Archives: Situation Reports

The Overseas Situation Report Tuesday 14 September 2021

by Mike Evans

“You can judge a man’s true character by the way he treats his fellow animals”

– Paul McCartney

In our Overseas reports we try to bring you some unusual stories, some good, some not so good regarding the pandemic from across the world. As the world starts to see a drop in new cases with a 15% reduction in the last 7 days compared to the previous week we look at two very different stories from the USA and from India around the world.

First up to Atlanta Georgia in the USA. Gorillas at Zoo Atlanta are being treated after initial tests showed they were positive for the coronavirus — and the zoo plans to vaccinate them once they recover.

A care team recently noticed telltale signs: Several members of the zoo’s western lowland gorilla population were coughing, had runny noses and showed minor changes in their appetites.

After nasal, oral and fecal samples were sent for testing, the zoo received presumptive positive results indicating that several gorillas had been infected by the virus that causes covid-19, the zoo said in a statementFriday. Zoo officials said in the statement that they were waiting for confirmation of the results after samples were sent to the National Veterinary Services Laboratories in Ames, Iowa. Rachel Davis, a spokeswoman for Zoo Atlanta, said Sunday that one confirmation had been received since the Friday statement and that the delta variant was identified.

Additional results from the lab are expected in the coming days. Davis said in an email that the zoo received presumptive positive results from all four troops of gorillas and that “the assumption is that members of all four troops have been exposed, regardless of symptoms exhibited or not exhibited.” Twenty gorillas total live in the four troops. Davis added that 18 of the 20 have exhibited varying degrees of symptoms, including sneezing, nasal discharge, coughing, decreased appetite and decreased activity.

“The teams are very closely monitoring the affected gorillas and are hopeful they will make a complete recovery,” Sam Rivera, senior director of animal health at the zoo, said in the statement. “They are receiving the best possible care, and we are prepared to provide additional supportive care should it become necessary.

The zoo is collecting samples to test its whole gorilla population and plans to regularly test the gorillas regardless of their symptoms, it said in the statement. Because the gorillas live together in proximity, it is not possible to isolate the affected population members, Rivera said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The gorillas “at risk of developing complications” from the virus are being treated with monoclonal antibodies, the zoo said. As they recover, the next step will be to vaccinate them with a vaccine developed for animals.

More animals across the country have been receiving vaccine doses, as zoos respond to and try to prevent coronavirus outbreaks among animal populations.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that the virus has been shown to infect mammals, and there have been documented reports around the world of animals, including pets and those in zoos and sanctuaries, being infected. The agency noted that most got the virus after contact with infected humans.

It’s not certain how the gorillas became sick, but the zoo said the virus may have been passed on by a fully vaccinated team member who cares for them. The team member was asymptomatic and wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) at work, the zoo said.

Meanwhile from India we report on a story about those who have had covid 19 and recovered and have received a vaccine dose.

Over the past several months, a series of studies has found that some people mount an extraordinarily powerful immune response against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19. Their bodies produce very high levels of antibodies, but they also make antibodies with great flexibility — likely capable of fighting off the coronavirus variants circulating in the world but also likely effective against variants that may emerge in the future. “One could reasonably predict that these people will be quite well protected against most — and perhaps all of — the SARS-CoV-2 variants that we are likely to see in the foreseeable future,” says Paul Bieniasz, a virologist at Rockefeller University who helped lead several of the studies.

In a study published online last month, Bieniasz and his colleagues found antibodies in these individuals that can strongly neutralize the six variants of concern tested, including delta and beta, as well as several other viruses related to SARS-CoV-2, including one in bats, two in pangolins and the one that caused the first coronavirus pandemic, SARS-CoV-1.

“This is being a bit more speculative, but I would also suspect that they would have some degree of protection against the SARS-like viruses that have yet to infect humans,” Bieniasz says. So who is capable of mounting this “superhuman” or “hybrid” immune response?

People who have had a “hybrid” exposure to the virus. Specifically, they were infected with the coronavirus in 2020 and then immunized with mRNA vaccines this year. “Those people have amazing responses to the vaccine,” says virologist Theodora Hatziioannou at Rockefeller University, who also helped lead several of the studies. “I think they are in the best position to fight the virus. The antibodies in these people’s blood can even neutralize SARS-CoV-1, the first coronavirus, which emerged 20 years ago. That virus is very, very different from SARS-CoV-2.”

In fact, these antibodies were even able to deactivate a virus engineered, on purpose, to be highly resistant to neutralization. This virus contains 20 mutations that are known to prevent SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from binding to it. Antibodies from people who were only vaccinated or who only had prior coronavirus infections were essentially useless against this mutant virus. But antibodies in people with the “hybrid immunity” could neutralize it.

These findings show how powerful the mRNA vaccines can be in people with prior exposure to SARS-CoV-2, she says. “There’s a lot of research now focused on finding a pan-coronavirus vaccine that would protect against all future variants. Our findings tell you that we already have it. “But there’s a catch, right?” she adds: You first need to be sick with COVID-19. “After natural infections, the antibodies seem to evolve and become not only more potent but also broader. They become more resistant to mutations within the [virus].”

Hatziioannou and colleagues don’t know if everyone who has had COVID-19 and then an mRNA vaccine will have such a remarkable immune response. “We’ve only studied the phenomena with a few patients because it’s extremely laborious and difficult research to do,” she says. But she suspects it’s quite common. “With every single one of the patients we studied, we saw the same thing.” The study reports data on 14 patients.

Several other studies support her hypothesis — and buttress the idea that exposure to both a coronavirus and an mRNA vaccine triggers an exceptionally powerful immune response. In one study, published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine, scientists analyzed antibodies generated by people who had been infected with the original SARS virus — SARS-CoV-1 — back in 2002 or 2003 and who then received an mRNA vaccine this year.

Remarkably, these people also produced high levels of antibodies and — it’s worth reiterating this point from a few paragraphs above — antibodies that could neutralize a whole range of variants and SARS-like viruses. Now, of course, there are so many remaining questions. For example, what if you catch COVID-19 after you’re vaccinated? Or can a person who hasn’t been infected with the coronavirus mount a “superhuman” response if the person receives a third dose of a vaccine as a booster?

Hatziioannou says she can’t answer either of those questions yet. “I’m pretty certain that a third shot will help a person’s antibodies evolve even further, and perhaps they will acquire some breadth [or flexibility], but whether they will ever manage to get the breadth that you see following natural infection, that’s unclear.”

Immunologist John Wherry, at the University of Pennsylvania, is a bit more hopeful. “In our research, we already see some of this antibody evolution happening in people who are just vaccinated,” he says, “although it probably happens faster in people who have been infected.”

In a recent study, published online in late August, Wherry and his colleagues showed that, over time, people who have had only two doses of the vaccine (and no prior infection) start to make more flexible antibodies — antibodies that can better recognize many of the variants of concern. So a third dose of the vaccine would presumably give those antibodies a boost and push the evolution of the antibodies further, Wherry says. So a person will be better equipped to fight off whatever variant the virus puts out there next.

“Based on all these findings, it looks like the immune system is eventually going to have the edge over this virus,” says Bieniasz, of Rockefeller University. “And if we’re lucky, SARS-CoV-2 will eventually fall into that category of viruses that gives us only a mild cold.”

Until Next Time, Stay Safe.

Total Cases Worldwide – 225,613,041 

Total Deaths Worldwide – 4,646,764 

Total Recovered Worldwide – 202,232,976 

Total Active Cases Worldwide – 18,733,301 (8.3 % of the total cases) 

Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 206,879,740

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ 

Information and resources:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/09/12/zoo-atlanta-gorillas-coronavirus-vaccine/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#countries

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/09/07/1033677208/

The Overseas Situation Report Friday 10 September 2021  

by Mike Evans

“The two areas that are changing… are information technology and medical technology. Those are the things that will make the world a very different place 20 years from now than it is today.”

– Bill Gates

With the news that Portugal has now vaccinated over 75% of its citizens this report is looking at the way the pandemic has made scientists look at viruses in a different way and have now been able to look at a different form of vaccine.

This is through sequencing the DNA of the virus and it was announced recently that scientists in India along with a number of other countries had successfully produced a vaccine that uses DNA as its main weapon of attack.

The Government of India has approved a new COVID-19 vaccine that uses circular strands of DNA to prime the immune system against the virus SARS-CoV-2. Researchers have welcomed news of the first DNA vaccine for people to receive approval anywhere in the world, and say many other DNA vaccines might soon be hot on its heels. It must be stressed that this approval is for emergency use only at this stage.

ZyCoV-D, which is administered into the skin without an injection, has been found to be 67% protective against symptomatic COVID-19 in clinical trials, and will probably start to be administered in India this month. Although the efficacy is not particularly high compared to that of many other COVID-19 vaccines, the fact that it is a DNA vaccine is significant, say researchers.

It is proof of the principle that DNA vaccines work and can help in controlling the pandemic, says Peter Richmond, a pediatric immunologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth. “This is a really important step forward in the fight to defeat COVID-19 globally, because it demonstrates that we have another class of vaccines that we can use.”

Close to a dozen DNA vaccines against COVID-19 are in clinical trials globally, and at least as many again are in earlier stages of development. DNA vaccines are also being developed for many other diseases.

“If DNA vaccines prove to be successful, this is really the future of vaccinology” because they are easy to manufacture, says Shahid Jameel, a virologist at Ashoka University in Sonipat, India.

The urgency of combating COVID-19 has fast-tracked the development of vaccines that use genetic technology, such as messenger RNA and DNA vaccines, says David Weiner, director of the Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

RNA vaccines were quicker to show strong immune responses in clinical trials; they have now been delivered to hundreds of millions of people around the world. But DNA vaccines have a number of benefits, because they are easy to produce and the finished products are more stable than mRNA vaccines, which typically require storage at very low temperatures.

ZyCoV-D was developed by Indian pharmaceutical firm Zydus Cadila, headquartered in Ahmedabad. On 20 August, India’s drug regulator authorized the vaccine for people aged 12 and older. The efficacy figure of 67% came from trials involving more than 28,000 participants, which saw 21 symptomatic cases of COVID-19 in the vaccinated group and 60 among people who received a placebo.

ZyCoV-D contains circular strands of DNA known as plasmids, which encode the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, together with a promoter sequence for turning the gene on. Once the plasmids enter the nuclei of cells, they are converted into mRNA, which travels to the main body of the cell, the cytoplasm, and is translated into the spike protein itself. The body’s immune system then mounts a response against the protein, and produces tailored immune cells that can clear future infections. Plasmids typically degrade within weeks to months, but the immunity remains.

Both DNA and mRNA vaccines have been under development since the 1990s, says Weiner. The challenge for DNA vaccines is that they need to make it all the way to the cell nucleus, unlike mRNA vaccines, which just need to get to the cytoplasm, says Jameel. So, for a long time, DNA vaccines struggled to induce potent immune responses in clinical trials, which is why they had been approved for use as vaccines only in animals, such as horses, until now.

To solve this problem, ZyCoV-D is deposited under the skin, as opposed to deep in muscle tissue. The area under the skin is rich in immune cells that gobble up foreign objects, such as vaccine particles, and process them. “This helps capture the DNA far more efficiently than in the muscle,” Jameel says. Unusually, the vaccine is delivered using a needle-free device pressed against the skin, which creates a fine, high-pressure stream of fluid that punctures the surface and is less painful than an injection.

But despite being more potent than previous DNA vaccines, ZyCoV-D requires a minimum of three doses to achieve its initial efficacy. This is likely to add to the logistical challenge of administering the vaccine during the current pandemic, says Jameel.

Although ZyCoV-D’s efficacy seems to be lower than the 90% or higher achieved by some mRNA vaccines, the figures are not comparable, says Jameel. The ZyCoV-D trials in India earlier this year were conducted while the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 was the dominant variant in circulation, whereas earlier mRNA vaccine trials were conducted when less transmissible variants were circulating. “The efficacy is essentially against the Delta variant, so that is pretty good,” he says.

However, it is not all good news as some researchers have criticized a lack of transparency in the approval process, because no late-stage trial results have yet been published. Zydus Cadila says the trial is still under way and it will submit the full analysis for publication shortly. The company says the first doses will start to be administered in India in September and it plans to produce up to 50 million doses by early next year.

Scientists in the US, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Canada, Thailand and Australia are all at various stages of development with the DNA vaccine although many are at the first phase so there will be a lot more testing to be done before it is available to the world.

Two of the trials have entered late-stage trials: one by Japanese company AnGes, based in Osaka; the other, which Weiner helped to develop, by Inovio Pharmaceuticals in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Inovio is injected under the skin and uses a device that hits the skin with short electric pulses to form pores in the cells that the vaccine can slip through.

More than half a dozen DNA vaccines for COVID-19 are in early-stage trials, including one by the South Korean biotech company GeneOne Life Science in Seoul, and another that Richmond is involved in, developed by the Thai firm BioNet in Bangkok. This vaccine is undergoing a phase I trial in Australia.

But Richmond expects many more DNA vaccines to emerge, targeting diseases for which there are currently no vaccines — from cytomegalovirus, which can be passed on to babies during pregnancy, to respiratory syncytial virus. DNA vaccines are also being trialled or developed for influenza, human papillomavirus, HIV and Zika.

DNA vaccines can store lots of information, which means they can encode large, complex proteins or even multiple proteins. Weiner says that gives them promise as anti-cancer vaccines, a possibility he is exploring in his own research.

If this new technology can help the world rid itself of Covid 19 then we will all be happier but as with many new developments they take time and until they are ready.

Until next time be sure to stay safe.

Total Cases Worldwide – 223,623,005 

Total Deaths Worldwide – 4,613,384 

Total Recovered Worldwide – 200,138,459 

Total Active Cases Worldwide – 18,871,162 (8.4 % of the total cases)

Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 204,751,843

Information and resources:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02385-

The Overseas Situation Report Tuesday 7 September 2021 

by Mike Evans

“The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.”  – Bertrand Russell

With the signs around the world that we may start to see the end of the pandemic or people will learn to live with it better, this report is looking at the issues surrounding flying and how those who have to work in the Aviation Industry are having to cope with a totally different set of issues.

 Working as a flight attendant previously afforded Mitra Amirzadeh the freedom to explore the world — taking her from her home in Florida to destinations including Kenya, France and Spain.

As the pandemic spread, the perks of Amirzadeh’s job diminished. Now restricted to domestic US flights, her work involves navigating not only the fear of catching Covid-19, but also the recent uptick in disruptive passengers.

“I’m dealing with a lot of babysitting, which I never counted on doing,” Amirzadeh, who works for a low-cost US airline, says “The actual children on board behave better than the grown adults do.”

This summer, unruly passenger behaviour seems to have reached new heights. In one incident, a passenger punched a Southwest flight attendant and knocked out two of their teeth. Video also circulated of a passenger getting taped to their seat after they reportedly punched and groped Frontier Airlines flight crew.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it has issued more than $1 million in fines to unruly airline passengers so far in 2021.

Many US flight attendants say the stress of the situation is taking its toll.

Susannah Carr, who works for a major US airline, says unruly incidents used to be “the exception, not the rule.” Now they’re “frequent. I come in expecting to get push back. I come in expecting to have a passenger that could potentially get violent,” she says.

Allie Malis, a flight attendant for American Airlines, says air crew are “exhausted — physically and emotionally. We’ve gone through worrying about our health and safety, worrying about our jobs — now we are worrying about our safety in a different way.”

Pre-pandemic, the issue of unruly passengers was becoming increasingly omnipresent — data from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) suggested incidents rose from 2012 to 2015, while whole conferences were dedicated to the problem.

This increase was often linked to cabins getting fuller, with increased security checks and processes adding to tension.

In 2019, Malis, who is also the government affairs representative at the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, a union representing American Airlines air crew, spoke about the decrease of personal seat space. She said her union believed it is “strongly correlated and in a large part to blame” for the rise in incidents.

Alcohol is also an often cited contributing factor — travellers drink at the airport and board the plane without crew realizing how inebriated they are. When it all kicks off at 30,000 feet, it’s too late. That said, it has always been hard to get an exact handle on whether passengers have actually become more unruly. Not every airline that’s part of IATA submits data, and not every airline records every instance of unruly behavior, while separate FAA data recorded oscillating numbers of investigated incidents between 1995 and 2019.

There have been suggestions that incidents just started to feel more ubiquitous in recent years because social media means videos of badly behaved passengers spread like wildfire.

But while FAA data might show fluctuating figures for much of the past 20 years, in 2021, incidents seem to have skyrocketed. In 2019, 146 investigations were initiated by the FAA. So far in 2021 that number is 727.

Covid-19 seems to have exacerbated an already existing issue to an unprecedented degree, at least in the US. Amirzadeh recalls the silent flights of spring 2020. People were too fearful to even look at other passengers or air crew, she says, let alone cause conflict.

By summer 2020, travel had recommenced and reports of in-flight disruptions were back. Masks — not yet mandated by the FAA, but enforced by some airlines — were becoming a sore topic among some travellers.

In recent months, unruly behaviour has reached new heights. “It just seems like every next incident is getting a little bit more extreme, things you just would have never imagined last year,” says Malis. “As a flight attendant, it’s really hard to imagine yourself being in a position that requires duct taping a passenger to their seats for the safety of everyone else on the plane, yet this is something that has happened numerous times in the last few months.”

Malis says she feels like incidents have been on a steady rise since the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. It also involved disruptive behaviour on planes and led to the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) International — which represents American flight attendants at 17 airlines — stating rioters should not be allowed on flights home.

“I think the insurrection was kind of an eye-opening experience,” Malis says. “What do you do when you have multiple incidents happening on the plane at the same time with only four crew members?” A survey by the AFA released in July of this year found that, of the 5,000 flight attendants surveyed, 85% said they’d dealt with unruly passengers in 2021.

Disruptive passengers had used sexist, racist and/or homophobic language, according to 61%, while 17% said they’d been victim of a physical attack this year.

“I thought I had seen or done or heard at all,” says Amirzadeh, who has flown for six years and previously worked in customer service.”But as I’ve learned the past 18 months, that is definitely not the case, I am seeing, hearing and doing things I never thought in my life I would ever be doing.”

Many incidents are linked with mask non-compliance, which many flight attendants who spoke out about this problem say has been an issue throughout the pandemic.

Even though it’s now FAA-mandated and federal law, the wearing of masks remains the cause of the majority of inflight issues. In a recent August press release , the FAA says it had received approximately 3,889 reports of unruly behaviour by passengers since January 1. Of those reports, 2,867 were passengers refusing to comply with the mask mandate.

“In the beginning, I would sympathize and say, ‘Hey, you know, I get it, it’s hot, I’m hot. I’m wearing it too — I need you to wear it too. Can we please work together?'” says Amirzadeh. “But here we are, it’s been a year and a half, you’re wearing them everywhere. And we’re not the only ones that are asking you to wear them — every train station, every bus, every airline…”

Carr says she thinks the problem is that mask-wearing is sometimes viewed as a political issue in the United States. “The mask issue was less about public health and it was more politicised in the beginning. And that is something we’re still dealing with today.”

Amirzadeh says fraught mask-related interactions often come as a result of passengers removing their face covering to eat or drink, and then keeping it off. It’s one of the reasons she thinks alcohol shouldn’t be served on planes currently. Not serving alcohol can be the cause of issues too — as Malis has found on board American Airlines, which continues to ban alcohol in its main cabins on board most flights.

“On some of my flights it’s caused people to get upset, because they do want to feel like they have a right to have a drink — but at the same time if you’re getting so upset because you can’t have a drink right now, that’s the exact reason we’re kind of afraid to give you one, that kind of erratic behaviour,” says Malis.

For some passengers, travel may feel more stressful and anxiety-inducing in the age of Covid. Carr suggests this — and the stresses we’ve all been under during the pandemic — are a contributing factor to the rise in incidents.

“We’ve been isolated for the last 18-plus months,” she says. “So I think some of the social graces have kind of been put on the back burner, as far as what’s acceptable in public and on an airplane.”

Malis wants passengers to realize that the stresses and anxieties they might be feeling about traveling in the age of Covid-19 are also shared by many crew, even if they seem like “a very accessible punching bag.” The ubiquity of events on social media also leads Malis to suggest there could be a “copycat factor.”

To reverse this, Amirzadeh says it’s important for people to realize that the passengers who’ve gone viral are paying the price.

Flight attendants are safety professionals trained in dealing with everything from a medical emergency to a potential terrorist incident. “We’re not here to serve you a Coke, we’re here to save your life,” is how Amirzadeh puts it.

But there’s the concern, she says, that dealing with unruly passengers could prevent crew from dealing with other issues on board.

“We are the people that are going to give you CPR, we’re the people that are going to give you the Heimlich maneuver, we are the people that are going to put out the fire. But we might miss those things if we’re too busy arguing with someone else about putting their mask on.”

Malis says dealing with unruly passengers is a team effort — if a passenger seems to have taken against a particular flight attendant, another crew member stepping in could calm them down.

Carr says she keeps tabs on mask-wearing from the moment travellers step onto the plane, and will first offer a friendly reminder. If someone continues not to comply, there are several warning steps culminating in the traveller getting handed a card stating that if they continue, they’ll be reported to the airline and could lose travel privileges.

As Amirzadeh points out, a flight attendant can’t force someone to wear a mask. “But I can let him know that if he doesn’t, then I hope that wherever we’re landing is his final destination, because his return ticket is going to be cancelled, we’re going to file a report with the FAA, and you could face fines, and other legal ramifications.”

As many countries now require mandatory use of masks this issue will only get worse and until people start to treat mask wearing on airplanes  as a “normal thing” we will see this happen more and more.

Until the next time Stay Safe.

Total Cases Worldwide – 221,721,579 

Total Deaths Worldwide – 4,585,277

Total Recovered Worldwide – 198,263,551

Total Active Cases Worldwide – 18,872,751 (8.5 % of the total cases)

Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 202,848,828

Information and resources:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Overseas Situation Report Friday 3rd September 2021

By Mike Evans

In this report as the EU trumpets the fact that 70% of its citizens are now vaccinated we look at how the world is dealing with the vaccines. There is still a large gap between the “haves and the Have Nots’ ‘ regarding vaccines and this week we see that the WHO is calling on the rich nations to donate at least 1 billion doses of vaccine to the third world countries struggling to find vaccines for their citizens.

In July 2020 the WHO set up the Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former President of Liberia, and Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, expressed deep concern over the slow pace of vaccine redistribution from high-income to low-income countries.

The two former leaders served as co-chairs of the Independent Panel and published their final report in May of this year.

“The Independent Panel report recommended that high-income countries ensure that at least one billion doses of vaccines available to them were redistributed to 92 low and middle-income countries by 1 September, and a further one billion doses by mid-2022”, they declared.

“Ensuring that all those around the world most vulnerable to the impact of the virus, including healthcare workers, older people and those with significant comorbidities, can be vaccinated quickly is a critical step towards curbing the pandemic.”

To date, the global solidarity initiative COVAX has shipped 99 million donated doses, they said.  While 92 countries have received some 89 million vaccines, this is far short of the one billion called for in the report.

“High-income countries have ordered over twice as many doses as are needed for their populations. Now is the time to show solidarity with those who have not yet been able to vaccinate their frontline health workers and most vulnerable populations,” the former leaders stated.

“Reaching the goal of redistributing one billion doses by 1 September would be a vital step in protecting the five billion people aged 15 and over who live in low- and middle-income countries. The 600 million doses which have already been pledged now need to be delivered with urgency”, they added.

Additionally, rapid action is needed to step up vaccine production in low- and middle-income countries.

“Manufacturing capacity has to be increased and knowledge and technology shared in order to scale up production quickly,” the two experts recommended. “This pandemic has shown the global risks of locating the know-how and manufacturing facilities in just a handful of countries.”

The co-chairs have also welcomed the establishment of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine technology hub in South Africa, adding that more such announcements are needed.

“Low and middle-income countries must be able to produce more of their own vaccines and thereby help increase in general the amount of vaccine available to the world”, they said.

What is COVAX? It is part of the drive by the WHO to see a greater equality of distribution of vaccines across the world. A part of this, The ACT-Accelerator was set up to contain the COVID-19 pandemic faster and more efficiently by ensuring that successful diagnostics, vaccines and treatments are shared equitably across all countries.

Key to achieving that goal is the design and implementation of a Fair Allocation Framework.

Equitable distribution is particularly important in the area of vaccines, which, if used correctly and equitably, could help to stop the acute phase of the pandemic and allow the rebuilding of our societies and economies.

Although the ACT-Accelerator will speed up development and production, initial supplies will be limited. If there is no international plan to manage vaccine distribution fairly, there will be hoarding in some places and life-threatening shortages in others. There will also be price spikes.

So WHO advises that once a vaccine(s) is shown to be safe and effective, and authorized for use, all countries receive doses in proportion to their population size, albeit initially in reduced quantities.  This will enable every country to start by immunizing the highest priority populations.

In the second phase, vaccines would continue to be deployed to all countries so that additional populations can be covered according to national priorities.

So who has contributed. The U.S. has delivered 110 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to 65 countries, from Afghanistan to Zambia, President Biden announced at the start of August 2021. The U.S. donations prove that “democracies can deliver,” Biden said. He added that the U.S. has acquired another 500 million Pfizer vaccines that will be donated to low- and middle-income countries by the end of the month, emphasizing that global vaccination is essential: “You can’t build a wall high enough to keep us safe from COVID in other countries.”

These initial U.S. donated doses are just a first step for the projected 11 billion vaccines needed to vaccinate 70% of the world’s population and bring the pandemic under control, according to the World Health Organization.

And providing doses to other countries is a quasi-Herculean task. “Sharing vaccine doses isn’t quite as easy as just putting them on a plane and calling somebody at the other end and telling them when they’ll arrive,” said Gayle Smith, the global COVID-19 response coordinator at the State Department.

There have been some delays. Biden first announced that the U.S. would distribute 80 million doses to countries in need by the end of June, only later to say the goal had simply been to “allocate” them by the end of June.

After the US, the next largest donor is the UK with 100 million pledged doses, followed by Japan, France, Germany, and China, all around the 30 million dose mark.  The top ten list of donors (by number of doses) include two middle-income countries. China (upper-middle income) has donated vaccines to the highest number of countries (our data shows 59, but other sources have suggested 80), primarily located in Africa and Asia. However, these tend to be small donations, with most donations around 200,000 doses per country and only three countries receiving more than 1 million doses. India (lower-middle income) has taken a similar approach, donating more than 11 million doses in relatively small numbers to 47 countries, with only a few countries receiving more than 1 million doses.

Looking by region, Asia is meant to receive the highest number (58 million doses), followed by Africa (20 million doses). COVAX is receiving more doses by far than any region, at 700 million doses. The US purchase of 500 million Pfizer-BioNTech doses for donation through COVAX means that the vast majority of donated doses are Pfizer-BioNTech. But after this, the second-most donated vaccine is Oxford-AstraZeneca, followed by Sinopharm-Beijing.

The EU has fallen significantly behind China and the U.S. in terms of coronavirus vaccine donations, according to an internal Council document seen by POLITICO Monday. The EU has donated just 7.9 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines — 4 percent of the total 200 million pledged by EU countries. That compares with 59.8 million doses already donated by the U.S. and 24.2 million doses donated by China. The figures come from a Council working paper dated August 2.

The document comes in the wake of comments from EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who said last Friday that the bloc’s “insufficient” vaccine shipments to Africa and Latin America risked Europe losing influence to China. “China’s expansion in Africa and Latin America should concern us and should occupy us a great deal,” he said. In clear evidence that the EU is keenly aware of the importance of vaccine diplomacy, a series of slides presented to EU ambassadors detail how China, Russia, the U.S. and the EU compare on vaccine distribution around the globe.

The document maps out purchase agreements and donations, as well noting which regions are most strategically important to the EU, with highly detailed slides on vaccines delivered to North Africa, Turkey, the Balkans and the Eastern Partnership countries. These slides include information such as where the delivery came from, which vaccines they were and what percentage of the population in these countries is vaccinated.

The EU’s international vaccine distribution is more robust in terms of exports, however, with more than 503 million vaccines sent to 51 countries, most of which are wealthier economies. The EU also cites the fact that it has pledged €3.4 billion to COVAX.

As time goes on we can but hope that these vaccines get through to these poorer countries so the world can start to say the Pandemic is Over. Until the next time Stay Safe.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/08/1098882

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-coronavirus-vaccine-donations-china-united-states/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#countries