Reports of people inoculated with U.S.-approved shots dying or requiring hospitalization due to covid are extremely rare, though exactly how long protection lasts isn’t yet clear. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases specialist, has said that booster shots will probably be necessary though the timing of such “third doses” has not been determined.
Here are some significant developments:
Analysis: The failure to forge lasting peace made the coronavirus even worse in Colombia
The use of militarized force against massive protests in Colombia has made international headlines. Despite having endured long lockdowns to combat the spread of the coronavirus, Colombians have risked infection to take to the streets in large numbers because, as countless protest signs and protesters claim, “the government is deadlier than the virus.”
A national strike began April 28, after President Iván Duque proposed a tax change that exposed deep and long-standing economic and social inequalities. The bill planned to expand the tax base through a regressive tax on necessities such as eggs, meat, milk, fish and gasoline as well as utilities like water, gas, electricity and Internet service.
Even as covid-19 and Duque’s policies have exacerbated inequality in Colombia, today’s crisis is more deeply rooted.
Pfizer to study breakthrough cases as it prepares for booster shots
A top Pfizer researcher said the company is looking at “breakthrough cases” of fully vaccinated people who later got infected by the coronavirus in an attempt to understand if, and when, booster shots need to be administered.
“We’re going to be monitoring this closely and using immunological data, clinical data, and real world data to help us think about when a booster might be needed,” David Swerdlow, Pfizer’s clinical epidemiology lead, told the Precision Medicine World Conference, according to Bloomberg Law. “We will be getting data from continued monitoring of our clinical trials to see how long immune markers last.”
Reports of people inoculated with U.S.-approved shots dying or requiring hospitalization due to covid are extremely rare, though exactly how long protection lasts isn’t yet clear. (One recent British study showed two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine provided 96 percent protection against severe disease from the delta variant.)
Between Jan. 1 and April 30, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracked 10,262 instances of breakthrough infection across 46 U.S. states and territories. Since May, the CDC has moved its focus to investigating the even smaller number of inoculated people who require hospitalization or die. (More than 144 million people have been fully vaccinated nationwide.)
“You will see breakthrough infections in any vaccination when you’re vaccinating literally tens and tens and tens of millions of people,” said Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases specialist, at a White House briefing in March.
Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla said in April that booster shots will probably be needed within 12 months of people getting fully vaccinated. Fauci has said that booster shots will probably be necessary though the timing of such “third doses” has not been determined.
Some countries that built their inoculation programs off the Sinopharm vaccine however, are already implementing booster shots amid infection spikes. Both the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have made Pfizer doses available to many people who have already received two shots of a Sinopharm vaccine, suggesting that health authorities in those countries no longer see the Chinese-developed vaccine as enough.
Analysis: How do you persuade skeptics to get vaccinated? Trust matters more than information.
How do you persuade reluctant or skeptical people to get vaccinated against a deadly pandemic — or any potentially dangerous illness? That question has long bedeviled public health officials. In 2019, just a year before the coronavirus struck, the World Health Organization declared “vaccine hesitancy,” one of the top 10 global health threats. Vaccines can’t help the world achieve global herd immunity against the coronavirus or any infectious disease if a significant number of people won’t accept the shot.
To better understand this reluctance, we undertook a recently published multicountry study — and found people who have more confidence in the WHO and who trust scientists and their country’s health-care professionals are the most likely to say yes to the injections. Many public health efforts focus on educating citizens about vaccine safety. Our work suggests it might be more important to invest in building trust.
Indonesia tightens distancing curbs as delta variant hits hard
Indonesia has imposed stricter social distancing measures as the virulent delta variant of the coronavirus wreaks havoc in Southeast Asia’s most populous country.
The governor of Jakarta, the capital, wrote on Facebook on Sunday that hospital capacity was starting to come under stress, leading national authorities to promise upgrades. The delta strain of the coronavirus, which was first detected in India, has become “more dominant” there, Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin told reporters.
The national government has also lowered capacity limits on offices to 25 percent, down from the current 50 percent, while moving to shut houses of worship and schools in high-risk areas, Bloomberg News reported. The new restrictions, which will be backed with police and military support, are in place until late June, said Airlangga Hartarto, a cabinet minister leading Indonesia’s response to the virus.
Dining in restaurants is still permitted with capacity restrictions, the Straits Times reported.
Indonesia on Sunday logged 9,868 new infections, the highest in months. Many of the new cases were detected after the Eid holiday in May, when large family gatherings were common in pre-covid times. There was also significant domestic travel in Indonesia despite curbs. Authorities don’t expect the number of new cases to meaningfully drop for at least another two weeks, Reuters reported.
The nation of some 270 million people has recorded over 1.9 million infections and nearly 53,000 covid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic. Fewer than 5 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated.
Japan considers placing Tokyo in ‘quasi-state of emergency’ for Olympics
The Japanese government is mulling putting Tokyo in a “quasi-state of emergency” during the Olympics as thousands of international athletes, coaches and media enter the country under strict restrictions.
The capital is under a state of emergency that had previously been extended, but that is likely to be rescinded once the order expires on Sunday, the Kyodo News agency reported. (Central Tokyo remains crowded despite the current restrictions and compliance to existing regulations is not universal.)
Instead, Tokyo could move into a lower state of alert that will allow hospitality establishments to serve alcohol, though operating hours would still be shortened. Fines for restaurants and bars that break regulations will also likely be lightened, Japanese media said.
The Mainichi newspaper said that officials were still deliberating whether to begin the quasi-state of emergency next week, or if restrictions should be lifted and then imposed again through the Olympics, which begin on July 23.
“We will take measures appropriately. There will be no cancellation or postponement [of the Olympics],” an unnamed government official told the newspaper.
Japan is still battling a wave of infections that began spiking in March, but cases are dipping sharply after a heavily criticized inoculation program started speeding up. This appears to have reduced concerns, voiced by many physicians, that the country could run out of critical care beds during the 2020 Games. One recent poll found that a small majority is now in favor of the Olympics going ahead as planned.
Asia’s second largest economy reported a seven-day rolling average of 1,806 new infections on June 13, down from over 6,400 in mid-May. Only about 5 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.
Separately on Wednesday, Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said the country would donate 1 million doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines to Vietnam. Japan had previously sent over 1.2 million doses of the vaccine, which it isn’t planning on using for mass domestic inoculation, to Taiwan.
How the pandemic saved Glut, an odd, beloved Maryland food co-op
On March 5, 2020, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan announced the state’s first cases of a new coronavirus. Eleven days later, I went to Glut, the worker-run food co-op in Mount Rainier, Md., where I live. The tiny store was packed — and panicky. No one was wearing a mask; officials were still declaring that masks were for health workers, and where could you have gotten one anyway? A few feet apart, breathing directly in each other’s faces, as one does in Glut’s tight confines,
I left shaken and scared. But one detail from the shopping trip boded well for my beloved store: I’d spent $188.94 — the most I’d ever dropped on a food shopping trip. In the year since, I’ve made many more such trips. As much of the economy has struggled, Glut, the grocery store that defies economic reason, has thrived — at least for now.
Federal judge accuses three senior law enforcement officials of criminal obstruction
A federal judge leveled criminal contempt charges Monday against senior federal law enforcement officials in a long-simmering standoff in South Dakota over the judge’s insistence that he needs to know whether deputies guarding his courtroom have been vaccinated against the coronavirus.
U.S. District Judge Charles Kornmann, who sits in Aberdeen, tore into the U.S. Marshals Service for nearly an hour over their reaction to his decision at a hearing last month to question the deputy marshal in attendance about whether she had been vaccinated.
The deputy marshal, according to the judge, refused to answer the question, at which point he ordered her out of his courtroom. The marshals, in turn, took three of the defendants scheduled for hearings that day out of the courthouse. That infuriated the judge, who describes that act as a “kidnapping” that obstructed the work of the court.
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