Day: February 5, 2021

The World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday that 75% of all COVID-19 vaccinations worldwide have been given in just 10 countries, while nearly 130 nations have not given a single vaccination.At the agency’s regular briefing in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters that, globally, the number of vaccinations has now overtaken the number of reported COVID-19 infections.He said that is basically good news and a remarkable achievement in such a short timeframe. But there are almost 130 countries with 2.5 billion people, that have not delivered a single dose of vaccine.Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization speaks during a session of the Executive Board on the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Geneva, Jan. 21, 2021.Tedros said there are some wealthier nations that have already vaccinated large proportions of their population at lower risk of severe disease or death.The WHO chief said he recognizes that all governments have an obligation to protect their own people. But he said once wealthier nations have vaccinated their priority populations — frontline health workers and the elderly — the best way those nations can protect the rest of their population is to share surplus vaccines so other countries can do the same.“The longer it takes to vaccinate those most at risk everywhere, the more opportunity we give the virus to mutate and evade vaccines,” said Tedros said, adding that unless the virus is suppressed everywhere, it could resurge globally.One way to make poorer nations less dependent on the richer ones is to ramp up production of vaccines worldwide, he added, noting how the multi-national pharmaceutical company Sanofi announced it would make its manufacturing infrastructure available to support production of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.Tedros called on other companies to do the same.“We encourage all manufacturers to share their data and technology to ensure global, equitable access to vaccines.”
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As more people get the COVID-19 vaccine, health care experts are tackling the issue of how someone can prove they’ve been vaccinated. Lesia Bakalets has more in this story narrated by Anna Rice. 
Camera: Sergii Dogotar     
 
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Despite its world-class medical system and its vaunted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. fell behind in the race to detect dangerous coronavirus mutations. And it’s only now beginning to catch up.The problem has not been a shortage of technology or expertise. Rather, scientists say, it’s an absence of national leadership and coordination, plus a lack of funding and supplies for overburdened laboratories trying to juggle diagnostic testing with the hunt for genetic changes.“We have the brains. We have the tools. We have the instruments,” said Ilhem Messaoudi, director of a virus research center at University of California, Irvine. “It’s just a matter of supporting that effort.”Viruses mutate constantly. To stay ahead of the threat, scientists analyze samples, watching closely for mutations that might make the coronavirus more infectious or more deadly.But such testing has been scattershot.Less than 1% of positive specimens in the U.S. are being sequenced to determine whether they have worrisome mutations. Other countries do better — Britain sequences about 10% — meaning they can more quickly see threats coming at them. That gives them greater opportunity to slow or stop the problem, whether through more targeted contact tracing, possible adjustments to the vaccine, or public warnings.CDC officials say variants have not driven recent surges in overall U.S. cases. But experts worry that what’s happening with variants is not clear and say the nation should have been more aggressive about sequencing earlier in the epidemic that has now killed over 450,000 Americans.“If we had evidence it was changing,” said Ohio State molecular biologist Dan Jones, “maybe people would’ve acted differently.”U.S. scientists have detected more than 500 cases of a variant first identified in Britain and expect it to become the cause of most of this country’s new infections in a matter of weeks. Another troubling variant tied to Brazil and a third discovered in South Africa were detected last week in the U.S. and also are expected to spread.The British variant is more contagious and is believed to be more deadly than the original, while the South Africa one may render the vaccines somewhat less effective. The ultimate fear is that a variant resistant to existing vaccines and treatments could eventually emerge.Potentially worrisome versions may form inside the U.S., too. “This virus is mutating, and it doesn’t care of it’s in Idaho or South Africa,” Messaoudi said.But the true dimensions of the problem in the U.S. are not clear because of the relatively low level of sequencing.“You only see what’s under the lamppost,” said Kenny Beckman, director of the University of Minnesota Genomics Center, which started analyzing the virus’s genetics last spring.Medics take a patient out of an ambulance outside the Royal London Hospital in east London, Feb. 4, 2021.After the slow start, public health labs in at least 33 states are now doing genetic analysis to identify emerging coronavirus variants. Other states have formed partnerships with university or private labs to do the work. North Dakota, which began sequencing last week, was the most recent to start that work, according to the Association of Public Health Laboratories.The CDC believes a minimum of 5,000 to 10,000 samples should be analyzed weekly in the U.S. to adequately monitor variants, said Gregory Armstrong, who oversees the agency’s advanced molecular detection work. And it’s only now that the nation is hitting that level, he acknowledged.Still, it is a jumble of approaches: Some public health labs sequence every positive virus specimen. Some focus on samples from certain outbreaks or certain patients. Others randomly select samples to analyze.On top of that, labs continue to have trouble getting needed supplies — like pipette tips and chemicals — used in both gene sequencing and diagnostic testing.President Joe Biden, who inherited the setup from the Trump administration, is proposing a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that calls for boosting federal spending on sequencing of the virus, though the amount has not been detailed and other specifics have yet to be worked out.“We’re 43rd in the world in genomic sequencing. Totally unacceptable,” White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said.For more than five years, U.S. public health labs have been building up their ability to do genomic sequencing, thanks largely to a federal push to zero in on the sources of food poisoning outbreaks.At the pandemic’s outset, some labs began sequencing the coronavirus right away. The Minnesota Department of Health, for example, started doing so within weeks of its first COVID-19 cases in March, said Sara Vetter, an assistant lab director. “That put us a step ahead,” she said.The CDC likewise worked with certain states to sequence close to 500 samples in April, and over a thousand samples in May and June.But many labs didn’t do the same — especially those overburdened with ramping up coronavirus diagnostic testing. The CDC’s Armstrong said that at the time, he couldn’t justify telling labs to do more sequencing when they already had their hands full and there wasn’t any evidence such analysis was needed.“Up until a month ago, it wasn’t on the list of things that are urgently necessary. It was nice to have,” said Trevor Bedford, a scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “There was definitely lack of federal resources assigned to doing exactly this.”At the same time, because of stay-at-home orders imposed during the outbreak, researchers at some labs were told not to go in to work, Messaoudi said.“Instead of having a call to arms,” she said, “they sent everyone home.”Over the summer, though, a group of scientists sounded the alarm about the state of genomic surveillance in the U.S. and began pushing for something more systematic.In November, the CDC began to roll out a national program to more methodically pull and check specimens to better determine what strains are circulating. Then in December, the U.S. got a wake-up call when British researchers announced they had identified a variant that seems to spread more easily.The CDC reacted by announcing its surveillance program would scale up to process 750 samples nationally per week. The agency also contracted with three companies — LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics and Illumina — to sequence thousands more each week. State labs are doing thousands of their own.Meanwhile, the outbreak is almost certainly seeding more COVID-19 mutations.“Where it has free rein of the place, there’s going to be significant variants that evolve,” Scripps Research Institute scientist Dr. Eric Topol said. “The more genomic sequencing, the more we can stay ahead of the virus.”
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The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Friday that there are more than 104 million global GOVID-19 cases and 2.2 million deaths from the virus. The United States remains at the top of the list as the location with the most infections, with more than 26 million cases, followed by India with 10.8 million and Brazil with 9.3 million. Medical officials are urging U.S. residents to not turn Sunday’s Super Bowl, a yearly football game, into a superspreader event.  Fans usually gather at large home parties or in bars and restaurants to watch the game on television.  Medical authorities this year, however, are urging football fans to watch the game “with the people you live with.” Some areas in the United States are running into difficulty ensuring that their residents are being inoculated equitably. The nation’s capital is no exception.  Residents in some of the Washington’s poorest neighborhoods have been underrepresented in the city’s vaccination drive.  Now, however, representatives from the mayor’s office have begun knocking on the front doors of senior citizens’ homes in Washington’s poorest neighborhoods in an effort to get them to sign up for the vaccines. Johnson & Johnson Seeks US Vaccine Approval for Emergency UseDrugmaker’s application for its single-dose vaccine to US Food and Drug Administration follows January report that found the vaccine had a 66% rate of efficacy in preventing infections Washington residents aged 65 and older are eligible for the free vaccinations.  In other areas around the country, local governments have begun their vaccine programs with senior citizens 75 and up.City Health Director LaQuandra Nesbitt told The Washington Post  the life expectancy for some of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods is as low as 68 while it is as high as 89 for richer neighborhoods. “If we would have begun vaccinating individuals at 75 years of age or older, we would have missed the opportunity to have an impact in the neighborhoods with the highest burdens of disease,” Nesbitt told the Post.New Zealand reopens borders
New Zealand says it is open to receiving refugees once again, The new measure comes almost a year after New Zealand closed its doors to foreigners in March because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fiona Whiteridge, the general manager of New Zealand’s refugee and migrant service, said in a statement, “With health protocols in place and safe travel routes, we are ready to welcome small groups of refugee families as New Zealand residents to this country, to begin their new lives.”According to Hopkins, New Zealand has 2,315 COVID cases, while it has suffered only 25 deaths.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 9 MB480p | 13 MB540p | 16 MB720p | 32 MB1080p | 65 MBOriginal | 197 MB Embed” />Copy Download AudioThumbnailThu, 02/04/2021 – 22:17Rick ShacklettMedia Duration00:02:43Rights RestrictedOffUS Will Support Program to Share COVID Vaccine with Poor Countries, But Offers Few DetailsBiden administration reiterates support for global initiative to ensure lower-income countries have access to the coronavirus vaccine but has not provided further detailsUS Will Support Program to Share COVID Vaccine with Poor Countries, But Offers Few DetailsIndia vaccinations
Pfizer told Reuters in a statement  Friday that it has withdrawn its application in India for emergency-use authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine developed with Germany’s BioNTech. Pfizer did not conduct a trial with its vaccine in India, a measure India usually requires.  Pfizer’s decision to withdraw came after its meeting earlier this week with India’s drug regulator, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization.The drug regulator said Pfizer’s vaccine was not recommended because there were no data from an Indian trial and because of reported side effects from the vaccine in its use abroad.  Pfizer said it will “re-submit its approval request with additional information as it becomes available in the near future.” India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare reported 12,408 new coronavirus cases Friday. The British vaccines minister recently told lawmakers there are about 4,000 variants of the coronavirus worldwide.  Nadhim Zahawi said, however, that a vaccine to combat a “a variant that we are really concerned about” could be developed  in 30 to 40 days, that would then be mass produced,  according to a report in The Guardian. 
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Despite its world-class medical system and its vaunted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. fell behind in the race to detect dangerous coronavirus mutations. And it’s only now beginning to catch up.The problem has not been a shortage of technology or expertise. Rather, scientists say, it’s an absence of national leadership and coordination, plus a lack of funding and supplies for overburdened laboratories trying to juggle diagnostic testing with the hunt for genetic changes.“We have the brains. We have the tools. We have the instruments,” said Ilhem Messaoudi, director of a virus research center at University of California, Irvine. “It’s just a matter of supporting that effort.”Viruses mutate constantly. To stay ahead of the threat, scientists analyze samples, watching closely for mutations that might make the coronavirus more infectious or more deadly.But such testing has been scattershot.Less than 1% of positive specimens in the U.S. are being sequenced to determine whether they have worrisome mutations. Other countries do better — Britain sequences about 10% — meaning they can more quickly see threats coming at them. That gives them greater opportunity to slow or stop the problem, whether through more targeted contact tracing, possible adjustments to the vaccine, or public warnings.CDC officials say variants have not driven recent surges in overall U.S. cases. But experts worry that what’s happening with variants is not clear and say the nation should have been more aggressive about sequencing earlier in the epidemic that has now killed over 450,000 Americans.“If we had evidence it was changing,” said Ohio State molecular biologist Dan Jones, “maybe people would’ve acted differently.”U.S. scientists have detected more than 500 cases of a variant first identified in Britain and expect it to become the cause of most of this country’s new infections in a matter of weeks. Another troubling variant tied to Brazil and a third discovered in South Africa were detected last week in the U.S. and also are expected to spread.The British variant is more contagious and is believed to be more deadly than the original, while the South Africa one may render the vaccines somewhat less effective. The ultimate fear is that a variant resistant to existing vaccines and treatments could eventually emerge.Potentially worrisome versions may form inside the U.S., too. “This virus is mutating, and it doesn’t care of it’s in Idaho or South Africa,” Messaoudi said.But the true dimensions of the problem in the U.S. are not clear because of the relatively low level of sequencing.“You only see what’s under the lamppost,” said Kenny Beckman, director of the University of Minnesota Genomics Center, which started analyzing the virus’s genetics last spring.Medics take a patient out of an ambulance outside the Royal London Hospital in east London, Feb. 4, 2021.After the slow start, public health labs in at least 33 states are now doing genetic analysis to identify emerging coronavirus variants. Other states have formed partnerships with university or private labs to do the work. North Dakota, which began sequencing last week, was the most recent to start that work, according to the Association of Public Health Laboratories.The CDC believes a minimum of 5,000 to 10,000 samples should be analyzed weekly in the U.S. to adequately monitor variants, said Gregory Armstrong, who oversees the agency’s advanced molecular detection work. And it’s only now that the nation is hitting that level, he acknowledged.Still, it is a jumble of approaches: Some public health labs sequence every positive virus specimen. Some focus on samples from certain outbreaks or certain patients. Others randomly select samples to analyze.On top of that, labs continue to have trouble getting needed supplies — like pipette tips and chemicals — used in both gene sequencing and diagnostic testing.President Joe Biden, who inherited the setup from the Trump administration, is proposing a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that calls for boosting federal spending on sequencing of the virus, though the amount has not been detailed and other specifics have yet to be worked out.“We’re 43rd in the world in genomic sequencing. Totally unacceptable,” White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said.For more than five years, U.S. public health labs have been building up their ability to do genomic sequencing, thanks largely to a federal push to zero in on the sources of food poisoning outbreaks.At the pandemic’s outset, some labs began sequencing the coronavirus right away. The Minnesota Department of Health, for example, started doing so within weeks of its first COVID-19 cases in March, said Sara Vetter, an assistant lab director. “That put us a step ahead,” she said.The CDC likewise worked with certain states to sequence close to 500 samples in April, and over a thousand samples in May and June.But many labs didn’t do the same — especially those overburdened with ramping up coronavirus diagnostic testing. The CDC’s Armstrong said that at the time, he couldn’t justify telling labs to do more sequencing when they already had their hands full and there wasn’t any evidence such analysis was needed.“Up until a month ago, it wasn’t on the list of things that are urgently necessary. It was nice to have,” said Trevor Bedford, a scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “There was definitely lack of federal resources assigned to doing exactly this.”At the same time, because of stay-at-home orders imposed during the outbreak, researchers at some labs were told not to go in to work, Messaoudi said.“Instead of having a call to arms,” she said, “they sent everyone home.”Over the summer, though, a group of scientists sounded the alarm about the state of genomic surveillance in the U.S. and began pushing for something more systematic.In November, the CDC began to roll out a national program to more methodically pull and check specimens to better determine what strains are circulating. Then in December, the U.S. got a wake-up call when British researchers announced they had identified a variant that seems to spread more easily.The CDC reacted by announcing its surveillance program would scale up to process 750 samples nationally per week. The agency also contracted with three companies — LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics and Illumina — to sequence thousands more each week. State labs are doing thousands of their own.Meanwhile, the outbreak is almost certainly seeding more COVID-19 mutations.“Where it has free rein of the place, there’s going to be significant variants that evolve,” Scripps Research Institute scientist Dr. Eric Topol said. “The more genomic sequencing, the more we can stay ahead of the virus.”
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Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson said Thursday it is seeking approval for its single-dose COVID-19 vaccine from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.The FDA said it has scheduled a Feb. 26 meeting of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee to discuss an emergency use authorization for the company.In January, Johnson & Johnson released a report that said its vaccine had a 66% rate of preventing the coronavirus infection in a large global trial. However, the vaccine was found in trials not to protect as well against the South Africa virus variant, which is highly transmissible and spreading around the globe, officials said.After previous such meetings of the FDA committee, vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna received authorization within a day.The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which each require two doses to be fully inoculated, are 95% effective, studies show.Johnson & Johnson, which said it will also apply for European authorization within weeks, has a single-dose vaccine that does not need to be frozen during shipping, which the two other approved vaccines do.In January, Paul Stoffels, the company’s chief scientific officer, said the drugmaker would have vaccine ready to ship by March.”Upon authorization of our investigational COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, we are ready to begin shipping,” Stoffels said in a statement.The news of a possible new vaccine to fight the coronavirus pandemic comes as global confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, neared 105 million and deaths totaled nearly 2.3 million.The United States leads the world with more than 26.6 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and by late Thursday had recorded 455,657 deaths.However, the number of daily deaths is falling, from a record high of 4,466 on Jan. 12, to 3,912 Wednesday, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the new head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said COVID-19 deaths could fall even further by next week. But she also worried that the upcoming Super Bowl game on Sunday could lead to people relaxing coronavirus protocols to gather and watch the major football event.
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The Biden administration on Thursday underscored the importance of supporting COVAX, the global mechanism that aims to deliver coronavirus vaccines to poor countries, but it acknowledged it has not increased funding beyond the $4 billion approved in December for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, one of the co-leaders of COVAX.“We have reiterated our commitment to COVAX, and I don’t have any additional funding note to announce today,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in response to a question from VOA.On Jan. 21, the day after President Joe Biden was inaugurated, the U.S. announced it would join COVAX and rejoin the World Health Organization. In July 2020, then-President Donald Trump formally withdrew from the world body, accusing it of being a puppet of China during the pandemic.Biden highlighted the message of working together with the international community in his foreign policy speech Thursday.”We’ve also reengaged with the World Health Organization,” Biden said. “That way we can build better global preparedness to counter COVID-19, as well as detect and prevent future pandemics, because there will be more.”Still, the administration has provided little detail on the scope and scale of U.S. commitment to COVAX beyond an initial National Security Directive released on Jan. 21 addressing U.S. global leadership to strengthen the international pandemic response.The directive instructs officials to come up with a framework for donating surplus vaccines, once there is sufficient supply domestically, to countries in need including through the COVAX facility.What is COVAX?COVAX is a global initiative co-led by the World Health Organization, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. It aims to deliver 2 billion doses of the coronavirus vaccines to people in lower-income countries by the end of 2021.As wealthy countries build up stockpiles for their own populations, the goal of COVAX is to ensure that poor countries can vaccinate at least 20% of their people.On Wednesday, COVAX announced its forecast of the first batch of vaccine distribution.“Soon, we’ll be able to start delivering life-saving vaccines globally, an outcome we know is essential if we’re to have any chance of being able to beat this pandemic,” Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, said in a briefing to reporters.According to COVAX interim forecast data, the first batch of vaccines distributed will include 336 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the first half of this year and 1.2 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for the first quarter.The 1.2 million is part of the 40 million doses Pfizer promised to COVAX this year. The company has obligations to individual countries, including the 200 million doses it promised to the United States by July.Berkley expressed disappointment that COVAX received so few Pfizer shots.“Of course, we would like more Pfizer-BioNTech. That is what we were offered,” he said, encouraging manufactures to make the largest number of doses available early to ensure global equitable distribution.COVAX is part of the World Health Organization’s ACT Accelerator, a global collaboration to accelerate the development, production and equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments and vaccines.First stepWhile welcomed by recipients, the total doses under COVAX cover on average only 3.3% of the total population of participating countries, merely a first step in the initiative’s goal of vaccinating 20% of the people in 92 lower-income countries, mostly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, by end of 2021.“They’re not finished, and so we’re going to see much more from COVAX,” Bruce Gellin, president of Global Immunization at the Sabin Vaccine Institute, said.“It was vaccines that were clearly available, that they had some control over and started to make those allocation projections primarily so countries could begin to plan,” Gellin said. The immunization strategy planning would include storage, distribution and how to address vaccine hesitancy.To meet its target, COVAX will need to address not only the current lack of supply but funding. COVAX said it needs $4.9 billion, in addition to the $2.1 billion it has already raised.
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