Day: June 14, 2021

Another highly effective vaccine is poised to join the fight against COVID-19.  But its impact may be blunted by supply issues. The manufacturer expected to produce the bulk of the doses is in India, where the government has banned vaccine exports.  FILE – A car drives past the sign for vaccine developer Novavax at the company’s headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Nov. 30, 2020.”Many of our first doses will go to … low- and middle-income countries, and that was the goal to begin with,” Novavax CEO Stanley Erck told The Associated Press. The vaccine does not have the special cold storage requirements of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines. That means low- and middle-income countries “can use the cold chain that they have already set up for routine childhood vaccines,” said William Moss, executive director of the Johns Hopkins University International Vaccine Access Center. “They don’t need to make modifications to handle the cold chain requirements” of the Pfizer and Moderna shots. Doses in limbo Novavax also has a deal with the Serum Institute of India (SII) to manufacture an additional 750 million doses of the vaccine.  SII is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer and the main supplier of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to COVAX. But the Indian government has barred the company from exporting those doses as the country suffers through a devastating wave of COVID-19 infections.  People register their names to receive a coronavirus vaccine at a free camp in Kolkata, India, June 14, 2021.”Considering the situation in India, there are still a lot of questions about timing and volume (of Novavax vaccine) that would actually be available to the rest of the world,” said Kate Elder, senior vaccines policy adviser to the Doctors Without Borders Access Campaign. “It’s really just a testament to how poorly we as a global community have diversified production sites,” she added. “Whatever candidate produces successful vaccines, that technology (and) that know-how needs to be made available to whoever can produce it.” The company does have manufacturing capacity in other countries, Moss noted, and as regulators authorize the vaccine, there need to be “efforts to scale up manufacturing at those other sites outside of India so that we can get that vaccine to the populations that need them.” “It just shows the trouble with perhaps putting a lot of eggs in one basket,” he added. “For the next few months, we’re really short on vaccine globally,” said former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Tom Frieden, who currently heads the global health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives.  “Redistributing (vaccine doses), as the U.S. and others are doing, will be somewhat helpful, but not for many months,” he said. Over the weekend, the G-7 group of industrialized nations pledged 870 million vaccine doses to COVAX.  Questions about variants The results from the Novavax vaccine trial are impressive, but “what we still don’t have enough information on is how it will do against variants,” Frieden said.  Novavax reported that the vaccine was 93.2% effective against variants in the clinical trial, but it did not specify which variants.  The alpha variant, first identified in Britain and known to scientists as B.1.1.7, is the dominant viral strain in the United States. But in an earlier, smaller trial in South Africa, the vaccine was 51% effective against the dominant variant there, now known as beta.  
 
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The World Health Organization said Monday that while the number of new COVID-19 cases has fallen steadily for seven straight weeks, the virus continues to spread and kill people in Africa, a region with little or no access to vaccines and treatments.Speaking from the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the overall decline in new cases, the longest since the pandemic began, was certainly welcome news. But he said deaths overall were not falling as quickly and declined only slightly last week.Tedros said the decline in cases also masks the fact that the virus continues to spread and kill in regions such as Africa, which has limited access to vaccines and treatments such as oxygen and diagnostic equipment.FILE – A medical team rolls a coronavirus patient from a bed onto a stretcher in the COVID-19 intensive care unit at Kenyatta National Hospital, in Nairobi, Kenya, April 14, 2021.He cited a recent study in the British medical journal The Lancet showing Africa with the highest global mortality rate among critically ill COVID-19 patients, despite it having fewer reported cases than most other regions. Tedros said that available evidence suggests new variants have substantially increased transmission globally, especially in areas with low vaccination rates. The risks have increased for people who are not protected, which is most of the world’s population, he said. “Right now, the virus is moving faster than the global distribution of vaccines.”The WHO chief expressed his gratitude to the leaders at the G-7 summit last week, who pledged 870 million doses of vaccine through the WHO-administered global vaccine cooperative, COVAX.He said while those donations would be a big help, the world needed more vaccines, and faster. Tedros said to end the pandemic, the shared goal must be to vaccinate at least 70% of the world’s population in the next year. That will take 11 billion doses of vaccine, and “the G-7 and G-20 can make this happen.” 
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Medical authorities in Cameroon marked World Blood Donor Day on Monday with continued pleas for blood donors, after a dramatic drop in donations over the past year. Donations fell by half in 2020, then by nearly half again so far this year, worsening the country’s blood shortage.Officials in Cameroon point to 32-year-old Alphonse Suh Chia as a good example of a determined, voluntary blood donor. 
Chia says he became a blood donor in February, after he watched as a 6-year-old boy died of severe anemia in the Central Hospital in Yaounde. He says the medical staff members on duty told him that the blood bank was dry and there was no one to donate blood to save the child’s life. Chia says he was being treated for malaria at the hospital and could not donate blood at the time.But since then, he says, he has joined an association called Green Hearts that donate blood to people in need. Cameroon says it needs 400,000 pints of blood each year to meet the medical needs of its 25 million people. But in 2020, people donated just 48,000 units of blood, down from 103,000 units in 2019. The central African state says blood donations have fallen again so far this year. Dora Ngum Suh Mbanya, director general of Cameroon’s National Blood Transfusion Center, says COVID-19 scares people away from donating blood.”With the COVID pandemic in 2020, there was a deficit of 44 percent in blood donation,” Mbanya said. “What we gathered is that COVID had a huge impact on blood donation. WHO set out criteria whereby, if you are a recovered person from COVID-19, you are allowed a month or so after recovery before you could be eligible to donate.”Mbyana says popular myths surrounding blood donation and transfusion are also an obstacle. “There are those who think that you take their blood and do witchcraft with it and so they cannot donate their blood. There are those with religious beliefs that you cannot take blood from one person and give to the next person. Those kinds of people will not want to donate blood since they would not even receive it. And so, we want to encourage our young people to step forward and take leadership roles in promoting health in our nation through blood donation,” Mbyana said. With Cameroon battling a separatist crisis in two western regions, Boko Haram attacks in the north and occasional spillover of violence from the Central African Republic, the government says the need for blood to treat wounded civilians and fighters is higher than ever. 
 
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U.S.-based biotech company Novavax announced Monday that Phase 3 clinical trials of its COVID-19 vaccine show it to be more than 90 percent effective at preventing the disease and provide good protection against variants.
A release from the company said the study enrolled 29,960 participants across 119 sites in the United States and Mexico with an emphasis on recruiting a representative population of communities and demographic groups most impacted by the disease.
While demand for COVID-19 shots in the U.S. has dropped off dramatically, the need for more vaccines around the world remains critical as many developing nations are just getting vaccine programs going or have yet to start.
The Novavax vaccine, which is easy to store and transport, is expected to play an important role in boosting vaccine supplies in the developing world. In an interview with the Associated Press news agency, Novavax Chief Executive Stanley Erck said, “Many of our first doses will go to … low-and middle-income countries, and that was the goal to begin with.”  
The White House’s top adviser on the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told The Washington Post the vaccine is “really very impressive,” saying it is on par with the most effective shots developed during the pandemic. “It’s very important for the world’s population to have, yet again, another highly efficacious vaccine that looks in its trial to have a good safety profile.”
The company intends to file for regulatory authorizations in the third quarter, upon completion of the final phases of process qualification and assay validation needed to meet chemistry, manufacturing and controls (CMC) requirements.  
Upon regulatory approvals, Novamax says it is on track to reach manufacturing capacity of 100 million doses per month by the end of the third quarter and 150 million doses per month by the end of the fourth quarter of 2021.
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Elizabeth Sherr had always had a passion for the ocean since she was young so trying to clean up the trash that litters beaches and the sea seemed a natural move. When she moved to live next to the sea in Barcelona, the native New Yorker posted some videos on TikTok encouraging others to help rid the beach of cigarette butts and plastic bottles but did not hold out much hope it would catch on. This undated handout photograph released on Jan. 14, 2021 by the University of Barcelona shows an underwater view of a Posidonia Oceanica seagrass meadow in the Mediterranean Sea. (AFP photo / University of Barcelona / Jordi Regas)To her surprise, after one video went viral, Sherr became the face of a global cleanup operation that removed almost 800,000 pieces from public spaces worldwide in ten days. The FILE – Two Belgian fans, wearing the Belgian colors, walk through plastic cups and other garbage after taking part in a celebration in Antwerp, Belgium, June 18, 2016.Single-use plastics are responsible for 49% of all marine pollution, while 27% is caused by plastics linked to fishing, according to data from the European Parliament. The 24-year-old campaigner said people from 33 countries from Peru to Honduras and Jordan to Cyprus joined in. “Many people got in touch to tell me that their attitude to sea pollution has completely changed since taking part in this challenge,” she said.  Sherr, who grew up in Manhattan, revealed the success of the challenge was due, in part, to a literary mistake which caught the imagination of other TikTok users. “In one video I wrote ‘Every follower is a piece of trash’. People on TikTok thought it was very funny.  That was the video which went viral with 1.3 million views,” said Sherr, who works for a nonprofit organization that works to combat deforestation.   “I never imagined it would take off like this. It has taken me aback but it has been good. I have always loved the ocean. It has always been my passion.” The European Commission’s directive will oblige all 27 member states to ban the use of plates, glasses and paper packaging covered with a single-use plastic film from July 3. Opposition The measure has met with opposition from some countries like Italy, which produces large quantities of these products. Frederique Ries, the European Parliament lawmaker who led the campaign to ban single-use plastics across the bloc, recently told an Instagram conference on trashchallenge:  “There were people who were hard to convince but we brought them on board for the ban on single-use plastics.” FILE – French skipper Catherine Chabaud stands on her boat as visitors pass by at Les Sables D’Olonne harbor on France’s Atlantic coast on Nov. 2, 2000.Catherine Chabaud, the first woman to travel solo around the world by boat, is a European Parliament lawmaker who has compiled a report on how to combat single-use plastics. “We must strengthen knowledge of nano-plastics, integrate the land-sea link as 80% of pollution in the seas comes from the land and we must launch an action plan to collect litter in rivers and estuaries,” Chabaud told an Instagram conference about #trashchallenge.   Holding a masters graduate in marine conservation, Sherr was inspired by the pioneering marine biologists Jacques Cousteau and Sylvie Earle. FILE – Captain Jacques Yves Cousteau poses on the French Riviera, April 9, 1995.She said Cousteau’s book “Silent World” and Earle’s “Sea Challenge” put her on the path to trying to save the oceans. “Cousteau opened my eyes but I would say that Dr. Earle was my real inspiration,” Sherr said. Earle was the first female chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Cousteau, who died in 1997 at 87, was a former French naval officer who wrote a series of influential books and films about marine conservation, the most notable being “The Silent World.”Carolina Sevilla, founder of the conservation group 5 Minute Beach Clean-Up was also involved in the European Parliament’s #trashchallenge. She said that her country, Costa Rica, hopes to become the first in the world where cleaning up the ocean will be part of the educational curriculum for 7 to 11-year-olds.   “We really hope that Costa Rica will become the first in the world mandatory program for students about cleaning up the ocean,” she said. 
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Conservationists have praised efforts by Australian authorities to drastically reduce the amount of plastic waste and eliminate some disposable coffee cups. The New South Wales state government wants to ban many common plastic items, including straws, drinks stirrers and cutlery, as well as polystyrene cups in a bid to protect the environment and reduce waste.    Lightweight plastic shopping bags could be eliminated within six months of new laws being passed.  The reforms could be approved by lawmakers this year. Other products will be phased out at different times depending on the availability of, for example, paper and bamboo alternatives.    Officials have estimated the measures will stop about 2.7 billion items of plastic from ending up in the environment and oceans over the next 20 years.    New South Wales Environment Minister Matt Kean has warned that the world is on track to have more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050.    He told Australian television that the changes would help protect the community.  “No-one wants to be wading through plastics when they go to the beach, let alone be consuming it in their food and water, and that is what we are doing at the moment. Every day in New South Wales people are consuming over 2,000 bits of plastic. That is the equivalent of a credit card of plastic they are ingesting every week and it is largely because of the pervasiveness of single-use plastics across our environment. So, we believe that we can do something about that. Do something about it where there are alternatives available and when it does not add to cost and that is what I am looking to see,” Kean said.  In Western Australia, the state government has also announced ambitious plans to tackle waste. By the end of this year, it will ban a range of items, including single-use plastic bowls, plates, straws, polystyrene food containers and thick plastic shopping bags.  Polystyrene packaging and takeaway plastic coffee cups and their lids will be outlawed in 2022.  It is estimated that Australians throw out about a billion coffee cups each year.  The World Wildlife Fund Australia said the state governments in New South Wales and Western Australia are in a “race to the top” in waste measures and that the reforms were “a terrific outcome for the environment.”   But conservationists have warned that Tasmania and the Northern Territory were the only Australian jurisdictions “without a plan to ban problem single-use plastics.” Also, in a few weeks, it will be illegal for companies to export certain waste plastics from Australia under tough new rules. 
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