Category: General

NAIROBI – Several hundred people line up every morning, starting before dawn, on a grassy area outside Nairobi’s largest hospital hoping to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Sometimes the line moves smoothly, while on other days, the staff tells them there’s nothing available and they should come back tomorrow.

Halfway around the world, at a church in Atlanta in the U.S. state of Georgia, two workers with plenty of vaccine doses waited hours Wednesday for anyone to show up, whiling away the time by listening to music from a laptop. In six hours, one person came through the door.

The dramatic contrast highlights the vast disparity around the world. In richer countries, people can often pick and choose from multiple available vaccines, walk into a site near their homes and get a shot in minutes. Pop-up clinics, such as the one in Atlanta, bring vaccines into rural areas and urban neighborhoods, but it is common for them to get very few takers.

In the developing world, supply is limited and uncertain. Just more than 3% of people across Africa have been fully vaccinated, and health officials and citizens often have little idea what will be available from one day to the next. More vaccines have been flowing in recent weeks, but the World Health Organization’s director in Africa said Thursday that the continent will get 25% fewer doses than anticipated by the end of the year, in part because of the rollout of booster shots in wealthier counties such as the United States.

Bidian Okoth said he spent more than three hours in line at a Nairobi hospital, only to be told to go home because there weren’t enough doses. But a friend who traveled to the U.S. got a shot almost immediately after his arrival there with a vaccine of his choice, “like candy,” he said.

“We’re struggling with what time in the morning we need to wake up to get the first shot. Then you hear people choosing their vaccines. That’s super, super excessive,” he said.

Okoth said his uncle died from COVID-19 in June and had given up twice on getting vaccinated because of the length of the lines, even though he was eligible because of his age. The death jolted Okoth, a health advocate, into seeking a dose for himself.

He stopped at one hospital so often on his way to work that a doctor “got tired of seeing me” and told Okoth he would call him when doses were available. Late last month, after a new donation of vaccines arrived from Britain, he got his shot.

The disparity comes as the U.S. is moving closer to offering booster shots to large segments of the population even as it struggles to persuade Americans to get vaccinated in the first place. President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered sweeping new federal vaccine requirements for as many as 100 million Americans, including private-sector employees, as the country faces the surging COVID-19 delta variant.

About 53% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, and the country is averaging about 145,000 new cases of COVID-19 a day, along with about 1,600 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Africa has had more than 7.9 million confirmed cases, including more than 200,000 deaths, and the highly infectious delta variant recently drove a surge in new cases as well.

John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters Thursday that “we have not seen enough science” to drive decisions on when to administer booster shots.

“Without that, we are gambling,” he said, and urged countries to send doses to countries facing “vaccine famine” instead.

In the U.S., vaccines are easy to find, but some people are hesitant to get them.

At the church in northwest Atlanta, a nonprofit group offered the Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer vaccines for free without an appointment from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. But site manager Riley Erickson spent much of the day waiting in an air-conditioned room full of empty chairs, though the group had reached out to neighbors and the church had advertised the location to its large congregation.

Erickson, with the disaster relief organization CORE, said the vaccination rate in the area was low and he wasn’t surprised by the small turnout. The one person who showed up was a college student.

“When you put the effort into going into areas where there’s less interest, that’s kind of the result,” he said. His takeaway, however, was that CORE needed to spend more time in the community.

Margaret Herro, CORE’s Georgia director, said the group has seen an uptick in vaccinations at its pop-up sites in recent weeks amid a COVID-19 surge fueled by the delta variant and the FDA’s full approval of the Pfizer vaccine. It also has gone to meatpacking plants and other work locations, where turnout is better, and it plans to focus more on those places, Herro said.

In Nairobi, Okoth believes there should be a global commitment to equity in the administration of vaccines so everyone has a basic level of immunity as quickly as possible.

“If everyone at least gets a first shot, I don’t think anyone will care if others get even six booster shots,” he said.

Source: Voice Of America

KAMPALA, UGANDA – At a taxi stand by a bustling market in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, traders simply cross a road or two, get a shot in the arm and rush back to their work.

Until this week, vaccination centers were based mostly in hospitals in this East African country that faced a brutal COVID-19 surge earlier this year.

Now, more than a dozen tented sites have been set up in busy areas to make it easier to get inoculated in Kampala as health authorities team up with the Red Cross to administer more than 120,000 doses that will expire at the end of September.

“All of this we could have done earlier, but we were not assured of availability of vaccines,” said Dr. Misaki Wayengera, who leads a team of scientists advising authorities on the pandemic response, speaking of vaccination spots in downtown areas. “Right now, we are receiving more vaccines and we have to deploy them as much as possible.”

In addition to the 128,000 AstraZeneca doses donated by Norway at the end of August, the United Kingdom last month donated nearly 300,000 doses. China recently donated 300,000 doses of its Sinovac vaccine, and on Monday a batch of 647,000 Moderna doses donated by the United States arrived in Uganda.

Suddenly Uganda must accelerate its vaccination drive. The country has sometimes struggled with hesitancy as some question the safety of the two-shot AstraZeneca vaccine, which is no longer in use in Norway because of concerns over unusual blood clots in a small number of people who received it.

Africa has fully vaccinated just 3.1% of its 1.3 billion people, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Public health officials across Africa have complained loudly of vaccine inequality and what they see as hoarding in some rich countries. Soon hundreds of millions of vaccine doses will be delivered to Africa through donations of excess doses by wealthy nations or purchases by the African Union.

Africa is aiming to vaccinate 60% of the continent’s population by the end of 2022, a steep target given the global demand for doses. The African Union, representing the continent’s 54 countries, has ordered 400 million Johnson & Johnson doses, but the distribution of those doses will be spread out over 12 months because there simply isn’t enough supply.

COVAX, the U.N.-backed program which aims to get vaccines to the neediest people in the world, said this week that its efforts continue “to be hampered by export bans, the prioritization of bilateral deals by manufacturers and countries, ongoing challenges in scaling up production by some key producers, and delays in filing for regulatory approval.”

Uganda, a country of more than 44 million people, has recorded more than 120,000 cases of COVID-19, including just over 3,000 deaths, according to official figures. The country has given 1.65 million shots, but only about 400,000 people have received two doses, according to Wayengera. Uganda’s target is to fully vaccinate up to 5 million of the most vulnerable, including nurses and teachers, as soon as possible.

At the Red Cross tent in downtown Kampala, demand for the jabs was high. By late afternoon only 30 of 150 doses remained, and some who arrived later were told to come back the next day.

“I came here on a sure deal, but it hasn’t happened,” said trader Sulaiman Mivule after a nurse told him he was too late for a shot that day. “I will come back tomorrow. It’s easy for me here because I work in this area.”

Asked why he was so eager to get his first shot, he said, “They are telling us that there could be a third wave. If it comes when we are very vaccinated, maybe it will not hurt us so much. Prevention is better than cure.”

Mivule and others who spoke to the AP said they didn’t want to go to vaccination sites at hospitals because of they expected to find crowds there.

Bernard Ssembatya said he had been driving by when he spotted the Red Cross’s white tent and went in for a jab on the spur of the moment. Afterward, he texted his friends about the opportunity.

“I was getting demoralized by going to health centers,” he said. “You see a lot of people there and you don’t even want to try to enter.”

Yet, despite enthusiasm among many, some still walked away without getting a shot when they were told their preferred vaccine was not yet available.

The one-shot J&J vaccine, still unavailable in Uganda, is frequently asked for, said Jacinta Twinomujuni, a nurse with the Kampala Capital City Authority who monitored the scene.

“I tell them, of course, that we don’t have it,” she said. “And they say, ‘OK, let’s wait for it.’”

Source: Voice Of America

The White House COVID-19 response team Friday used its regular briefing to support and defend the new round of vaccination mandates announced a day earlier by U.S. President Joe Biden.

Part of Biden’s plan calls for the U.S. Department of Labor to implement an emergency rule requiring all employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workers are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week. The plan would cover more than 80 million workers. Non-compliance could bring fines of as much as nearly $14,000 per violation.

The plan drew criticism from Republican lawmakers and state governors. But during the team’s virtual briefing, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients called the president’s plan an aggressive, comprehensive way to get more people vaccinated, which is the surest path out of the pandemic.

He reiterated getting vaccinated is a public health issue, not a political one.

Zients said statistics show vaccine mandates work. He said when the president announced his mandate for federal employees to be fully vaccinated in July, hundreds of businesses, colleges and universities, health care systems, and state and local governments followed his lead.

Zients pointed out that since large companies like Tyson Foods and United Airlines announced similar requirements, vaccination numbers rose substantially. Tyson, for example, saw vaccination numbers go from 45% to 72%, with nearly two months to go before its November deadline, Zients said.

Centers for Disease Control Director Rochelle Walensky said this remains a pandemic of the unvaccinated, with more than 90% of people hospitalized with COVID-19 unvaccinated, more than 10 times the number of vaccinated patients.

The team said the pace of U.S. vaccinations has picked up, with 14 million people receiving their first shots in August, four million more than in July. The CDC reports more than 73% of U.S. residents, age 12 and older, have now received at least one vaccination and 62.5% are fully vaccinated.

Source: Voice of America

WASHINGTON – Just over two months ago, on Independence Day, President Joe Biden declared that the United States was “closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus.”

Vaccines had driven down the average daily death toll from COVID-19 from more than 3,400 at the start of the year to around 400 in early July.

It didn’t last.

On Thursday, with about 1,500 Americans dying of COVID-19 each day, according to ourworldindata.org, Biden announced new measures aimed at beating back the virus again.

Public health experts applaud the stepped-up efforts, including new vaccine mandates and increased access to testing. But some say they do not go far enough. And they note that the Biden administration’s mixed messaging deserves some of the blame for the current situation.

‘Pandemic of the unvaccinated’

Despite vaccines that are safe, effective, free and widely available, one-quarter of the adult population has not yet taken its first shot.

The highly contagious delta variant of the COVID-19 coronavirus has ripped through this unprotected population like California wildfire, overwhelming hospitals in parts of the country and dampening the economic recovery that was starting to take hold.

The United States has the highest death rate and the second-lowest vaccination rate among major industrialized nations, according to ourworldindata.org.

“This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Biden said.

The United States is also unusual among industrialized nations for the level of political division over pandemic measures.

Resistance to COVID-19 restrictions that started among conservatives during the Trump administration has persisted under Biden.

Republican elected officials have pushed back against mask and vaccine mandates as unconstitutional infringements of personal liberty. The Republican governors of Texas and Florida have barred local school districts from requiring masks in classrooms.

Biden’s new plan will require teachers and federal employees to be vaccinated. It mandates that private businesses with more than 100 employees must require their workers to get the shots or be tested weekly.

Biden took aim in his speech Thursday at “elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against COVID-19.”

Those officials shot back.

“See you in court,” Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem wrote on Twitter.

Inconsistent approach

Experts say the administration has also undermined its own efforts with its inconsistent approach toward vaccine boosters.

Biden said in his speech Thursday that boosters will be available for eligible people as soon as the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authorize them.

The administration says it is responding to research showing that “breakthrough” infections among vaccinated people are more common with delta than with previous variants, and that vaccinated people can still spread the virus. There is some indication that vaccine efficacy wanes with time, but it is not yet clear how significant that is.

Experts question if most people need boosters, however.

“Breakthrough” infections may be more common with delta, but they tend to be mild. Studies from around the world show that people who received both their shots (or one shot of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine) are protected extremely well from serious illness, hospitalization and death.

While boosters might be a good idea for the elderly and others whose immune systems tend to be weaker, “I don’t think that we have data yet that indicates everyone needs a booster,” infectious disease physician Monica Gandhi at the University of California-San Francisco told VOA.

And focusing on the need for boosters undermines the effort to get people their first shots, she said.

“Saying in one breath, ‘Get vaccinated,’ and then in the second, ‘Well, they don’t actually seem to be working out well’ — I think it had a profound impact on the people who are reluctant to vaccinate,” Gandhi said.

The on-again, off-again guidance for masks hasn’t helped, either.

In May, the CDC took the unusual step of saying vaccinated people no longer had to wear masks, but unvaccinated people did.

It was a “very American” message, Gandhi said: ” ‘We’ll give you a prize if you get vaccinated.’ ”

But “no other country had differentially removed masks for one population,” she added. “Every country, when they lift masks, they just lift it for everyone.”

‘Not safe’

Overall, public health officials said the Biden administration is doing the right thing. The administration is mandating vaccines under its purview to make workplaces safe.

“It is not safe at this moment to return to a workspace where there are large numbers of unvaccinated people. It is just not,” said Brown University School of Public Health Dean Ashish Jha at a news briefing. “While I appreciate the rights of people who choose not to be vaccinated, people also have a right to be able to go to work and not get infected, not get sick and not die.”

Jha said the administration also should have required vaccination at colleges and universities and for interstate travel, areas where the federal government has jurisdiction.

“These things largely work,” he said. “People don’t love them, but they work.”

Source: Voice of America

The U.S. space agency on Friday will brief the media on the initial analysis of the first sample of a Martian rock collected by its Perseverance rover earlier this week.

NASA confirmed the rover had collected the rock, releasing a picture of the sample inside a collection tube. The rover made a first attempt to collect a sample in early August, but the rock crumbled during the drilling and coring process.

The rover moved to a different location earlier this month where the team selected a rock that held up better.

Over the past week, scientists have been using Perseverance’s instruments to analyze the sample and they are expected to reveal what they have discovered at Friday’s briefing.

Former NASA research director Scott Hubbard — now a professor at Stanford University — told the Associated Press the collection “is a huge step forward in what the science community has wanted for more than 50 years, which is to bring samples back from the Red Planet.”

He said the sample appears to be one that could be dated, a main goal of collecting such rocks, along with looking for evidence of past or present biological life. A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life.

The plan is for subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with the European Space Agency, to send spacecraft to Mars to collect Perseverance’s sealed samples from the surface and bring them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater February 18, and the rover team kicked off the science phase of its mission June 1.

Source: Voice of America

WASHINGTON – U.S. President Joe Biden will unveil a new strategy to combat the dramatic surge of COVID-19 cases across the nation during a major White House speech Thursday afternoon.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Wednesday that Biden will spell out six methods designed to encourage more Americans to get inoculated against the virus, including involvement of the private sector.

Biden’s speech comes as the U.S. is experiencing a growing number of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths sparked by the highly contagious delta variant, which has completely upended the administration’s aggressive vaccination efforts during its first months in office.

The majority of new infections have been among Americans who have not been vaccinated, including a spike in the number of young children who are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine.

The American Academy of Pediatrics said cases among children soared to 750,000 between Aug. 5 and Sept. 2.

The latest surge has pushed hospitals and health care workers across the U.S. to a breaking point, with intensive care units filled to capacity with COVID-19 patients, and stalled the nation’s economic recovery from the pandemic, a key goal of Biden’s first year in office.

Source: Voice of America

U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to call for a summit on boosting the global supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, according to U.S. news outlets.

The summit will be held during the U.N. General Assembly later this month. The Washington Post reports the topics will include coordination among world leaders to collectively tackle the health crisis and address inequities, including the slow rate of vaccinations in the developing world.

The United States and other wealthy nations have been under increasing pressure to donate their surplus of COVID-19 vaccines to poorer countries as the pandemic wreaks havoc across the globe with the emergence of new and more contagious variants of the coronavirus, which causes COVID-19.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, on Wednesday implored wealthy nations to forgo COVID-19 vaccine booster shots for the rest of the year to ensure that poorer countries have more access to the vaccine. Tedros had previously asked rich countries not to provide boosters until September.

The global vaccine sharing initiative COVAX also announced Wednesday that it expects to receive about 1.4 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of the year, as opposed to the projection of 1.9 billion doses it made in June.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Board of Education is expected to approve a measure Thursday that would mandate vaccinations against COVID-19 for all students 12 years old and older. Students would be required to receive their first dose by November 21 followed by a second dose by December 19 in order to be fully vaccinated by the next semester.

The measure would also require students participating in in-person extracurricular activities to receive both shots by the end of October.

If the measure passes, Los Angeles would be the largest school district in the U.S. to impose a mandatory vaccination policy. The district is the nation’s second-largest with just over 600,000 students.

Separately, Japan announced Thursday that it will extend its current coronavirus state of emergency for Tokyo and 18 other areas until September 30. Two prefectures will be shifted from full emergency status to more targeted restrictions.

The state of emergency was first imposed for the city and a handful of other prefectures just weeks before the start of the Tokyo Olympics as Japan struggled under the surge of new infections sparked by the delta variant and a sluggish vaccination campaign.

Japan currently has more than 1.6 million confirmed infections, including 16,600 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, with nearly 50% of its population fully vaccinated.

Source: Voice of America

The leader of the World Health Organization implored wealthy countries Wednesday to forgo COVID-19 vaccine booster shots for the rest of the year to ensure that poorer countries have more access to the vaccine.

So far, such calls have not been heeded.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “appalled” that vaccine manufacturers have said they have enough supply to provide both demands.

“I will not stay silent when companies and countries that control the global supply of vaccines think the world’s poor should be satisfied with leftovers,” he said.

“Third doses may be necessary for the most at-risk populations, where there is evidence of waning immunity,” Tedros said. “But for now, we do not want to see widespread use of boosters for healthy people.”

Tedros had previously asked rich countries not to provide boosters until September.

Source: Voice of America