The Covid-19 wave is brewing in the European Union, and new forms of Omicron are circulating in Italy, according to a White House adviser
By late February 2021, Mosley was able to use his political contacts to alert the Biden administration to his clinic’s lack of vaccines. His plea for help arrived when White House aides, then in their first weeks in office, were looking for ways to narrow the racial gap in vaccinations. The natural social history of diseases is that they tend to favor inequality unless you try and change it, according to a Biden administration adviser.
The Trump administration seemed to want to leave it up to states to fight those inequalities. President Biden made closing the gaps a priority. The White House chief of staff told me that equity was the core of the Covid response.
A new Covid-19 wave appears to be brewing in Europe as cooler weather arrives, with public health experts warning that vaccine fatigue and confusion over types of shots available will likely limit booster uptake.
Omicron subvariants BA.4/5 that dominated this summer are still behind the majority of infections, but newer Omicron subvariants are gaining ground. Hundreds of new forms of Omicron are being tracked by scientists, World Health Organization (WHO) officials said this week.
The WHO data showed that 1.5 million cases in the European Union were reported last week, up 8% from the prior week, despite a dramatic fall in testing. Globally, case numbers continue to decline.
In the week ending October 4, Covid-19 hospital admissions with symptoms jumped nearly 32% in Italy, while intensive care admissions rose about 21%, compared to the week before, according to data compiled by independent scientific foundation Gimbe.
Omicron-adapted vaccinations have not been approved in the EU since September, but they are likely to increase uptake in the coming months
Omicron-adapted vaccines were launched in Europe in September, with two types of shots that are specific to the BA.1 as well as the BA.4/5 subvariants. The shots have not been approved for use in Britain.
The latest boosters have only been endorsed for a small group of people, including the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. Complicating matters further is the “choice” of vaccine as a booster, which will likely add to confusion, public health experts said.
“For those who may be less concerned about their risk, the messaging that it is all over coupled with the lack of any major publicity campaign is likely to reduce uptake,” said Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “So on balance I fear that uptake will be quite a bit lower.”
A high proportion of the population may have had a Covid episode in recent months, according to a professor in pharmaceutical medicine.
However, weekly vaccine doses administered in the EU were only between 1 million and 1.4 million during September, compared with 6-10 million per week during the year-earlier period, ECDC data showed.
“I’ve almost had to remind people about influenza,” Schaffner said. “We’ve had two quite curtailed, very low influenza years. Everyone has been focused on Covid, so they want to put it behind them and move on with their lives.
Italy, soon to be replaced after an election, has a science foundation that said the government was not prepared for winter and had blocked a publication on the management of the swine flu.
British officials last week warned that a return of flu and a resurgence in Covid-19 could cause additional strain on the already stretched National Health Service.
The American Pandemic Vaccine Crisis: How Much Vaccination Has Helped? A Computer Model of Covid-19 Disease Transmission in the United States
First, a programming note: This is my last newsletter before starting a book leave. I’ll be back in late January. Until then, other Times journalists will be writing The Morning, and I look forward to reading their work along with all of you.
Hundreds of deaths each day in the U.S. are likely due to Paxlovid and other drugs not being offered to the people who would benefit the most.
People have become accustomed to bad flu seasons for the elderly. So this is kind of just the same, with a few other viruses around. There’s a sense that this is what we’re going to expect and this is what we have to live with,” said Dr. Jesse Hackell, a pediatrician who co-authored a clinical report about countering vaccine hesitancy in 2016.
One answer is that we don’t like seeing the deaths because they’re a sort of background noise or faded wallpaper. Covid-19 is the third leading cause of death in the country, at a rapid pace of around 100,000 per year, making it important for us to understand who is dying and why. It is a familiar pattern that we don’t track the ups and downs of cancer or heart disease.
Throughout the last few years, the country has also struggled to consider individual risk and social risk separately. In the first year of the pandemic, we seemed to build our sense of individual risk backward from the social need to limit spread — underemphasizing some of the differential threat and focusing instead on universal measures like social distancing and mask wearing. The arrival of vaccines led us to build a collective picture of social risk in the opposite way from an individual basis.
The US is nearing the second anniversary of its first Covid-19 vaccinations, and although the coronavirus is still causing thousands of illnesses and deaths, the vaccines have made living with the virus more manageable.
To determine exactly how much the shots have helped, researchers from the Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health created a computer model of disease transmission that incorporated demographic information, people’s risk factors, the dynamics of infection and general information about vaccination.
The study authors say that the savings could be higher if you factor in long Covid cases that were likely prevented by vaccines.
“Given the emergency of highly transmissible variants and immune-evading variants like Omicron, it is a remarkable success and an extraordinary achievement,” said Galvani, founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis.
“Don’t wait. If you wait, you put yourself at risk,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said Friday at an AARP event. “We’re entering the colder months of the late fall and the early winter. We are all going to have a lot of friends and family over for the holidays. Great if you’re up to date. If you’re not, get a vaccine now.
Anthony Fauci: a doctor-scientist who has lived through the HIV pandemic and with whom we know he’s been attacked
There was a surge in the number of residents living in areas that meet the CDC criteria for a high Covid-19 community level, including Los Angeles County and New York City, but not as much as before. The CDC recommends that you wear a mask indoors.
Anthony Fauci will be stepping down as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) after more than 35 years in the post and 54 years with the US National Institutes of Health. He has led the institute under seven US presidents, overseeing its research and response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as well as the COVID-19 Pandemic. During the H1N1, the doctor-scientist became a household name and was a trusted source of advice, but he was also a target of ridicule, as he was seen to be overlycautious by President Trump. Musk, who took over the social-media platform in October, attacked him on 11 December. Fauci spoke to Nature about Musk’s comments, the pandemic and his own legacy.
One of the most important is in the area of HIV. In 1981, when we first became aware of the cases of HIV, [it was] a mysterious disease of unknown etiology that was killing virtually everybody who was infected. It was one of the darkest periods of my or anybody’s professional career in infectious diseases. We went from not knowing what was killing the young gay men to getting a test to find out if they had the HIV and, within a few years, an entire series of drugs, which when used together, have changed the lives of people with HIV. Our methods for prevention, such as pre-exposure prophylaxis and treating people who are infectious, bring the level of the virus to below detected levels so they don’t transmit it to anyone else.
One of the holy grails of infectious-disease research is a safe and effective vaccine for HIV. We’ve made spectacular advances in the development of therapies, both for treatment and prevention of disease. But the one thing that’s eluded us up to now has been a safe and effective vaccine. So that’s one of the things we look forward to. The other is the possibility, although it’s a stretch, in some respects, to have a cure for HIV, where you can have durable suppression or elimination and eradication of virus in the absence of any further therapy. That is an aspiration goal, but we have not reached that point yet.
Yes, we do. You do it just by doing it. It’s not that difficult to incorporate a discipline of social sciences into the discipline of the hard sciences of developing vaccines. In our country only 32% of the total population have the primary vaccine for COVID. Of those, half received a single boost. Despite the fact that there is aneffective BA.4/5 bivalent updated booster, only a fraction of the eligible population has received it. That is very disturbing, and almost embarrassing for us that we have that low an enthusiasm about getting a life-saving vaccine.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04432-7
Changing the global public-health effort after COVID-19: the case of the United States, the Israel, South Africa as an example
Another aspect that has been brought to the fore by COVID-19 is the importance of mental health, and paying attention to the stresses that [the pandemic] has put on society: not only on health-care workers, doctors and nurses, but also on the general population, including children. [Their] growth and development has been [shaped] not only by missing in-person school, but also by the stress of losing grandparents and parents, and seeing the disruption of the normal flow of their childhood. All of that has had a major negative impact on mental health.
It is impossible to answer that. The global public-health effort could be affected by countries or groups that are not transparent. And I would hope that all the countries of the world come to a realization that we’ve got to be completely cooperative, collaborative and transparent in everything we do, because there’s no such thing as a pandemic, particularly of an infectious disease spread by the respiratory route, that’s going to stay in one country. We saw that very painfully with how COVID spread throughout the world and has already resulted in close to seven million deaths, and that’s probably a gross underestimate.
It’s very difficult to give a fair [answer], because when you’re dealing with a virus as formidable as this, you are going to get deaths. The United States could have done better. The one success story has been the rapid development and deployment of vaccines. The public-health response has not been as successful. Take this country as an example. Over the decades, we have let our public-health system atrophy Not getting the information accessible in real time and not keeping the equipment up to date are some of the things that have been done. We’ve had to go to other countries to get real-time information: the UK, Israel, South Africa. In the system of reporting, states are not required to report to the CDC, but the CDC requires states to participate in the response. It really has to change.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04432-7
The Power of Public Service: The Case Against Hateful Social Lobbyists in the Context of the Global Planck Scale
I don’t pay attention to that, Max, and I don’t feel I need to respond. I don’t tweet. I don’t have a way to keep up with what’s happening. I am not worried about a lot of that stuff because it is a cesspool of misinformation.
It is at risk. Federal agents are with me all the time. That stirs up a lot of hate in people who have no idea why they’re hating — they’re hating because somebody like that is tweeting about it.
I would encourage them not to be deterred, because the satisfaction and the degree of contribution you can make to society by getting into public service and public health is immeasurable. It’s really extraordinary. All of the bad stuff is overcome by it. We are having attacks on public health officials. The accomplishments you can achieve in the field are great. It supersedes everything else.
Vaccine Choices in Pediatric Nurses: Implications for Covid-19 Vaccination Trends, the CDC, and Physicians’ Offices
The number of vaccines given in pharmacy this season is more than double last year, and the CDC data shows that adults are choosing to get their flu shots from a pharmacy than from doctors’ offices. It’s a sign that there are more opportunities to reach a broader group of otherwise healthy adults who are less likely to have a primary care provider, Tan said.
Trying to persuade people to do something new can add to the hesitancy that’s already become so pervasive and make them less likely to come in at all. People are more likely to accept a flu vaccine at an appointment than a booster at a doctor’s office.
There is a saying that says familiarity breeds contempt. He said that familiarity did breed a certain nonchalance, but that perhaps that was a bit strong.
People have to choose whether to get the flu vaccine each year – and more recently, they have to make decisions about Covid-19 vaccine updates. Each new decision opens the door for misinformation or disinformation to seep into the process.
But that double threat didn’t materialize. Flu seasons have been uncharacteristically mild for the past two years, and people have let their guard down, experts say.
It might be different if the vaccine was really effective and it wasn’t repeated. We have to compare it to Covid and flu vaccines, which has less efficacy, and when there is a lot of controversy going on, I think that spills over.
I think it’s a moral injury and fatigue on the part of providers. We’re not pushing it as hard,” said Hackell, who is also chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Practice and Ambulatory Medicine. “It gets very difficult to keep having these unproductive conversations over and over again. And there’s so much more respiratory illness now that I don’t know that the time is there to have these long discussions when your office is packed with sick kids.”
Uptake for the updated Covid-19 booster has also been lackluster: Fewer than 1 in 7 eligible people have gotten one since it was authorized in the fall, according to CDC data.
It is possible to link the two shots, but there is no evidence that this is the best way of increasing coverage rates.
Tan, a former liaison to the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee for the American Medical Association, said that it is rare for adults to be given multiple vaccine at the same time.
“Some confidence is given by direct interaction with a health-care provider – in this case, the pharmacist or the physician or the clinician – who is able to reassure the patient that it’s safe,” Tan said. The patient ends up getting the vaccine when the provider tells them about it in a personal conversation. It is testimony to our health-care providers.
The message could be sticking. Data shared with CNN shows that co-administration of the flu and Covid-19 vaccine is higher at Walgreens locations than it was last year.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/health/flu-vaccine-fatigue/index.html
The Uptick: Towards a Better World for Weaker Couplings and Proton Decays. A Brief Introduction
“At least we’ve got the uptick now, as opposed to this continuous decline that we were seeing four weeks ago,” he said. “But while I’m sounding positive, I want to remind us all that we need to be better than we currently are.”