powerful philanthropist Bill Gates, the Post reported. Gates made clear Sunday that he’s opposed to lifting such patent protections.

    In addition, the Post reported, “other officials in the Commerce Department and the coronavirus task force warn that waiving the patents could backfire, including by handing intellectual property to international rivals. They also say that allowing new manufacturers to compete for scarce vaccine ingredients and expertise could hinder existing production, and that donating doses to countries in need would be more efficient.”

    But the chorus of outside voices urging wealthier nations to drop their opposition to the waiver is strong and swelling. It includes Fatima Hassan, who leads South Africa’s Health Justice Initiative and told the Post, “It’s really amazing to me that you have one of the most powerful countries in the world, and it can’t take on four CEOs.”

    Other prominent voices calling on President Joe Biden to back the TRIPS waiver proposal include former Irish President and former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson.

    “We have to be on the side of humanity and life saving in a crisis,” she told BBC News.

    Oxfam Great Britain CEO Danny Sriskandarajah made the case for the patent waiver this week and put the need in the context of India’s current surge in Covid-19 cases — what he called “a tsunami.”

    “We’re putting the interests of a few big pharmaceuticals above the interests of people around the world,” Sriskandarajah said on the BBC’s “Question Time. “No one is safe until everyone is safe and the best way to do that is to loosen the rules on who owns the rights to produce the vaccines.”

    India reported over 400,000 Covid-19 cases in a single day Friday — a global record. The case surge prompted the Biden administration to ban entry to the U.S. any non-U.S. citizens or permanent residents traveling from India.

    Doctors Without Borders, which supports the TRIPS waiver, warned Friday that “the second wave of Covid-19 is reaching extremely alarming levels in India,” and “has devastated the healthcare system and overwhelmed frontline workers.”

    Sharing the Post’s report, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also addressed the current outbreak in India.

    Warren tweeted that the “Covid-19 outbreak in India is a humanitarian crisis that threatens its 1.4 billion citizens, and billions more around the world. I’m urging President Biden — and our vaccine manufacturers — to use every tool possible to help with this crisis.”

    As of Thursday, according to the New York Times, India had vaccinated just 1.8% of its population, and the country’s “major vaccine companies are struggling to increase production.”

    In the U.S., by contrast, 39% of adults have been fully vaccinated.

    Such a divide, say humanitarian aid and social justice organizations, must not be allowed to continue.

    “Policymakers have to make a choice: do they support a #PeoplesVaccine to end vaccine apartheid, or do they work for big pharma?” Health GAP tweeted Friday. “The whole world is watching.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • CDC Finds Anxiety Was Cause of Many Adverse Responses to J&J Vaccine

    An Army nurse fills a syringe with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at the FEMA-supported COVID-19 vaccination site at Valencia State College in Florida on April 25, 2021.

    Fainting, dizziness, vomiting, a racing heart— these are just some of the reported reactions people said they experienced after receiving Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine. However, according to a new analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), these reactions weren’t related to an issue with the vaccine itself but instead were the results of pre-vaccine anxiety, including a fear of needles.

    The CDC authors examined data from five mass vaccination sites in California, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa and North Carolina, which reported an increase in “anxiety-related events” following the administration of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen COVID-19 vaccine between April 7 and 9. According to the analysis, 64 out of 8,624 vaccine recipients reported experiencing rapid heart rate, rapid breathing or fainting.

    All of the events were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS); none were considered “serious” by the system’s standards. The authors of the report suggested that because the J&J COVID-19 vaccine is a single-dose shot, people who are more fearful of needles might be more likely to get the shot instead of the two-dose options.

    “It is possible that some persons seeking Janssen COVID-19 vaccination could be more highly predisposed to anxiety-related events after being vaccinated,” the authors of the study explained. “The stress of an ongoing pandemic might also increase anxiety surrounding COVID-19 vaccination.”

    Twenty-percent of those who had anxiety-related reactions, which equated to 13 patients out of the 64, informed staff at the vaccination sites that they had a history of needle aversion. A quarter of those who lost consciousness were between the ages of 19 and 49 years old.

    “As use of COVID-19 vaccines expands into younger age groups, providers should be aware that younger persons might be more highly predisposed to anxiety-related events after vaccination than are older persons,” the CDC reports. “Increased awareness of anxiety-related events after vaccination will enable vaccination providers to make an informed decision about continuing vaccination.”

    The CDC stated that most events resolved themselves within the 15-minute observation period that’s required after receiving the vaccine. Thirteen people were taken to an emergency department, and among those at least five people were released from the hospital the same day.

    In the same review, the CDC reported that 3% of reported reactions are classified as “serious,” including a total of 17 incidents of severe blood clotting.

    “A rare but serious adverse event occurring primarily in women, blood clots in large vessels accompanied by a low platelet count, was rapidly detected by the U.S. vaccine safety monitoring system,” CDC researchers wrote. “Monitoring for common and rare adverse events after receipt of all COVID-19 vaccines, including the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine, is continuing.”

    After a temporary pause, the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommend use of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine. However, the health agencies have emphasized that women younger than 50 should be aware of the potential rare adverse effect.

    The CDC states there haven’t been any reports of blood clots among the doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that have been administered in the United States as of April 17, 2021

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The government must prove it’s not helping big pharma screw over poorer countries getting vaccines

    MPs and campaigners are urging the government to prove it’s not putting the interests of pharmaceutical companies above poor countries in need of vaccines.

    Cross-party MPs came together to demand the government publish details of communications with pharmaceutical companies and lobbyists to ensure businesses have not been given preferential treatment in vaccine policy.

    This comes amid revelations that the Covax programme, meant to provide vaccines to poorer countries, is severely behind on its delivery targets. Pharmaceutical and humanitarian campaigners have called for intellectual property rights on vaccines to be waived so they can be mass-produced and get to struggling nations faster.

    However, the UK, along with the US and EU, has blocked a temporary waiver supported by 100 countries.

    Calls for public scrutiny

    Aimed at ensuring the UK’s opposition had not been influenced by pharmaceutical companies, the statement, signed by 24 MPs and seven advocacy organisations, reads:

    With spare vaccine manufacturing sitting idle and COVID cases rapidly rising around the world it is outrageous that the government continues to side with the pharmaceutical industry and their profits over the action needed to save more lives and end the pandemic.

    The signatories, which include Zarah Sultana (Labour), Caroline Lucas (Green), Wera Hobhouse (Lib Dem), Global Justice Now, and Just Treatment, called for:

    public scrutiny of any corporate influence over the government’s domestic and international vaccine policy to ensure that no preferential access has been given and no secret deals have been made using taxpayers money without accountability or oversight.

    Millions more lives at risk

    Former world leaders have already written to Joe Biden asking for him to support the waiving of vaccine intellectual property rights. Among them were François Hollande, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Gordon Brown.

    Scientists from Independent Sage have also added their support to a waiver. Member Gabriel Scally said the UK’s opposition to the waiver could have great consequences for the continuation of the pandemic.

    Heidi Chow, policy and campaigns manager at Global Justice Now, said the UK’s opposition to a vaccine waiver was “utterly indefensible”. She added:

    With a real scandal emerging over big business’s preferential access to this government, we must ask: is the UK’s reckless opposition to a patent waiver because of undeclared big pharma lobbying? We have a right to know if the Prime Minister has thrown low and middle income countries under the bus to protect private profits.

    Lead organiser at Just Treatment Diarmaid McDonald said:

    Boris Johnson hailed corporate ‘greed’ as the cause of the UK’s vaccine success but that greed is in fact worsening the pandemic, putting millions more lives at risk – including NHS patients.

    We need to fully understand what is motivating the government to consistently side with big pharma to oppose measures that could break unfair monopolies, scale up vaccine production and save lives.

    Vaccine inequality

    Covax is a scheme set up by the World Health Organisation (WHO), that encourages rich countries and charities to buy vaccines for poorer countries. However, a Guardian analysis found that Covax has so far only delivered around a fifth of the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine doses expected to be delivered by May.

    Pakistan, Myanmar, Mexico, and Bangladesh haven’t received any doses of the vaccines promised.

    A number of factors have caused the delays. The Indian government cut exports from its biggest vaccine manufacturer in response to its second wave. Similarly, rich countries striking private deals with manufacturers has undermined the scheme.

    Earlier in April, Unicef executive director Henrietta Fore implored countries with sufficient vaccines to donate 5% of their supply to countries in need. She said:

    At the current rate, there is simply not enough vaccine supply to meet demand. And the supply available is concentrated in the hands of too few. Some countries have contracted enough doses to vaccinate their populations several times, while other countries have yet to receive even their first dose. This threatens us all. The virus and its mutations will win.

    Featured image via Flickr/U.S. Secretary of Defense

    By Jasmine Norden

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • More Than 3,600 US Health Care Workers Have Died in the Pandemic’s First Year

    A nurse fills up a syringe with the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination site at a senior center on March 29, 2021, in San Antonio, Texas.

    More than 3,600 U.S. health care workers perished in the first year of the pandemic, according to “Lost on the Frontline,” a 12-month investigation by The Guardian and KHN to track such deaths.

    Lost on the Frontline is the most complete accounting of U.S. health care worker deaths. The federal government has not comprehensively tracked this data. But calls are mounting for the Biden administration to undertake a count as the KHN/Guardian project comes to a close.

    The project, which tracked who died and why, provides a window into the workings — and failings — of the U.S. health system during the covid-19 pandemic. One key finding: Two-thirds of deceased health care workers for whom the project has data identified as people of color, revealing the deep inequities tied to race, ethnicity and economic status in America’s health care workforce. Lower-paid workers who handled everyday patient care, including nurses, support staff and nursing home employees, were far more likely to die in the pandemic than physicians were.

    The yearlong series of investigative reports found that many of these deaths could have been prevented. Widespread shortages of masks and other personal protective gear, a lack of covid testing, weak contact tracing, inconsistent mask guidance by politicians, missteps by employers and lax enforcement of workplace safety rules by government regulators all contributed to the increased risk faced by health care workers. Studies show that health care workers were more than three times as likely to contract covid as the general public.

    “We rightfully refer to these people without hyperbole — that they are true heroes and heroines,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci in an exclusive interview with The Guardian and KHN. The covid deaths of so many are “a reflection of what health care workers have done historically, by putting themselves in harm’s way, by living up to the oath they take when they become physicians and nurses,” he said.

    Lost on the Frontline launched last April with the story of Frank Gabrin, the first known American emergency room doctor to die of covid-19. In the early days of the pandemic, Gabrin, 60, was on the front lines of the surge, treating covid patients in New York and New Jersey. Yet, like so many others, he was working without proper personal protective equipment, known as PPE. “Don’t have any PPE that has not been used,” he texted a friend. “No N95 masks — my own goggles — my own face shield.”

    Gabrin’s untimely death was the first fatality entered into the Lost on the Frontline database. His story of working through a crisis to save lives shared similarities with the thousands that followed.

    Maritza Beniquez, an emergency room nurse at Newark’s University Hospital in New Jersey, watched 11 colleagues die in the early months of the pandemic. Like the patients they had been treating, most were Black and Latino. “It literally decimated our staff,” she said.

    Her hospital has placed 11 trees in the lobby, one for each employee who has died of covid; they have been adorned with remembrances and gifts from their colleagues.

    More than 100 journalists contributed to the project in an effort to record every death and memorialize those who died. The project’s journalists filed public records requests, cross-connected governmental and private data sources, scoured obituaries and social media posts, and confirmed deaths through family members, workplaces and colleagues.

    Among its key findings:

    • More than half of those who died were younger than 60. In the general population, the median age of death from covid is 78. Yet among health care workers in the database, it is only 59.
    • More than a third of the health care workers who died were born outside the United States. Those from the Philippines accounted for a disproportionate number of deaths.
    • Nurses and support staff members died in far higher numbers than physicians.
    • Twice as many workers died in nursing homes as in hospitals. Only 30% of deaths were among hospital workers, and relatively few were employed by well-funded academic medical centers. The rest worked in less prestigious residential facilities, outpatient clinics, hospices and prisons, among other places.

    The death rate among health care workers has slowed dramatically since covid vaccines were made available to them in December. A study published in late March found that only four of 8,121 fully vaccinated employees at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas became infected. But deaths lag behind infections, and KHN and The Guardian have tracked more than 400 health care worker deaths since the vaccine rollout began.

    Many factors contributed to the high toll — but investigative reporting uncovered some consistent problems that heightened the risks faced by health workers.

    The project found that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on masks — which encouraged hospitals to reserve high-performance N95 masks for intubation procedures and initially suggested surgical masks were adequate for everyday patient care — may have put thousands of health workers at risk.

    The investigation exposed how the Labor Department, run by Donald Trump appointee Eugene Scalia in the early part of the pandemic, took a hands-off approach to workplace safety. It identified 4,100 safety complaints filed by health care workers to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Labor Department’s workplace safety agency. Most were about PPE shortages, yet even after some complaints were investigated and closed by regulators, workers continued to die at the facilities in question.

    The reporting also found that health care employers were failing to report worker deaths to OSHA. The data analysis found that more than a third of workplace covid deaths were not reported to regulators.

    Among the most visceral findings of Lost on the Frontline was the devastating impact of PPE shortages.

    Adeline Fagan, a 28-year-old OB-GYN resident in Texas, suffered from asthma and had a long history of respiratory ailments. Months into the pandemic, her family said, she was using the same N95 mask over and over, even during a high-risk rotation in the emergency room.

    Her parents blame both the hospital administration and government missteps for the PPE shortages that may have contributed to Adeline’s death in September. Her mother, Mary Jane Abt-Fagan, said Adeline’s N95 had been reused so many times the fibers were beginning to disintegrate.

    Not long before she fell ill — and after she’d been assigned to a high-risk ER rotation — Adeline talked to her parents about whether she should spend her own money on an expensive N95 with a filter that could be changed daily. The $79 mask was a significant expense on her $52,000 resident’s salary.

    “We said, you buy this mask, you buy the filters, your father and I will pay for it. We didn’t care what it cost,” said Abt-Fagan.

    She never had the opportunity to use it. By the time the mask arrived, Adeline was already on a ventilator in the hospital.

    Adeline’s family feels let down by the U.S. government’s response to the pandemic.

    “Nobody chooses to go to work and die,” said Abt-Fagan. “We need to be more prepared, and the government needs to be more responsible in terms of keeping health care workers safe.”

    Adeline’s father, Brant Fagan, wants the government to begin tracking health care worker deaths and examining the data to understand what went wrong. “That’s how we’re going to prevent this in the future,” he said. “Know the data, follow where the science leads.”

    Adeline’s parents said her death has been particularly painful because of her youth — and all the life milestones she never had the chance to experience. “Falling in love, buying a home, sharing your family and your life with your siblings,” said Mary Jane Abt-Fagan. “It’s all those things she missed that break a parent’s heart.”

    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.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Muslim health professionals urge community to get vaccinated even whilst observing Ramadan

    Mosques are preparing for Ramadan after the holy month had to be observed during coronavirus (Covid-19) restrictions last year without the usual community prayer gatherings.

    Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, begins with the first sighting of the new moon. It’s expected on 13 April this year in the UK, although this may change.

    Vaccinations

    Many Muslims abstain from all eating and drinking during daylight hours. But Muslim medical professionals have urged those fasting to still get vaccinated against coronavirus.

    Salman Waqar, from the British Islamic Medical Association (BIMA), spoke to the PA news agency. He said Muslim scholars across the world have said vaccinations do not break the fast. And people should not delay their jab on account of Ramadan.

    Suspicions and stigma

    Waqar co-authored a study that assessed the impact of Ramadan on coronavirus deaths in 2020. The study found that the observing of Ramadan rituals did not contribute to a rise in deaths.

    The report said:

    There has been much commentary suggesting that the behaviours and cultural practices of minority communities explain their increased exposure to the pandemic.

    It said these claims were “not evidence-based” but “unhelpful distractions” from existing health inequalities.

    Waqar added:

    We don’t want to exceptionalise Muslim communities for observing these religious or cultural practices. Everyone everywhere is fed up with being stuck indoors.

    Even when places of worship were open, Test and Trace didn’t attribute many cases of Covid transmission to those places.

    Of course, the data is self-reported, so there is some under-reporting of that, but there doesn’t seem to be a suggestion that places of worship are responsible for outbreaks of Covid.

    Precautions

    The East London Mosque and Muslim Centre is one of the largest mosques in Europe and the biggest in the UK. On Fridays before the pandemic, it would accommodate more than 7,000 worshippers at a time. The mosque is now preparing to welcome people back for Ramadan prayers.

    Head Imam Shaykh Abdul Qayum said they were “blessed” to be able to return:

    However, we shouldn’t forget that we are still in a pandemic, and as such, the mosque has taken appropriate precautions to ensure that Ramadan in its premises is conducted in a safe way.

    The mosque won’t open until 15 minutes before prayer starts. Everyone is asked to leave with 10 minutes of it ending. The Ramadan prayers, usually two hours long, have also been shortened.

    Worshippers are to bring their own prayer mats and bags for shoes. And no one under the age of 12 should attend. Sanitation stations have been placed throughout the building, which will operate with a one-way system.

    Spirituality and community

    Traditionally, the mosque hosts a big iftar meal after sunset so everyone can break their fast together. But this year donations are being made to the mosque’s foodbank instead.

    Khizar Mohammad, from the mosque, said:

    The vast majority of people are very receptive to the rules. They understand the need for them because one of the key features of Islam is that it advocates the preservation of life, so that overrides a lot of rules.

    First female secretary general of MCB
    Zara Mohammed (MCB/PA)

    Zara Mohammed, the first female secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said she was looking forward to a more “health-conscious and sustainable” Ramadan when it came to breaking her own fast. She said:

    We are hoping that it will give everyone a renewed optimism, in a sense to be grateful and come back again to the spiritual

    She said the month was one of the biggest charitable times for Muslim communities, adding:

    My message would be to keep in mind and pray for those who are still going to have a quite difficult Ramadan because they are not going to be around their loved ones, whether they are shielding or have lost loved ones through this time.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Some Eligible People Are Being Denied COVID Vaccines. Chances Are It’s Illegal.

    People line up at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland, which was transformed into a COVID-19 mass vaccination site, on March 20, 2021.

    As the United States seeks to end its coronavirus crisis and outrun variants, public health officials recognize it is essential for as many people as possible to get vaccinated. Making that easy is a major part of the plan. According to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, the vaccine is supposed to be free to everyone, whether they’re insured or not. And the Biden administration has directed all vaccination sites to accept undocumented immigrants as a “moral and public health imperative.” But this promise has not always been fulfilled, ProPublica has found.

    At vaccination sites around the country, people have been turned away after being asked for documentation that they shouldn’t need to provide, or asked to pay when they owed nothing.

    In part, this has happened as businesses administering the vaccine try to recoup administrative fees they are allowed to charge to the government and private insurers. To aid them in passing along the bill, major pharmacies ask those being vaccinated for their Social Security numbers and insurance information. They aren’t supposed to deny a shot to people who aren’t covered or try to make them pay the fees. But both of those things have happened.

    Workers at vaccine sites have also turned away people who they felt didn’t provide sufficient proof that they belonged to an eligible group, demanding to see medical records or other evidence of underlying conditions. While the vast majority of states don’t require such documentation, government officials haven’t always communicated that clearly.

    The resulting barriers can be higher for those less equipped to advocate for themselves, such as undocumented people and those who do not speak English. Because of this, even as vaccines have become more widely available, they are still not easy for some of the most vulnerable people to access.

    This is part two of a series documenting barriers to access to COVID-19 vaccines. If you or your family members are experiencing difficulty getting a COVID-19 vaccine, or if you design vaccination plans and can share solutions or challenges related to fair distribution, please fill out our questionnaire. If you prefer to call or text, you can get in touch at 202-681-0779 in English or Spanish.

    You Do Not Need a Social Security Number or Insurance to Get a Free COVID Vaccine. Your Immigration Status Does Not Matter, Either.

    Camille lives in Baltimore with her 77-year-old mother. (She asked to be identified only by her first name for privacy reasons.) When a nonprofit organization helped her mother get a vaccination appointment an hour away in College Park, Maryland, Camille took time off from work to drive her there. They’d only brought along her mother’s state ID card. But when they went up to the counter at the CVS pharmacy, an employee asked for insurance information and a Social Security number. Camille’s mother, who is from Togo and is seeking asylum in the United States, doesn’t have either of those. Camille said the employee told her they’d have to pay if they wanted a vaccine.

    No one is supposed to be charged for the COVID-19 vaccine, according to the CARES Act, and immigration status shouldn’t affect eligibility. Many vaccination sites ask for insurance and Social Security information so they can charge administrative fees to insurance companies or the federal government, but those aren’t requirements for being able to get vaccinated.

    Camille told the CVS employee she wasn’t going to pay for a vaccine. Her mother, a French speaker who takes weekly English lessons, needed Camille to translate what was happening. “I felt so embarrassed, and my mom also when I was explaining to her,” she said. “She was like, ‘I’m not going to have it because of insurance?’”

    Not wanting to drive an hour back without the vaccine, Camille called Tiffany Nelms, executive director of the Baltimore-based nonprofit Asylee Women Enterprise, which had set up the appointment for them. When Nelms asked the CVS employee why they were having trouble getting a vaccine without a Social Security number, the employee “quickly backpedaled,” Nelms said. The staffer told Nelms a supervisor would override the CVS computer system’s request for an insurance or Social Security number.

    Nelms said she’s worried about others who have less access to support. “Not everyone has a bilingual relative to go with them who is even comfortable advocating in that way and also has an advocate that’s a phone call away,” Nelms said. “A lot of our clients, especially those who don’t have legal status yet, if they were asked a question like that, they would just leave.”

    Camille said she’s thankful her mother got the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine so they don’t have to go back to the CVS for a second shot.

    “We are aware of these isolated incidents in Maryland and are committed to addressing inequities related to COVID-19 vaccine access in vulnerable communities, with a particular focus on Black and Hispanic populations,” a spokesperson for CVS said in a written statement regarding Camille’s experience and two other incidents that took place at Maryland CVS locations. “No patient, whether they are insured or uninsured, has been charged directly for a COVID-19 vaccine. If a patient does not have insurance, we are required by the Health Resources and Services Administration to ask the patient to provide either a Social Security number or valid driver’s license/state ID #. However, uninsured patients are not required to provide this information in order to receive a vaccine from us.”

    Vaccination sites’ arbitrary documentation requirements have been a barrier for other Marylanders trying to get vaccinated as well. Several Montgomery County public school teachers formed Vaccine Hunters-Las Caza Vacunas to help find appointments for eligible Marylanders. In March, eight of their clients were initially denied vaccines when they showed up for appointments. Most were told they needed documentation that isn’t required by the state. All of them were immigrants, and most eventually got the vaccine after contacting someone from the group to advocate on their behalf.

    In one incident Vaccine Hunters volunteers said they intervened in, a woman arrived for her appointment at a CVS in White Plains, Maryland, and presented her ID, a Salvadoran passport. She was told she would need an insurance card or Social Security number, which she does not have. In another, a woman who primarily speaks Spanish was initially turned away by a College Park CVS because she couldn’t respond when asked, in English, to identify her eligibility category.

    The group’s volunteers have received complaints from local residents who were turned away for other reasons as well. At a Giant grocery store in Hyattsville, two Latina pastors were initially turned away because they did not have a letter from their employer, even though they brought W-2 forms proving their employment status.

    “A COVID-19 vaccine provider may not refuse an individual a vaccine based on their citizenship or immigration status,” said Charles Gischlar, deputy director of communications for the Maryland Department of Health. However, Gischlar said, Maryland vaccine providers are required to take “reasonable steps” to determine whether someone is actually in a priority group: “A COVID-19 vaccine provider may require additional documentation or employee identification and may require that organizations submit institutional plans with identified individuals.”

    A spokesperson for Giant Food said that its stores check patient information from their IDs or letters from their employers to identify who is being vaccinated and report demographics back to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Our goal is to assist in getting people immunized, not to police the vaccine by any means,” communications and community relations manager Daniel Wolk said. “As you can imagine, guidance from the state legislators and the Department of Health changes daily. We do our best to effectively communicate these changes to our over 400 pharmacists via email and weekly calls.”

    Across the country in the Mission Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, Rite Aid turned away a woman on March 14 after asking her to provide a Social Security number and a U.S.-issued ID, which she does not have. She had brought her consular ID, which Los Angeles County sites are supposed to accept for vaccination appointments.

    “After being on a waitlist for a week, my mom was turned away because she has no social security and because she is UNDOCUMENTED,” her son Sebastian Araujo wrote on Instagram, adding on Twitter, “My mom was literally sobbing and I’m literally appalled.” After Araujo shared the incident on social media, Rite Aid responded to him on Twitter with an apology and reached out to reschedule a time to vaccinate his mother.

    A Rite Aid spokesperson said the company advises its employees not to turn anyone away from a vaccine appointment, regardless of whether they have an ID, Social Security number or insurance. “This was an isolated incident, was a mistake and did not have anything to do with immigration status,” said Rite Aid public relations director Chris Savarese. “The store staff and regional teams have been retrained on our policy to not turn anyone away.”

    A week after the Los Angeles incident, a Rite Aid in Orange County, California denied the vaccine to another woman who did not have a Social Security card or insurance, though she had brought her out-of-state ID and a letter from her employer.

    At first, Araujo said, he was hesitant to post publicly about his mother’s experience because of the hateful comments he anticipated facing online. “But I think raising awareness is very, very important,” Araujo said in an interview with ProPublica. “If we would’ve just stayed quiet, honestly, nothing would have happened. Rite Aid probably would have continued rejecting people and LA County would’ve never brought this issue into a conversation.”

    After Araujo and local media outlets publicized the incident, Los Angeles County officials spoke out and posted on social media to emphasize that proof of citizenship is not required to get a vaccine.

    A COVID Vaccine Should Never Cost You Money — Ever. It’s the Law.

    While the CDC has made it clear that vaccine providers should not charge patients anything, including administrative fees or copays, some patients have still received bills for the COVID-19 vaccine.

    The day after Rosanne Dombek, 85, received her second shot at InterMed, a primary care practice in Maine, she opened her mail and found a bill. For “Covid-19 Pfizer Admin, 1st dose,” her charge was $71.01. “If your outstanding balance becomes 120 days past due, the balance will be transferred to the Thomas Agency for further collection action,” the bottom of the bill said. “It sounded rather final,” said Dombek, who is the mother of Lynn Dombek, ProPublica’s research editor. She immediately wrote out a check. “I was surprised to get the bill, but I’m old enough now that I don’t want any more battles.”

    When asked about Dombek’s bill, InterMed spokesperson John Lamb first said that the $71 should have been billed to the patient’s insurance company, and that “the correspondence you referenced is likely a request for insurance information.” When shown a copy of Dombek’s bill, which did not include any such request, Lamb responded, “The statement should have included a notice to call us with her insurance information. We’re looking into why that was missing.” Yet InterMed’s website seemed to indicate that the bill was intentional. In its coronavirus FAQ section, the site said:

    “The COVID vaccine will be provided to patients at no cost. However, there will be a vaccine administration fee charged to the patient.” When ProPublica questioned InterMed about this language, Lamb responded, “Good catch. It was confusing. We’ve corrected it to reflect the billing to the insurance provider.” The website was subsequently updated. Dombek did not end up mailing her check to InterMed. Some residents in New Mexico have also reported receiving bills after getting vaccinated. It’s unclear how the CDC or its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, aims to prevent patients from being billed. A CDC spokesperson noted that individuals can call an HHS hotline to report any billing-related violations, but referred oversight questions to HHS. HHS didn’t respond to requests for comment.

    Fear of potential bills has kept others from getting vaccinated to begin with. Nancy Largo of Bellport, New York, doesn’t have insurance, already carries about $7,000 in medical debt and has been out of work for almost two years because of a workplace injury. She knows the vaccine is supposed to be free, but she’s still worried. “What happens if they charge me?” Largo asked in Spanish.

    Largo doesn’t speak English, and medical providers don’t always have Spanish-speaking staff, so she’s not confident that she’ll be able to ask questions about billing and other details once she gets to a vaccination site.

    Though nearby pharmacies are offering the vaccine, Largo is limiting herself to finding a shot through one clinic that she knows treats people without insurance and has Spanish-speaking staff. So far, they haven’t had an appointment for her.

    In Nearly Every State, Providers Are Required to Believe What You Say About Underlying Conditions.

    Sara Waldecker was worried about how she could prove that she was a high-risk patient eligible for a COVID-19 shot. Michigan had just opened up vaccinations to anyone ages 16 and up with disabilities or medical conditions that qualified. Waldecker, 37, said that a childhood illness left her with lung scarring and asthma, but she wasn’t sure how to get hold of those medical records because “the primary doctor I saw, up to five years ago, has died.” After that, Waldecker switched hospital systems, and her old records didn’t transfer with her. Then Waldecker’s husband lost his job during the pandemic, leaving them without health insurance. She said she couldn’t afford to see a doctor and have tests run to get diagnosed again. She’d spent the entirety of the pandemic isolated, buffeted by conflicted emotions. “If I catch it, there’s an overwhelming chance I’m not going to make it, but I also feel guilt from keeping my kid from her favorite places,” she said. “She’s healthy, the rest of my family is healthy — I’m the weak link. I’m the one keeping them in isolation.” In fact, Waldecker didn’t need to prove anything. In Michigan, “individuals attest to any medical conditions upon registration,” according to Lynn Sutfin, public information officer for the state’s

    Department of Health and Human Services. “They do not need to provide proof.” That information is not evident on the state health department’s website, nor is it clear on the website of the health department for Macomb County, where Waldecker lives.

    ProPublica surveyed all 50 states and found that, among those currently providing vaccines to individuals with underlying health conditions, almost all only require a patient to self-attest that they meet the criteria, and do not require any documentation or proof. Florida is one exception. It limits eligibility to “persons determined to be extremely vulnerable by a physician” and provides a form for doctors to fill out.

    In Delaware, health providers and hospital systems are the only places where patients with health conditions can get a vaccine. “Delaware health providers, including hospitals, have been advised to use their clinical judgement to vaccinate individuals 16-64 with underlying health conditions, as they will have access to the patient’s medical information,” state public health department spokesperson Robin Bryson wrote in an email. Even in states that only require an attestation of someone’s underlying condition, that information was hard to find on state websites. Many did not mention it at all, and ProPublica was only able to learn about it by contacting press offices.

    Whatever a state says, however, specific vaccination sites may sometimes ignore official guidelines. When Ric Galvan, 20, went to the Alamodome stadium in San Antonio, Texas, for his shot on March 2, he recalled, he was questioned by a firefighter who was helping with intake: “He first sort of condescendingly asked, ‘How old are you, buddy?’ — likely because I’m young.” Galvan provided his ID and stated that he had chronic asthma. “He then asked if I had an inhaler or some sort of proof of having asthma, to which I said, ‘No, not with me.’ He then told me that the vaccine is only for ‘real asthmatics’ who ‘need their inhaler with them at all times.’”“As someone who has been under pulmonologist care since I was 4 years old, this really upset me,” Galvan said. He tried to push back, telling the firefighter that none of the confirmation emails said anything about medical proof, but the firefighter told him to leave the site. A full-time student who also works part time, Galvan added that he was frustrated because it had been so hard to get an appointment in the first place, and now he had to start over again.

    “We must ensure individuals that have registered do in fact meet the criteria set by the state of 1A and 1B. This process entails verification of name, age, and if under 65, qualified pre-existing conditions,” replied Michelle Vigil, a spokesperson for the city of San Antonio. “Unfortunately we have seen instances where these conditions cannot be verified. In order to ensure that we are in compliance we have had to turn a very small number of people away.”

    But Texas sites aren’t supposed to ask for proof of underlying medical conditions, according to Douglas Loveday, spokesperson for Texas’ health department. People seeking vaccinations “can self-disclose their qualifying medical condition,” he said. “They do not need to provide documents to prove that they qualify.”

    Juany Torres, a community organizer and advocate in San Antonio, said she’s heard of several similar cases at the Alamodome.“Some undocoumented folks that showed up were questioned about their diabetes or their asthma, and they were turned away and lost their appointment,” Torres said. They had been diagnosed in their home country and didn’t have their medical records on hand, she said. None have health insurance or a primary care doctor in the U.S. “They lost the time they had taken off work, they were embarrassed, and I had to re-convince them that they were worthy to go and that they should get their shot,” she said. In Texas, at least, requests for medical documentation should no longer be an issue: On March 29, the state transitioned to allow everyone age 16 and older to sign up for a vaccine.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Justice on Trial

    Prosecutors showed a 9-minute 29-second video of the murder, and told jurors to “believe your eyes.” Continue reading

    The post Justice on Trial appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • Boris Johnson urged to share coronavirus vaccine with poorer nations instead of hoarding supplies

    Boris Johnson is facing calls to immediately begin donating vaccines to poorer nations. He otherwise risks hoarding supplies while frontline workers are exposed to coronavirus (Covid-19).

    Health and development charities urged the prime minister on Sunday 28 March to take “accelerated action”. And they asked him to “swiftly clarify” how doses will be shared.

    Wellcome, led by Sage scientist Sir Jeremy Farrar, and Save the Children UK were among those making the demand in a letter to Johnson.

    “Hoarding limited supply”

    They say the UK is “one of the world’s highest per-capita buyers” of vaccines. And it’s on track to have more than 100 million surplus doses.

    The letter reads:

    There is therefore the high risk that the UK will be hoarding limited supply whilst health workers and the most vulnerable in low and middle-income countries do not have access…

    The UK will be sitting on enough surplus vaccine doses to vaccinate the world’s frontline health workers twice over.

    The Covax initiative

    They are urging Britain to immediately begin donating doses through the Covax initiative. This is working to provide vaccines for low and middle-income countries.

    Farrar said the UK will still have contractual access to at least 100 million surplus doses once the entire population is vaccinated. He said these doses “won’t be of use in the UK”.

    The government responded that it will share “the majority of any future surplus” vaccines with the Covax pool “when these are available”.

    “Now is the time to think beyond our borders”

    The experts’ case is not just a moral one – Farrar pointed out:

    If left to spread, [the virus] risks mutating to an extent where our vaccines and treatments no longer work. This goes beyond ethics – it’s a scientific and economic imperative. Science has given us the exit strategy. We must use it properly.

    Adults who have received Covid-19 vaccine
    (PA Graphics)

    Anti-poverty campaigns One and Global Citizen also signed the letter, as did the Results UK charity and the Pandemic Action Network.

    Farrar said:

    Now is the time to think beyond our borders. The world won’t be safe while any single country is still fighting the virus

    The letter also points to research suggesting that vaccine nationalism and the unequal distribution of jabs could cost the UK £106bn.

    Government response

    A UK government spokesperson said:

    The UK has played a leading role in championing global access to coronavirus vaccines. This includes contributing £548 million, as one of the largest donors, to the Covax Advance Market Commitment, which has already helped 20 lower-middle countries to receive doses.

    The Prime Minister has confirmed the UK will share the majority of any future surplus coronavirus vaccines from our supply with the Covax pool, when these are available. No one is safe until we are all safe.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Scientist warns that unfettered international travel could ‘undo vaccine progress’

    Keeping borders open for international travel could risk undoing vaccine progress, a scientist has warned.

    Dr Mike Tildesley is a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), which advises the Government. He’s said that allowing overseas trips without efficient testing and tracing in place could enable a vaccine-evading variant to enter the UK.

    Under current guidelines, it’s illegal to travel abroad for holidays. But travel for a range of professions including defence personnel and some HGV drivers is permitted.

    Red list

    Travellers returning from countries included on the ‘red list’, where coronavirus cases are higher, must quarantine in a government-approved hotel for 10 days.

    Ministers are facing pressure to protect the success of the vaccination programme against the import of new variants from overseas. It comes as the Guardian reported that officials met on Friday 26 March to consider expanding the red list.

    “We need to do what we can to minimise the risk”

    Dr Tildesley, an infectious diseases expert, told Times Radio:

    I can understand the need for wanting to keep our borders open for as long as possible, but if we are, there’s a risk there.

    We need to do what we can to minimise the risk, because what we don’t want is new variants coming in that undo all the good that our vaccination programme has done.

    Test, trace, and support for self-isolation

    He added:

    If we are going to allow travel to continue we clearly need to do something about making sure that testing is much more efficient at airports and making sure that tracing works, and also that people are isolating for the full period, and we need to give people the support to do so.

    Earlier this week, the prime minister referred to the “natural wanderlust” of Britons. The implication was that summer holidays could still be on the cards. Though he acknowledged things are “looking difficult” in Europe, where transmissions are rising.

    Under the current ‘road map’ for easing restrictions, the earliest date people in England could go on holiday abroad would be 17 May. And Boris Johnson has said details of a review by the international travel taskforce will be revealed on 5 April.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • QAnon Conspiracy Theorists Doubt Trump’s Endorsement of Vaccines Was Real

    A woman with a QAnon shirt and a "no forced vaccines" sign stands with protesters outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston on August 30, 2020.

    Although former President Donald Trump has now strongly urged everyone in the U.S. to get vaccinated against COVID-19, a number of his most ardent supporters — particularly those who subscribe to the QAnon set of conspiracy theories — are continuing to express skepticism about the vaccines. Some have even started spreading baseless conspiracy theories claiming that the person who promoted the COVID vaccines in a video interview with Fox News wasn’t really Trump.

    During his interview with Fox News on Tuesday, Trump gave a strong endorsement to the vaccines, while still suggesting people had the choice to make up their own minds on whether to get one or not.

    “I would recommend it, and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it. And a lot of those people voted for me, frankly,” Trump acknowledged. “But, you know, again, we have our freedoms and we have to live by that, and I agree with that also.”

    “But it’s a great vaccine, it’s a safe vaccine, and it’s something that works,” he added.

    Prior to his Fox News interview, Trump had been less vocal than other former presidents about encouraging Americans to get vaccinated. Notably, he did not take part in a public service ad campaign that featured every other former president who is still alive. And rather than receive his COVID-19 vaccine in a public way, to motivate others to get vaccinated and to show that the vaccines are safe, Trump chose to receive his COVID-19 vaccine privately before leaving the White House, in contrast to what other former presidents have done.

    Polling shows that skepticism about the coronavirus vaccines is higher among Trump supporters. Fifty-six percent of Americans in a recent Economist/YouGov poll say they are planning to be vaccinated or have already received at least one shot, with only 43 percent saying they will not get vaccinated or aren’t sure about doing so. But those numbers are flipped when it comes to voters who selected Trump in the presidential race last fall, with only 46 percent of his supporters saying they will or have gotten vaccinated, and 54 percent saying they won’t or aren’t sure about doing so.

    Skepticism over Trump’s words this week was evident within the QAnon conspiracy movement, with many individuals in chat groups even going so far as to claim that the interview with the former president on Tuesday was faked.

    One user in a QAnon group said the way Trump “greeted Maria [Bartiromo of Fox News] and how he spoke to her” indicated that it “wasn’t him” speaking during the interview, according to reporting from Newsweek.

    “I saw and heard a lot of interviews between him and Maria that wasn’t like he speaks to her normally and it wasn’t his voice at all…. Me and some other people noticed this immediately,” the user, nicknamed Mary Cue, hypothesized.

    Other members of the same chat group suggested that if it was Trump who was speaking during the interview, he had been “compromised” and possibly even “blackmailed” into supporting the distribution of the vaccine.

    QAnon members are highly suspicious of the vaccines that are available to stop the spread of COVID-19. Many have promulgated preposterous theories about the vaccine causing people to become homosexual or transgender.

    Trump’s words were not enough to convince these ardent conspiracy theorists to change their minds — but there’s evidence to suggest even mild Trump supporters who are skeptical of COVID-19 vaccines aren’t necessarily looking to him for guidance on this issue. Responses from a focus group of Trump voters who are not sure yet about getting vaccinated suggest that many of the former president’s loyalists are more likely to be persuaded not by political figures, but by doctors and experts themselves.

    “We want to be educated, not indoctrinated,” said one participant in the focus group, which was convened by conservative pollster Frank Luntz.

    “What I don’t trust is the government telling me what I need to do when they haven’t led us down the right road,” another participant explained.

    Confounding Luntz, participants even said that a PSA from Trump wouldn’t change their minds. “Those people are beginning to move on” from the former president, Luntz suggested.

    Participants were more moved, in fact, by the words of Tom Frieden, a doctor who provided facts and information to the group that alleviated concerns about the long-term effects of the vaccines, including by mentioning that doctors themselves were getting vaccinated for protection against the virus. (Luntz did not mention to participants that Frieden once led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under former President Barack Obama.)

    Such findings seem to reinforce comments made by President Joe Biden earlier this week. When asked by reporters whether his administration ever considered reaching out to Trump to promote a bipartisan message on the vaccines to dissuade Trump supporters’ skepticism, Biden said his administration opted against that idea.

    “I discussed it with my team, and they say the thing that has more impact than anything Trump would say to the ‘MAGA folks’ is what the local doctor, what the local preacher, what the local people in the community say,” Biden explained. “So I urge all local docs and ministers and priests to talk about why, why it’s important to get that vaccine and even after that, until everyone is, in fact, vaccinated, to wear this mask.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Vaccine Passports Risk Worsening Pandemic Inequalities

    Passengers check in at Hamburg Airport in Germany, on March 14, 2021.

    After a year of canceled concerts, closed-door sporting events and restricted air travel, vaccine passports are being touted as a way to quicken the route back to normalcy.

    The premise is straightforward: A digital or paper document will indicate whether individuals have received a COVID-19 vaccination or, in some cases, recently tested negative for the coronavirus. This could allow them to travel more freely within their communities, enter other countries or engage in leisure activities that have largely been closed off during the pandemic.

    Vaccine passports seem like a desirable alternative to continuing lockdowns until herd immunity — estimated to occur at about a 70%-85% vaccination rate — is achieved.

    As a global health management researcher, I can certainly see the benefits of vaccine passports. But I’m also aware of the pitfalls. While vaccine passports may open the world to many, they may lead to discrimination — especially against the poor.

    Return to the Skies

    Undoubtedly there is a desire to get back to normality as quickly as possible.

    For the tourism industry, which is estimating more than US$1 trillion in losses due to COVID-19, a reopening of travel would be much-needed relief. Even for those able to travel during the pandemic, arrival in most countries has required significant restrictions, often including a hotel quarantine of up to 14 days.

    Vaccination passports could allow families separated by local lockdowns, or state or country border restrictions, to meet in person.

    Pushing the case for a digital passport, an executive from Air New Zealand told The Guardian, “Reassuring customers that travel is, in fact, safe is one of our priorities. By using the app, customers can have confidence that everyone onboard meets the same government health requirements they do.”

    And it isn’t just travel. Passports could also open the door to everyday pursuits that seemed normal before the pandemic. In Israel, the country with the fastest vaccination rate, citizens with a vaccination “green pass” will be allowed entry to gyms, hotels, concerts and indoor dining at restaurants.

    And some employers are considering requiring proof of vaccination to return to work.

    Getting a Green Pass

    In short, the concept of vaccine passports is no longer theoretical, as it was early in the pandemic, when the World Health Organization recommended against their use.

    It has even been suggested that the lure of a vaccine passport could result in more people stepping forward to get vaccinated.

    Israel instituted its green pass program on Feb. 21, both to reopen the economy and to encourage young people to get vaccinated.

    Other countries are monitoring the success of Israel’s program. The U.K. has shown interest in the idea of vaccine passports, and the 27 member states of the European Union are considering some form of vaccine-certification system to allow easier cross-border travel in the EU.

    In the U.S., President Joe Biden has directed government agencies to “assess the feasibility” of some form of digital vaccine certificate, analogous to the concept of a vaccine passport.

    Pandemic Inequities

    This potential opening up of the world after months of restrictions is welcomed. But the concern is that the benefits will not be distributed equitably, and as a result some groups will be disadvantaged.

    After all, a pandemic once considered a “great equalizer” soon turned out to be anything but.

    As with most health crises, racial minorities made up a higher proportion of those affected in the U.S. — as seen in their higher rates of hospitalizations and deaths.

    Disparities along income and racial lines have persisted in vaccination campaigns. In the United States, for example, Black Americans have received the vaccine at half the rate of white Americans, and the disparity is even larger for Hispanic Americans. Globally, rich countries have ordered almost all of the currently available vaccines, meaning that the average citizen in a high-income country is much more likely to receive a vaccine than a health care worker or high-risk citizen in lower-income countries.

    It is also likely that demographic groups with higher levels of trust in authorities and medical institutions are the most willing to be vaccinated, and this may adversely affect marginalized communities. A recent study found that Black Americans — perpetuate existing inequities within countries if those who are vaccinated can enjoy the freedom to move about their community while others remain in lockdown.

    A World Divided?

    Given the global imbalance of vaccine availability, it is not difficult to imagine a situation where the citizens of rich countries may regain their rights to travel to environments where local populations are still in some form of lockdown.

    This potential to further divide the global rich from the global poor is a significant concern. Once economies start to “open” and those with vaccine passports are able to go about their business as usual, the urgency to deal with COVID-19 in marginalized communities may dissipate.

    Further, vaccination passports may give populations an inaccurate level of risk perception. It is still unclear how long immunity will last. It is also unclear the extent to which virus transmission is limited once one is vaccinated. Public health authorities still suggest that vaccinated individuals wear masks and maintain distancing in public for now, especially if interacting with unvaccinated people.

    These recommendations have led to concerns that vaccinated tourists, diners and shoppers may act in ways that might risk the unvaccinated service and hospitality employees with whom they are interacting.

    [Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

    There are also privacy concerns with vaccine passports, which are primarily being proposed in a digital format.

    In the U.K., the proposed vaccine certification would come in the form of an app, which could be scanned to gain entry to restaurants and venues. It has sparked concerns that digital passports may infringe on the rights to privacy, freedom of movement and peaceful assembly.

    Countries that rank low in global freedom indices, such as Bahrain, Brunei and China, are also using apps, often with troubling implications. In China, the app was found to be linked to law enforcement, and as people checked into locations across the city, their locations were tracked by the software.

    Despite the upsides of vaccines passports, these concerns remain. The World Health Organization has called on nations to make sure that, if implemented, vaccine passports are not responsible for “increasing health inequities or increasing the digital divide.”

    The danger is that thus far, at every stage the pandemic has exposed society’s inequities. Vaccine passports may perpetuate these inequities as well.The Conversation

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Heather Cox Richardson: 100 Million Shots

    Biden’s address was in part a victory lap after he signed the American Rescue Plan, a sweeping measure that launches the country in the direction it has avoided since 1981, using the national government not to cut taxes, which favors those with wealth, but rather to support working families and children. Continue reading

    The post Heather Cox Richardson: 100 Million Shots appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • ‘Colour-blind’ coronavirus vaccine distribution is putting ethnic minorities at risk

    Doctors have warned that the UK’s “colour-blind” vaccine distribution strategy is putting ethnic minority communities at higher risk of falling ill and dying with coronavirus (Covid-19).

    “Unequal impact”

    Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, they say the current prioritisation “disregards the unequal impact of the pandemic on minority ethnic groups”. And it’s worsening racial inequalities that the pandemic has exposed.

    The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has largely recommended an age-based approach, saying age is the single biggest risk factor for coronavirus. It recently considered but rejected a move to prioritise people in higher-risk occupations, saying this may slow down the rollout.

    Different ethnic groups are not specifically mentioned in this list. But the JCVI said there should be “flexibility” at a local level. And attention should be given to “mitigating health inequalities, such as might occur in relation to access to healthcare and ethnicity”.

    Higher risk

    People from minority ethnic communities are more likely to live in multigenerational, crowded households, where transmission may be higher. They also make up a higher proportion of those working in high-risk, low-paid occupations. These workers are less likely to be able to work from home and are exposed to more people, meaning they have a higher risk of infection.

    The authors write:

    The invisibility of these vulnerable groups from the priority list and the worsening healthcare inequities and inequalities are putting ethnic minorities at a significantly higher risk of Covid-19 illness and death.

    The UK’s colour-blind vaccination model disregards the unequal impact of the pandemic on minority ethnic groups, rendering it an enabler of structures that are known to systematically disadvantage BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) communities.

    Lead author professor Azeem Majeed of the Department of Primary Care and Public Health at Imperial College London said:

    Prioritising essential workers for vaccination will preserve the healthcare system, accelerate reopening of society, help revive the economy and enable the operation of essential community services.

    A targeted approach

    The authors say ineffective vaccine allocation strategies “likely play a role in the high levels of vaccine hesitancy observed across ethnic minorities”. Strategies that could alleviate barriers to getting the vaccine could include ensuring people do not experience financial loss by taking time off work and travelling to get a jab, and administering the vaccine in easily accessible community settings.

    Majeed added:

    Dismissing the racial and socioeconomic disadvantages that ethnic groups face may result in devastating impacts lasting far beyond the end of the pandemic.

    Controlling further outbreaks and, ultimately, ending the pandemic will require implementation of approaches that target ethnic minorities as well as ensuring vaccine allocation strategies are effective, fair and justifiable for all.

    Dr Habib Naqvi, director of the NHS Race and Health Observatory, said:

    We have sadly witnessed the consequence of not acting on early evidence presented into Covid-19 ethnicity and health inequalities.

    The impact of the virus on BME communities has been disproportionate and bleak.

    Now is the time to urgently learn from recent lessons, and act on improved granular data, including a clear focus on localised approaches with resources and support which both engage and tackle lower levels of trust and confidence in the vaccine programme across diverse communities.

    Disparities

    A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said:

    The independent JCVI’s advice on Covid-19 vaccine prioritisation was developed with the aim of preventing as many deaths as possible, with older age being the single greatest risk of death. We are following the JCVI recommendations so that we save lives.

    We have invested millions into research into ethnic disparities and Covid-19 and established a new NHS Race and Health Observatory to tackle the specific health challenges facing people from ethnic minority backgrounds.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Defeating COVID Requires Waiving Big Pharma’s Vaccine Patents, WHO Leader Says

    World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus talks during a daily press briefing on COVID-19 virus at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, on March 11, 2020.

    Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday urged global powers to “pull out all the stops” to defeat the coronavirus pandemic including by waiving Big Pharma’s vaccine patents to ensure equitable access to the drugs.

    “Sharing doses, boosting manufacturing by removing barriers, and ensuring that we use data effectively to target left-behind communities is key to ending this crisis,” he wrote in an op-ed published at The Guardian.

    He lamented that “the vast majority” of the 225 million administered Covid-19 vaccine doses “have been in a handful of rich and vaccine-producing countries, while most low- and middle-income countries watch and wait.” Such a “me-first” approach, he said, is ultimately “self-defeating.”

    That’s because “as long as the virus is spreading anywhere, it has more opportunities to mutate and potentially undermine the efficacy of vaccines everywhere,” wrote Tedros. “We could end up back at square one.”

    To prevent such a scenario, the WHO chief laid out a number of possible steps. “Whether it’s dose sharing, tech transfer, or voluntary licensing, as the WHO’s own Covid-19 Technology Access Pool initiative encourages, or waiving intellectual property rights, as South Africa and India have suggested, we need to pull out all the stops,” he stated.

    “Flexibilities in trade regulations exist for emergencies, and surely a global pandemic, which has forced many societies to shut down and caused so much harm to business — both large and small — qualifies. We need to be on a war footing, ” he wrote.

    While welcoming “significant” moves by pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Sanofi to share vaccine technology — as well as Johnson & Johnson and Merck’s partnership to boost vaccine supplies — Tedros said that further actions are needed to stamp out the crisis, including waiving patents.

    Framing the challenge of a global vaccination effort as immense but not insurmountable, Tedros wrote that “if we can put a rover on Mars, we can surely produce billions of vaccines and save lives on earth.”

    Tedros further noted that other global threats like the climate crisis require international cooperation, so “the faster we can vaccinate, the faster we will be able to focus on fighting” those issues.

    “The future is ours to write,” he wrote.

    Tedros’ comments were welcomed by Oxfam International, a member of the People’s Vaccine Alliance.

    “Dr. Tedros is right,” the social justice group said. “It’s time to end vaccine monopolies. We need a #PeoplesVaccine.”

    Other advocates agree:

    The health leader’s new op-ed followed growing demands from social justice and healthcare organizations that the World Trade Organization lift its Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property rules to allow for wider manufacturing of the vaccines.

    At a Thursday protest outside the WTO headquarters in Geneva, activists with Doctors Without Borders displayed a banner reading “No Covid Monopolies — Wealthy Countries Stop Blocking TRIPS Waiver.”

    In the U.S., President Joe Biden recently faced a call from hundreds of national groups to back the call for an emergency waiver of the trade organization’s intellectual property (IP) rules.

    As Common Dreams noted Thursday, “Despite garnering support from more than 100 countries, the waiver push has run up against opposition from powerful nations such as the U.S., the U.K., and Canada, which have thwarted the will of a supermajority of WTO member nations in order to ensure that pharmaceutical corporations retain monopoly control over coronavirus vaccine technology.”

    That opposition was denounced by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who tweeted last month, “Denying poor countries the Covid vaccine to allow Pharma to profit from IP is cruel and morally bankrupt.”

    “This should be a no-brainer,” wrote Khanna. “President Biden must grant the waiver so that millions around the world can develop the vaccine and save lives.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Millions of Unpaid Caregivers Are Currently Ineligible for COVID Vaccine

    Before her stretched a line of people waiting to get covid-19 vaccines. “It was agonizing to know that I couldn’t get in that line,” said Davidson, 50, who is devoted to her father and usually cares for him full time. “If I get sick, what would happen to him?”

    Tens of thousands of middle-aged sons and daughters caring for older relatives with serious ailments but too young to qualify for a vaccine themselves are similarly terrified of becoming ill and wondering when they can get protected against the coronavirus.

    Like aides and other workers in nursing homes, these family caregivers routinely administer medications, monitor blood pressure, cook, clean and help relatives wash, get dressed and use the toilet, among many other responsibilities. But they do so in apartments and houses, not in long-term care institutions — and they’re not paid.

    “In all but name, they’re essential health care workers, taking care of patients who are very sick, many of whom are completely reliant upon them, some of whom are dying,” said Katherine Ornstein, a caregiving expert and associate professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at Mount Sinai’s medical school in New York City. “Yet, we don’t recognize or support them as such, and that’s a tragedy.”

    The distinction is critically important because health care workers have been prioritized to get covid vaccines, along with vulnerable older adults in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. But family members caring for equally vulnerable seniors living in the community are grouped with the general population in most states and may not get vaccines for months.

    The exception: Older caregivers can qualify for vaccines by virtue of their age as states approve vaccines for adults ages 65, 70 or 75 and above. A few states have moved family caregivers into phase 1a of their vaccine rollouts, the top priority tier. Notably, South Carolina has done so for families caring for medically fragile children, and Illinois has given that designation to families caring for relatives of all ages with significant disabilities.

    Arizona is also trying to accommodate caregivers who accompany older residents to vaccination sites, Dr. Cara Christ, director of the state’s Department of Health Services, said Monday during a Zoom briefing for President Joe Biden. Comprehensive data about which states are granting priority status to family caregivers is not available.

    Meanwhile, the Department of Veterans Affairs recently announced plans to offer vaccines to people participating in its Program of Comprehensive Assistance for Family Caregivers. That initiative gives financial stipends to family members caring for veterans with serious injuries; 21,612 veterans are enrolled, including 2,310 age 65 or older, according to the VA. Family members can be vaccinated when the veterans they look after become eligible, a spokesperson said.

    “The current pandemic has amplified the importance of our caregivers whom we recognize as valuable members of Veterans’ health care teams,” Dr. Richard Stone, VA acting undersecretary for health, said in the announcement.

    An estimated 53 million Americans are caregivers, according to a 2020 report. Nearly one-third spend 21 hours or more each week helping older adults and people with disabilities with personal care, household tasks and nursing-style care (giving injections, tending wounds, administering oxygen and more). An estimated 40% are providing high-intensity care, a measure of complicated, time-consuming caregiving demands.

    This is the group that should be getting vaccines, not caregivers who live at a distance or who don’t provide direct, hands-on care, said Carol Levine, a senior fellow and former director of the Families and Health Care Project at the United Hospital Fund in New York City.

    Rosanne Corcoran, 53, is among them. Her 92-year-old mother, Rose, who has advanced dementia, lives with Corcoran and her family in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, on the second floor of their house. She hasn’t come down the stairs in three years.

    “I wouldn’t be able to take her somewhere to get the vaccine. She doesn’t have any stamina,” said Corcoran, who arranges for doctors to make house calls when her mother needs attention. When she called their medical practice recently, an administrator said they didn’t have access to the vaccines.

    Corcoran said she “does everything for her mother,” including bathing her, dressing her, feeding her, giving her medications, monitoring her medical needs and responding to her emotional needs. Before the pandemic, a companion came for five hours a day, offering some relief. But last March, Corcoran let the companion go and took on all her mother’s care herself.

    Corcoran wishes she could get a vaccination sooner, rather than later. “If I got sick, God forbid, my mother would wind up in a nursing home,” she said. “The thought of my mother having to leave here, where she knows she’s safe and loved, and go to a place like that makes me sick to my stomach.”

    Although covid cases are dropping in nursing homes and assisted living facilities as residents and staff members receive vaccines, 36% of deaths during the pandemic have occurred in these settings.

    Maggie Ornstein, 42, a caregiving expert who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, has provided intensive care to her mother, Janet, since Janet experienced a devastating brain aneurysm at age 49. For the past 20 years, her mother has lived with Ornstein and her family in Queens, New York.

    In a recent opinion piece, Ornstein urged New York officials to recognize family caregivers’ contributions and reclassify them as essential workers. “We’re used to being abandoned by a system that should be helping us and our loved ones,” she told me in a phone conversation. “But the utter neglect of us during this pandemic — it’s shocking.”

    Ornstein estimated that if even a quarter of New York’s 2.5 million family caregivers became ill with covid and unable to carry on, the state’s nursing homes would be overwhelmed by applications from desperate families. “We don’t have the infrastructure for this, and yet we’re pretending this problem just doesn’t exist,” she said.

    In Tomball, Texas, Robin Davidson’s father was independent before the pandemic, but he began declining as he stopped going out and became more sedentary. For almost a year, Davidson has driven every day to his 11-acre ranch, 5 miles from where she lives, and spent hours tending to him and the property’s upkeep.

    “Every day, when I would come in, I would wonder, was I careful enough [to avoid the virus]? Could I have picked something up at the store or getting gas? Am I going to be the reason that he dies? My constant proximity to him and my care for him is terrifying,” she said.

    Since her father’s hospitalization, Davidson’s goal is to stabilize him so he can enroll in a clinical trial for congestive heart failure. Medications for that condition no longer work for him, and fluid retention has become a major issue. He’s now home on the ranch after spending more than a week in the hospital and he’s gotten two doses of vaccine — “an indescribable relief,” Davidson said.

    Out of the blue, she got a text from the Harris County health department earlier this month, after putting herself on a vaccine waitlist. Vaccines were available, it read, and she quickly signed up and got a shot. Davidson ended up being eligible because she has two chronic medical conditions that raise her risk of covid; Harris County doesn’t officially recognize family caregivers in its vaccine allocation plan, a spokesperson said.

    Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Press Sec Psaki: Trump Doesn’t Deserve Vaccine Credit After 500K COVID Deaths

    White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki speaks during the daily press briefing in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on March 4, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    While fielding questions during the daily White House press briefing on Thursday, Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked how much credit former President Donald Trump should get regarding the rollout of coronavirus vaccines across the United States.

    “I don’t think anyone deserves credit when half a million people in the country have died from this pandemic,” the press secretary said.

    ABC News senior White House correspondent Mary Bruce asked the question to Psaki on Thursday.

    Current President Joe Biden “has been pretty critical of the prior administration’s handling of the pandemic, saying you inherited a mess here,” Bruce began, “but when it comes to vaccinations, you are following some of the same playbook here, so does the prior administration deserve some credit for laying the groundwork?”

    Psaki questioned where that question came from. Bruce explained that it was suggested by Trump’s former coronavirus testing czar Brett Giroir, who had claimed Biden’s vaccine plan was 99 percent copied from Trump’s.

    “He has said that the prior administration deserves more credit here for at least getting the ball rolling on some of these,” Bruce added.

    Psaki rejected that argument outright.

    “What our focus is on and what the president’s focus is on when he came into office just over a month ago, was ensuring we have enough vaccines. We are going to have them now,” Psaki added, stating that there were “not enough” vaccines available when Biden initially took office.

    Psaki’s response is in line with previous criticisms from Biden, who has said in the past that Trump failed to procure enough doses of coronavirus vaccines before he left office.

    The Biden administration purchased 200 million more doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in February, saying at the time that they had brought the vaccine totals high enough to vaccinate every person in the U.S.

    “While scientists did their job in discovering vaccines in record time, my predecessor — I’ll be very blunt about it — did not do his job in getting ready for the massive challenge of vaccinating hundreds of millions,” Biden said in February.

    In more recent days, the Biden administration also helped to broker a deal between two competing pharmaceutical companies, Johnson & Johnson and Merck, to produce millions more doses of a third vaccine in the coming months.

    The increase in vaccine doses, Biden has said, will mean that every adult in the U.S. will be able to get vaccinated by the end of May.

    Far from being helpful in putting a halt to the pandemic, Trump’s actions as president likely made matters worse. A study from the medical journal The Lancet noted Trump’s “appalling response” to the pandemic, which included making the wearing of masks a political issue. The manner in which the former president behaved regarding the virus “expedited the spread of Covid-19,” the report concluded. (The report also concluded that if the U.S. had the same health care system and approach to COVID-19 that other wealthy nations have employed, there could have been 40 percent fewer deaths from the virus than had actually occurred.)

    A separate study, which examined 18 of Trump’s political campaign rallies held last year (which featured tightly packed crowds and very few in attendance wearing masks), found that the rallies were connected to at least 700 deaths and tens of thousands of coronavirus infections across the country.

    By the time Trump had exited office, more than 400,000 Americans had died from COVID-19 — a stunning number that is worlds apart from what the former president had predicted just over one year ago.

    While 118,000 more Americans have died due to coronavirus since Trump’s departure from office, it does appear that numbers are now trending in a better direction. On January 20, the last day Trump was in office, the seven-day average of new daily cases stood at 195,064 cases per day. As of March 3, that number has been reduced to 64,409 cases per day, a decrease of nearly 67 percent.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • No House Meeting Today — Potential for Riots

    Stories continue to break about the previous administration. Continue reading

    The post No House Meeting Today — Potential for Riots appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • Reality Check: COVID, Russia and Biden’s High Approval Rating

    The vaccines will come none too soon for people in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott announced he will end the statewide mask mandate and permit all businesses to reopen without coronavirus restrictions. Continue reading

    The post Reality Check: COVID, Russia and Biden’s High Approval Rating appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • Biden Can Save Lives From COVID by Supporting Intellectual Property Rules Waiver

    A nurse shows the AstraZeneca vaccine used at the "Covid Express" vaccination centre at Son Dureta Hospital in Palma, Spain, on February 27, 2021.

    Calling it a moral imperative as well as an urgent public health and economic necessity, over 400 progressive groups on Friday urged U.S. President Joe Biden to save hundreds of thousands of lives by joining more than 100 nations in supporting an emergency waiver of the World Trade Organization’s intellectual property rules, which are currently blocking the rapid production and equitable global distribution of Covid-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines.

    At a press conference joined by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a coalition of health, labor, human rights, faith, and other groups released a letter (pdf) signed by hundreds of prominent organizations calling on the Biden administration to reverse the Trump administration’s “dangerous and self-defeating” obstruction of an effort to bring the coronavirus disaster to a swift end by temporarily suspending Big Pharma’s exclusive rights over tests, treatments, and vaccines — life-saving tools developed with public subsidies.

    “As a global community, we must come together and use every tool at our disposal to stop this pandemic,” Blumenauer said. “Unfortunately, we have seen intellectual property rules and corporate greed have disastrous impacts for public health during past epidemics, and we need to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”

    “Working to ensure that trade rules do not stunt the developing world’s access to vaccines, treatments, and diagnostic tests is a clear step,” he added. “It’s the right thing to do not only for our country, but for the entire world.”

    The WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) requires countries to give pharmaceutical corporations lengthy monopoly control over the knowledge and technology used to produce medicines, even though governments and taxpayers have contributed billions of dollars to quickly develop multiple coronavirus vaccines as well as diagnostic and therapeutic tools.

    India and South Africa in October 2020 introduced a proposal (pdf) calling on the WTO to exempt member nations from enforcing pandemic-related patent protections. The TRIPS waiver is backed by more than 100 countries, but a small group of powerful states in the Global North — led by the U.S., U.K., and Canada — is actively and successfully impeding the will of a supermajority of the world.

    While former President Donald Trump was at the forefront of objecting to the TRIPS waiver, Biden, despite having had the opportunity to do so at two recent WTO committee meetings, has not yet ended U.S. opposition to India and South Africa’s proposal — even though current trends indicate that the world’s poorest countries will be forced to wait until 2024 for mass inoculation, causing needless suffering and death, and generating more than $9 trillion in economic losses.

    “As an expert in intellectual property law and access to life-saving medicines, I can assure the Biden administration that intellectual property barriers are real, and they’re blocking millions of people around the world from accessing life-saving Covid-19 vaccines,” Brook Baker, senior policy analyst at Health GAP and professor of law at Northeastern University, said during the press conference. “By obstructing the TRIPS waiver proposal, President Biden is breaking his promise to share Covid-19 vaccine technologies with the world.”

    During an interview with healthcare activist Ady Barkan in July 2020, Biden committed to sharing technology and access to any Covid-19 vaccine produced in the U.S., saying “it’s the only humane thing in the world to do.” As Common Dreams has reported, health justice campaigners have argued that rejoining and contributing funding to the World Health Organization-backed COVAX program, while welcome, is insufficient.

    Ahead of the WTO’s upcoming General Council meetings next Monday and Tuesday, the coalition’s letter implored Biden to “deliver on that promise” by supporting the TRIPS waiver. During his testimony, Baker said the Biden administration must “send a message to Big Pharma that it’s unacceptable to write off the lives of 90% of people in low- and middle-income countries.”

    Describing the fight against the pandemic as “a race against time,” Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, asked during the press conference: “What is the possible upside of the U.S. blocking this WTO waiver supported by most countries given there is manufacturing capacity around the globe to greatly increase supplies of vaccines, tests, and treatments if formulas and technologies are shared?”

    Akshaya Kumar, director of crisis advocacy at Human Rights Watch, pointed out that “instead of arguing about how to ration better, we could be rationing less.”

    “Sharing the recipe for vaccines by pooling intellectual property and issuing global, open, and non-exclusive licenses,” Kumar added, “could help scale up manufacturing and expand the number of vaccine doses made.”

    Deploying a metaphor to make the same point, Abby Maxman, president of Oxfam America, said that “rather than slicing the existing pie of vaccines even more finely, we need to share the recipe so that we have enough for everyone. We need a people’s vaccine. A vaccine that is free to everyone around the world, that is fairly distributed based on need and not on nationality or ability to pay.”

    All of the speakers stressed the need for urgency in combating “vaccine apartheid.” As Schakowsky noted, “The new Covid-19 variants, which show more resistance to vaccines, prove that further delay in immunity around the world will lead to faster and stronger mutations.”

    “Equitable access is essential,” she added. “Our globalized economy cannot recover if only parts of the world are vaccinated and have protection against the virus. We must make vaccines available everywhere if we are going to crush the virus anywhere.”

    Decrying the “vast chasm of inequality” created by giving “just a handful of giant pharmaceutical corporations… monopoly control over the live-saving technologies we all need,” Maxman noted that the U.S., with only 4% of the world’s population, has purchased almost half of Pfizer’s total expected supply in 2021.

    Last week, as Common Dreams reported, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres lamented the fact that 10 countries had gobbled up 75% of the world’s Covid-19 vaccines while people in more than 130 countries had yet to receive a single dose. The U.N. chief warned that this “wildly uneven and unfair” allocation of vaccines threatened to prolong a pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 2.5 million people around the world.

    Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer, a co-founder of Partners in Health, made it clear that “the world does not have time to wait for the usual, slow, and unequal distribution of treatments, diagnostics, and vaccines.”

    “We can take a lesson from the global AIDS movements and make sure patent laws don’t block access to life-saving therapies for the poor,” Farmer added. “It’s a similar story for vaccines, which in the case of Covid-19, we’re so lucky to have and in such short order. Moderna has waived these rights, and others should follow suit as we deploy one of the mainstays required to end this pandemic.”

    Echoing Farmer’s call to learn from past epidemics, Yuanqiong Hu, policy co-coordinator of the Access Campaign at Doctors Without Borders, said that “governments must not squander this historic opportunity and avoid repeating the painful lessons of the early years of the HIV/AIDS response.”

    The TRIPS waiver, Hu added, “would give countries more ways to tackle the legal barriers to maximizing production and supply of medical products needed for Covid-19 treatment and prevention. Defending monopoly protection is the antithesis to the current call for Covid-19 medicines and vaccines to be treated as global public goods.”

    Drawing attention to the public nature of Covid-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines, Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, emphasized that “the U.S. government has invested over $13 billion in taxpayer funds to create vaccines, and other developed nations have invested as well.”

    Instead of hoarding vaccines and causing unnecessary suffering and preventable deaths, Campbell said, “rich nations have an obligation to share with the global community. That is the only way to protect the vulnerable here and abroad.”

    “The United States must stop blocking the WTO TRIPS waiver in order to share the vaccine with the developing world and to prevent the killing of our vulnerable siblings in the developing world,” Campbell added. “If we don’t get the waiver, we in the United States, I believe, will have blood on our hands, and we cannot allow that to happen. Let’s change this.”

    Watch:

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Administration Working Hard on COVID

    Vaccinations rates are picking up, and now nearly 1 in 5 adults have had their first shot. Continue reading

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    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • The Milestone Nobody Wanted to Reach

    The United States passed the heartbreaking marker of 500,000 official deaths from COVID-19. The GOP resorts to old playbook and suggest Trump will run in 2024. Continue reading

    The post The Milestone Nobody Wanted to Reach appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • People Over 75 Are First in Line to Be Vaccinated Against COVID-19

    Prioritizing COVID-19 vaccinations for people 75 and up can leave out Black Americans, who tend to die younger than their white counterparts. In majority-Black Shelby County, this gap raises questions of how to make the vaccine rollout equitable.
    Continue reading

    The post People Over 75 Are First in Line to Be Vaccinated Against COVID-19 appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • Whose Rights Matter in Pandemic America?

    Not those of poor Americans, that’s for sure. Continue reading

    The post Whose Rights Matter in Pandemic America? appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • Experts begin tests to determine whether the UK will need to be re-vaccinated

    As part of our #FactOfTheMatter series, The Canary explores whether emerging mutations of coronavirus (Covid-19) will lead to people in the UK needing to be re-vaccinated. With emerging strains being reported in South Africa and Brazil, the question for experts is will people need to be re-vaccinated because of coronavirus variants? Here is what we know so far.

    On 6 January, an emerging strain was found from Brazil, making it the latest variant to be reported after South Africa, the UK and Denmark.

    Covid-19 emerging strains timeline

    The current coronavirus timeline of emerging strains is listed below, accurate at the time of publication.

    • 6 January 2021- Mutation– Brazil
    • 18 December 2020- South Africa announced the detection of a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 that is rapidly spreading in three provinces of South Africa.
    • 14 December 2020- The United Kingdom reported to WHO a variant referred to by the United Kingdom as SARS-CoV-2 VOC 202012/01
    • August and September 2020- Denmark identified a SARS-CoV-2 variant linked to infection among farmed mink.

    With new strains being found, and the UK- Kent variation being dubbed a ‘variant of concern’ by scientists, it raises an important question: will we have to be re-vaccinated because of mutations?

    Will current vaccines still work?

    Speaking about the emerging strains in Brazil, Oxford vaccine clinical trials, Lead, Andrew Pollard told The British Medical Journal (BMJ):

    In those settings, variants of the virus that emerge that are able to spread despite existing post-infection immunity will be selected. If that’s the case, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to find ourselves in a position where vaccines don’t work against hospitalisation or severe disease, but it may be more difficult to prevent milder disease and transmission.

    We need to monitor the situation carefully and work out the process that would be needed to make an adjusted vaccine, should the need arise.

    While the three main vaccines: Pfizer BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford AstraZeneca were all designed in a slightly different way, they all do the same thing which is to reduce the effect of coronavirus. Although all slightly different, they target what is called a ‘spike protein‘ of the virus.

    Imperial College London, Department of Infectious Disease, Dr John Tregoning explained to The Canary why we are seeing Covid-19 mutations:

    Selection pressure is a term that comes from evolution. All living things are under some level of evolutionary pressure – the fittest ones will produce more offspring. Selection pressures are the external factors that restrict the ability of an organism to replicate. Covid-19 is caused by a virus (SARS-CoV-2) and because it needs to replicate it is under selective pressures. This occurs at an accelerated rate to more complex organisms because viruses replicate very quickly and to very high numbers. 

    How does selective pressure affect Covid-19?

    Tregoning explained that selective pressure is not just one thing but several things that can affect a virus:

    There are a number of selective pressures but two of the main ones for viruses are how quickly they can spread and how easily they are seen and destroyed by the immune system. When nobody has seen the virus before, the speed and ease with which it can infect people is the main factor.

    One question we had was: what happens when the pressure on the virus gets bigger?

    Tregoning told The Canary:

    Over time as more people have been infected the immune system becomes a bigger pressure on the virus. The most important feature of the immune response in this context is immune memory – previous infection with a virus will give you protection against future infection with the same virus. So only ones that cannot be recognised by the immune system will spread. Of course this is not completely black and white, there will be some viruses that are partially infectious or some people who are more susceptible.

    However, this doesn’t mean that experts can predict if and when mutations occur.

    Experts can’t predict whether Covid-19 will mutate again

    Speaking to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Pollard explained why mutations are happening:

    When lots of people have had disease or been vaccinated, the virus is going to come under a lot of pressure, and when that happens some viruses just can’t compete against that immunity.

    Will it mutate instead? With this coronavirus we don’t know the answer to that question yet, and that’s why surveillance is going to be critical in the year ahead to make sure that we’re not in a position where, at the point of population immunity, the virus escapes. And if it does, we need to know that, so that we can redesign the vaccines.

    However Imperial College London, Department of Infectious Disease, Dr John Tregoning told The Canary that mutations may help scientists in the long run:

    The immune pressure is mostly coming from previous infections – most of the new variants arose before the vaccines were introduced or in countries where there has been no vaccine rollout. One interesting feature of the mutations that have arose is that they all fall within very similar places on the spike protein (the one the virus uses to get into cells). This may help scientists design vaccines to target the new variants or understand how it might change over time, but it is too early to say.

    However, according to those that have investigated the virus, it’s not a case of whether we will see future mutations, but rather, preparing for a life with Covid-19.

    Professor Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, has stated that we may never eliminate coronavirus, but that international focus must be on monitoring and updating our medicine to deal with it:

    Looking forward we’re going to be living with coronavirus indefinitely, we’re never going to eliminate it from the human population, it will evolve, and we may need to regularly update our vaccines.

    But how easy is it to update vaccines?

    Vaccines could be tweaked for ‘2021 booster campaigns’

    While the vaccine can be tweaked, Pollard suggests that changes to the science would be an easier step than the manufacturing and logistic operation a new vaccine would need.

    Pollard explained to the BMJ:

    For the RNA vaccines and the viral vectors it’s relatively straightforward, because you just have to synthesise a new bit of DNA in our case—or RNA in [the Pfizer and Moderna] cases—and then insert that into the new vaccine. Then there’s a bit of work to do to manufacture the new vaccine, which is a reasonably heavy lift. But the same processes would be used.

    The second component is that there will almost certainly need to be some testing, whether it’s in animals or humans, to show that you can still generate immune responses, and then the regulator would have to approve that new product.

    Meanwhile Imperial College London, Department of Infectious Disease, Dr John Tregoning told us that we could see new vaccines in upcoming booster campaigns later this year:

    One of the impacts of the mutations is potentially reduced efficacy of the first generation of vaccines. It is important to stress that these are currently highly effective and no severe disease has been reported in the vaccinated arm of any of the trials, so it is definitely worth being immunised as this will help to reduce the burden of infection globally, also reducing the likelihood of further mutation. But as a precaution, second generation vaccines that target the new variants are being developed – it is possible these will be used in an autumn booster campaign later in 2021.

    The Canary contacted the Department for Health and Social Care, NHS England and the Oxford Vaccine Group about the impact new vaccines could have on manufacturing, logistics and distribution to the general public. They were unable to comment at the time of publication.

    Close monitoring is vital

    One of the teams monitoring mutations is The G2P-UK National Virology Consortium.

    The Consortium work with The COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) to study how mutations may affect transmission, vaccines and treatments.

    By carrying out rapid whole genome sequencing they aim to help monitor new variants. The consortium then shares data with other organisations such as the GISAID: as it tracks the coronavirus pandemic in real-time.

    G2P-UK co-lead, Michael Malim explained in a recent webinar that because of the work the consortium is doing, they would know ‘pretty quickly’ whether a new strain would be a risk to those who are vaccinated:

    Once a sequence of interest is identified we’ll be able to synthesise that spike gene and make virus particles in the laboratory. Then we’ll test the sensitivity of that virus to inhibition of infection in laboratory models to a range of sera from vaccines and natural infection, and work out if there is a change. It would take about two to three weeks from knowing which sequence to focus on to having those results. So, pretty quickly, we would know where the variant, for example, could potentially break through vaccination.

    A global task-force is ready

    A global surveillance system is something that the World Health Organization has been working on.

    The WHO’s SARS-CoV-2 global laboratory network has been monitoring virus mutations since it was formed in June 2020.

    The working groups who have expertise in sequencing are currently working with other countries to see how current monitoring can be improved.

    Addressing new variants the WHO stated:

    While mutations of SARS-CoV-2 are expected, it is important to continue to monitor the public health implications of new virus variants. Any increased in transmissibility associated with SARS-CoV-2 variants could make control more difficult. Current disease control measures recommended by WHO continue to be effective and should be adapted in response to increasing disease incidence, whether associated with a new variant or not.

    The group will continue to work on finding ways that systems can be strengthened or adapted to better monitor variations and aid international centres in the fight against coronavirus. While the logistics and manufacturing of a new vaccine is a large task, it seems scientists are confident in their ability to modify existing vaccines if needed. While scientists are confident in their ability to supply changed vaccines, little is known about what manufacturing and logistical issues this might cause the Department for Health and Social Care and Public Health England in distributing vaccines.

    Featured Image: RF._.Studio

    By Emma Guy

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Biden Aims for US to Produce Millions of At-Home COVID Tests by End of Summer

    President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the national economy and the need for his administration's proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief legislation in the State Dining Room at the White House on February 5, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    President Biden’s pandemic response team announced plans on Friday to use the Defense Production Act to help Pfizer manufacture more of its COVID vaccine, produce 61 million rapid at-home COVID tests over the next six months, and address shortages of personal protective equipment for health care workers.

    The Defense Production Act gives the president emergency powers to compel private companies to prioritize supply lines and manufacturing for the benefit of national defense, in this case against coronavirus. Biden signed an executive order directing federal agencies to use the 1950 law shortly after his inauguration.

    The announcement is the new administration’s latest departure from COVID policy under President Donald Trump, who was criticized by Biden and the media for taking a hands-off approach to deploying the Defense Production Act and largely ignoring the pandemic during his final months in office.

    Tim Manning, a former Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator serving as Biden’s pandemic supplies coordinator, told reporters on Friday that limited supplies of ingredients and equipment are currently straining a push to speed up production of the Pfizer vaccine. The federal government is expanding “priority ratings” under the Defense Production Act, giving the company “first access” to components for filling pumps and tangential flow filtration skid units needed to scale up vaccine manufacturing.

    “It’s actions like these that will allow Pfizer to ramp up production and hit their targets of delivering hundreds of millions of doses over the coming months,” Manning said.

    The Biden administration is also working to increased production of rapid COVID tests that can be taken at home without a prescription. On Friday, Manning announced that the Defense Production Act will be used to contract with six companies to produce at-home tests, but he did not release the names of the companies due to ongoing contract negotiations. Manning said the government will help the companies build new production plants and supply lines in the United States, reducing “vulnerabilities” in the supply chain.

    Under most insurance plans, at-home tests are only free of charge for people experiencing symptoms or exposed to COVID-19 and can cost $129 or more out of pocket.

    “The country is well behind where we need to be in testing, particularly the rapid at-home test that will allow us all to get back to normal activities like work and school,” Manning said, adding that 60 million at-home tests would be available by the end of the summer.

    Manning said the U.S. is nearly 100 percent reliant on overseas manufacturers to export personal protection equipment, notably surgical gloves, which is “unacceptable.” The government will use the Defense Production Act to invest in private companies building plants and factories for producing raw materials and manufacturing surgical gloves. By the end of the year, Manning expects the U.S. to be producing one billion gloves per month.

    “We’re already working to increase the availability of N95 masks to frontline workers but another critical area of concern we hear over and over is surgical gloves,” Manning said. “Right now, we just don’t have enough gloves.”

    Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control, said the U.S. is coming off a “case bump” from the holidays and has seen a 61 decrease in new COVID-19 cases since infection rates peaked on January 8. Over the past week, rates of COVID-related deaths and hospitalizations fell 11.9 percent and 15 percent respectively, according to the Washington Post.

    “The data moving is in right direction, we will know in the next week if it is really going down,” Walensky said on Friday.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.