Six on History: the 'Rona
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It seems patently obvious. But for the first time U.S. President Joe Biden has said he supports lifting intellectual property rights on coronavirus vaccines in order to increase production and make them more accessible to developing nations. Biden yesterday threw his backing behind the waiver proposal, drafted by India and South Africa, winning praise from the World Health Organization which called it “a monumental moment.” However, the drug industry is not happy, with shares in BioNTech, Moderna and Novavax down after the news broke. The E.U. is now set to hold talks on whether to follow America’s lead.
Sources: NYT, Al Jazeera, DW
More colleges are announcing that they will require students to be vaccinated. Here are the ones we know about.
TALLAHASSEE (The Borowitz Report)—"Governor Ron DeSantis announced that Florida will lift its coronavirus restrictions in order to focus all its attention on voting restrictions.
“While the danger posed by the virus has largely dissipated, voting remains as dangerous as ever,” DeSantis said.
The Governor indicated that he was “taking a hard look” at indoor voting, which he said was responsible for “many bad outcomes,” and noted that outdoor voting, involving people placing ballots in mailboxes, could also be curbed.
“Until the danger has passed, we may have to ban voting by groups of five or more people,” he said, adding that it would “depend on who the people were.”
DeSantis said that the measures to restrict voting should be passed into law as soon as possible. He warned, “We must stop the spread of democracy.”
"Grave diggers in Iran are working around the clock, and chimneys of crematoriums in India have started melting. The two countries are combating a surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths with vaccines urgently needed.
One common factor for the noticeable vaccine shortage in many countries is the enormous hurdle set by Washington. For India, it is the US export controls on raw materials for vaccine production, while for Iran, it is the unilateral sanctions that block its vaccine purchases.
With these selfish, if not malicious, policies, the United States is losing its moral compass in the global vaccination race to save lives.
The United States said on Sunday that it had lifted restrictions on exports of vaccine supplies to help vaccine makers in India expand production. Such a belated decision came following increasing exposure of US vaccine surplus and sharp criticism over Washington's vaccine nationalism.
Since the outset of the pandemic, the United States has rushed to secure vaccine deals. According to the latest update of Bloomberg's Vaccine Tracker, the United States, with only 4.3 percent of the global population, has 22.7 percent of the world's vaccines.
While vaccines were still not available to many in the developing world, thousands of COVID-19 vaccines ended up in the garbage across the United States every day, NBC News reported in January.
Washington has actually become a major disrupter in the global supply chain of vaccines and fueled what World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called a "shocking imbalance" in the distribution of coronavirus vaccines between rich and poor countries.
Meanwhile, despite the pandemic's fallouts on people's basic human rights like life and health, the United States has continued its maximum pressure campaign against countries like Iran and Venezuela, rendering them difficulty in purchasing COVID-19 vaccines with their money in foreign accounts locked up by US sanctions.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said earlier this month that the United States blocked Iran's access to 10 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine by pressuring relevant suppliers.
Moreover, the United States has indulged itself in moves that put global vaccine cooperation as part of geopolitical competition.
Some officials in Washington, together with certain US media, have kept on throwing mud at China's and Russia's vaccine cooperation with other countries, working to raise whatever flimsy doubts on the efficacy of the vaccines produced by the two nations.
As a matter of fact, the United States is the very one that has politicized the virus, significantly undermining global solidarity and cooperation.
"It's outrageous ethically, morally, scientifically," Maria Van Kerkhove, a WHO epidemiologist, told the Washington Post on global vaccine inequities. "We have all the kindling to start fires everywhere. We're sitting on a powder keg."
Washington's announcement to help New Delhi is welcome to the world as it could signal a US return to the cooperation against COVID-19. It is hoped that the sole superpower will match words with deeds and make more positive contributions. Clock is ticking and lives are at stake. The world cannot afford any more delay in this fight."
Math Is Hard—but Vital for Understanding Vaccine Risks
Readers of CNN’s website (4/15/21) saw an alarming headline: “So Far, 5,800 Fully Vaccinated People Have Caught Covid Anyway in US, CDC Says.” Nearly 6,000 so-called “breakthrough” infections—cases of Covid-19 contracted by people after they had been vaccinated against the coronavirus that causes Covid — had been identified in the US by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and “some became seriously ill and 74 people died.”
Ars Technica (4/15/21) and CNN (4/15/21) wrote about the same report—but only Ars Technica understood the point of the report.
Three hours later, the tech news site Ars Technica (4/15/21) reported: “99.992% of Fully Vaccinated People Have Dodged Covid, CDC Data Shows.” Breakthrough infections, Ars Technica wrote, “occur at the teeny rate of less than 0.008% of fully vaccinated people.”
The two stories were, in fact, the same story. Both CNN and Ars Technica had read the same CDC analysis of its vaccination database and come to opposite conclusions: one that breakthrough infections were alarmingly high, the other that they were hearteningly low.
Scientists, when they appeared in news reports, tended toward reassurance. "This is a really good scenario, even with almost 6,000 breakthrough infections," Kent State epidemiologist Tara Smith told NBC News (4/15/21). "Most of those have been mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic. That's exactly what we were hoping for." Yet NBC went with the headline “CDC: About 5,800 'Breakthrough Infections' Reported in Fully Vaccinated People.”
The Hill (4/15/21) reported the breakthrough infection rate of just 0.008% in its story, but for a headline went with “CDC Finds Less Than 1% of Fully Vaccinated People Got Covid-19”—which, while true, still overstates the breakthrough infection rate by a factor of 100, making its headline equivalent to saying “less than 25% of the US House of Representatives is under investigation for child sex trafficking.”
A similar math problem reared its head in the other big vaccine-related story of the week: the news that the CDC and FDA were calling for a “pause” in the use of Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine as a result of some recipients having developed potentially life-threatening blood clots. In typical reporting, CBS News’ website (4/14/21) ran the headline “US Recommends ‘Pause’ for Johnson & Johnson Covid Vaccine to Review Blood Clot Cases,” referring to “adverse side effects” but noting they were “extremely rare.”
How rare, exactly? Six people out of more than 6.8 million vaccinated had developed blood clots that, if treated improperly, could lead to severe complications or even death — enough for the government agencies to call a temporary halt to use of the vaccine. (Only one vaccine recipient, a woman from Virginia, was reported to have actually died from blood clots after getting vaccinated.)
Math is hard, for journalists as well as readers, and there’s an understandable reflex for news sites to try to keep the numbers in their stories simple, to avoid making people’s eyes glaze over. Yet a number, whether 5,800 or six, doesn’t tell you much unless you know not just the numerator of a fraction—how many people are affected—but also the denominator, how many people are in the total pool being studied. If six people out of every thousand suffer side effects, that’s alarming; if six people out of every 6 million do, that’s assuredly bad for those six people, but not necessarily a significantly bigger concern than that one out of every 2.4 million Florida residents will get eaten by an alligator (National Geographic, 6/15/16).
Unfortunately, too much vaccine coverage has left readers and viewers with no way to tell whether news about infections and side effects should be cause for alarm, or just what’s to be expected in a world so large that even unlikely circumstances are likely to happen to someone, somewhere. Even attempts at reassurance sometimes missed the mark, as when Yahoo! (4/15/21) warned in a headline, “CDC Reports 5,800 Breakthrough Covid-19 Infections in People Who Were Vaccinated,” but added the conciliatory note: “Doctors Say, ‘Don’t Panic.’” (Um, if you say so?)
NPR’s All Things Considered segment (4/13/21) on the J&J story was headlined on the web “Blood Clot Concerns Put Johnson & Johnson Vaccine on Pause.” NPR science correspondent Joe Palca reported that seeing six of such cases among the 6.8 million people who received the J&J vaccine was “not very common, but more common than you would expect from people who never got the vaccine.” But even this, it turned out, wasn’t necessarily true: NYU Vaccine Center investigator and immunologist Purvi Parikh told CNBC (4/13/21) the same day that a Canadian study had found people who contract Covid are “much more likely” to develop blood clots than those who get the vaccine.
Contrary to the New York Post (4/7/21), it's not news if one of the half a billion people who have gotten a Covid vaccines dies after the shot—not even if it happens in Australia.
Sometimes all it took was a numerator of one person to spark a story warning of potential vaccine failures. The New York Post (4/7/21) ran an entire article on an 82-year-old Australian woman who died shortly after receiving a Pfizer vaccine shot, though it noted it was “unclear whether the jab played any role in her death.” (With millions of people being vaccinated every day, it would be more shocking news, statistically speaking, if no one ever died the same day they got a vaccine.)
Both the New York Times (1/12/21) and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel (4/8/21) ran long articles on a Miami Beach doctor who died of a brain hemorrhage 16 days after getting a Pfizer shot, though the only evidence linking the death to the vaccine was his wife’s Facebook post wondering about a connection.
Providing all the numbers is vital, because in a world where both policymakers and individuals are trying to decide whether vaccines are effective and safe, the only way to do so is with math. Does the benefit of having a fully vaccinated population outweigh the risk of possible side effects? But as medical experts have tried to point out in the wake of the J&J pause, people all too seldom consider numbers in context (STAT, 4/13/21):
“You have a greater chance of being in a car accident on the way to getting this vaccine than you have of having a problem from this vaccine. But that’s not how people view risk,” said Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital.
It’s certainly important to investigate the potential side effects of vaccines, and to warn people that getting vaccinated isn’t a license to blithely ignore the virus as if you’re 100% immune. But as the Covid endgame increasingly turns into a political battle over whether to get vaccinated, it’s also not enough to run an alarmist headline and consign the scientific consensus to the latter half of a story—especially as more and more readers, especially on social media, never read past the headlines.
Journalists’ job is to do the math for the rest of us, so we can better understand what are acceptable and unacceptable risks; just throwing the grabbiest numbers on a screen may be good for traffic, but it’s not likely to be good for public health."
"THE EXTREMITY OF Covid-19 vaccine apartheid cannot be overstated. As of mid-February, the United States had acquired enough vaccines for three times its total population, while in 130 countries, not a single vaccine shot had been administered. This is no accident, but the direct and long-predicted result of a vaccine production and access model tied to privatized intellectual property and entrenched medicine monopolies.
The majority of Americans want President Joe Biden to act to end this intolerable vaccine inequality. Sixty percent of U.S. voters said they wanted Biden to endorse a motion at the World Trade Organization that would waive patent barriers and other crucial intellectual property protections on Covid-19 vaccines, according to a new poll from Data for Progress and the Progressive International. This would enable a significant expansion of global production and rollout, while disrupting the extraordinary profiteering of pharmaceutical leviathans in a death-dealing pandemic.
The refusal on the part of major pharmaceutical companies and Western powers to ensure the sharing of vaccine patent and production information has been an immeasurable moral failure, not to mention a most foolish approach to a pandemic in need of a global response. The new poll also makes clear that, for Biden, blocking vaccine sharing is not even a popular position. Seventy-two percent of registered Democrats want the president to remove patent barriers to speed vaccine rollout and reduce costs for less affluent nations.
At present, WTO rules over intellectual property mean that most countries are barred from producing the leading vaccines that have been approved, including those by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, which are U.S.-produced. Last October, South Africa and India brought a proposal to the WTO for a temporary waiver that would apply to certain intellectual property on Covid-19 medical tools and technologies until global herd immunity is reached.
It garnered majority support from member states: A hundred countries support the proposal overall, and 58 governments now co-sponsor it; 375 civil society organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and Amnesty International have signed a letter in support.
The waiver was blocked, however, by a small number of wealthy nations and blocs, including the U.S., the U.K., and the EU, that chose instead to leave vaccine production in the hands of only a few pharmaceutical companies, which, through public-private partnerships, have ensured priority access to the rich countries in turn.
There are no legitimate grounds for maintaining patent barriers in this health crisis unless you’re a pharmaceutical giant making billions or, of course, a Western power invested in maintaining global power through neoliberalization, market monopolies, and racialized capitalism. The strongest advocates of intellectual property protections in medicine, Bill Gates chief among them, have offered no ethical basis for the current status quo beyond vague gestures to protecting “innovation.”
Even a self-interested approach, that sees the devastating economic possibilities of a mutating virus turning the pandemic into something endemic, should make the necessity of a patent waiver clear. The commitment to monopoly medicine is, in this sense, ideological.
THE WTO WAIVER proposal needs backing by a consensus of the the organization’s 164 members to pass. It was under President Donald Trump that the U.S. blocked the patent waiver: a move that came as no surprise for an administration of white nationalists, which proudly left the World Health Organization. A change of tack by the Biden administration, which rejoined the WHO on Day One, could go a long way in pushing other wealthy countries to follow suit.
The Data for Progress and the Progressive International poll makes clear that Biden has a popular mandate in acting against vaccine apartheid. Burcu Kilic, research director of the access to medicines program at Public Citizen and member of Progressive International’s Council, called on Biden to “listen to Americans who put him in power” and “do the right thing.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chair of the Senate Budget Committee, responded to the poll saying the U.S. should be “leading the global effort to end the coronavirus pandemic.” According to Sanders, “a temporary WTO waiver, which would enable the transfer of vaccine technologies to poorer countries, is a good way to do that.” More than 60 lawmakers have added their signature to a letter pushing Biden to save lives through a global vaccination drive.
For an entire year, public health organizations and civil society groups have en masse urged an internationalized pandemic response of open-sourced research and medical tools. Such calls for cooperation and equity were swiftly quashed, in no small part thanks to the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As Alexander Zaitchik noted in a crucial piece for The New Republic, Gates’s long history of intellectual property crusading enacted a Covid-19 vaccine response in line with a status quo “defined by a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.”
I’m not the first to highlight the colonialist regime that has shaped this unequal vaccine scenario. Sharon Lerner reported for The Intercept that countries including Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, and Turkey, which hosted Pfizer vaccine trials, have been shut out of sufficient vaccine access. The same extractive practices that have historically enriched Western powers through the direct expense and suffering of colonized peoples continue to this day with most deadly consequences — vaccine apartheid among them.
Whether Biden, no enemy to neoliberalism, will take a stand against the approach of canonized philanthropist Gates is not yet clear. It’s now undeniable that U.S. voters, alongside the broad public health community, want him to."
