Registered pharmacist prepares a administer a dose of Moderna vaccine at the C.S. Family Pharmacy, Carol Stream, Ill., Aug. 18.

Photo: H. Rick Bamman/Zuma Press

WHO Gets It Wrong Again

The World Health Organization on Wednesday condemned the U.S. and other wealthy countries such as Israel and Germany for ordering Covid booster shots for their own citizens. There’s insufficient evidence to support the need for third doses, WHO officials said while accusing wealthy countries of behaving selfishly by giving their own citizens added protection while billions around the world remain unvaccinated.

“The divide between the haves and have nots will only grow larger if manufacturers and leaders prioritize booster shots over supply to low- and middle-income countries,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “Vaccine injustice is a shame on all humanity,” Wealthy countries are handing out “extra lifejackets to people who already have lifejackets,” and leaving others “to drown without a single lifejacket,” WHO official Dr. Mike Ryan complained.

This analogy doesn’t quite, well, hold water since the U.S. has already donated 110 million vaccines out of its supply to lower-income countries and contracted for another 500 million to donate—three times the 200 million boosters the Biden administration recently ordered for Americans. The administration has also pledged as much as $4 billion to the WHO-backed program Covax to buy vaccines for low-income countries, as a Journal editorial today explains. All told, the U.S. will end up donating more vaccines than it administers to its own citizens.

In any case, the WHO shouldn’t be lecturing the U.S. and other wealthy countries about their global public-health obligations. These are the same folks who praised China’s transparency during the early days of the pandemic and waited until mid-January to acknowledge evidence of human-to-human transmission. By that time the virus was spreading stealthily across Europe.

The WHO didn’t even declare a pandemic until the middle of March when hospitals in Northern Italy were already overflowing. Then for months it downplayed the likelihood of aerosol transmission even while real-world evidence was accumulating to the contrary. In short, the WHO has repeatedly misjudged or misrepresented scientific evidence, often for political purposes including making nice with China.

Were not for the WHO’s blunders—some more pernicious than others—wealthier countries may have been better able to prepare for the virus and prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths. But we digress.

One important fact that the WHO omits is that Covid is mainly dangerous to older folks and those with medical conditions such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease—all of which are much less prevalent in developing countries. The obesity rate in the U.S. is 36.2% versus 5% to 10% in most low-income countries in Asia and Africa.

Most lower-income countries also have much younger populations than Europe and the U.S. About 16% of the U.S. population is over age 65 versus 2.7% in Nigeria, 3.5% in Ethiopia and 6% in South Africa. Hence most lower-income countries have experienced many fewer deaths per capita than Europe and the U.S. despite their inferior health systems.

Middle-income countries in Latin America have high death rates, but vaccinations are increasing rapidly there as global supply expands, as the Journal’s Ryan Dube and Juan Forero noted on Tuesday.

Roughly two-thirds of people in Chile and Uruguay are fully vaccinated, compared with about half in the U.S. Most of the rest of Latin America is still behind the U.S. in the share of people with one or both vaccine doses, but a number of countries are closing the gap fast.
In recent weeks, Brazil, which has 30% fewer people than the U.S., has been applying nearly 1.5 million doses a day, double the 750,000 or so daily doses in the U.S., according to Our World in Data. On a per-capita basis, the U.S. is currently vaccinating at half the rate of Mexico, and a third the rate of Peru, Colombia and Argentina. In the past week, Panama vaccinated its people at six times the rate of the U.S.

It’s hard to compare the relative Covid risk of an unvaccinated 20-year-old in, say, Ethiopia with an 80-year-old nursing home resident or 50-year-old diabetic in the U.S. who got vaccinated early this winter. As studies published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday noted, vaccine efficacy against mild and moderate disease has declined from the spring, and protection against severe illness is less than 100%.

One CDC study found that protection against hospitalization is 84% to 86% for up to six months after vaccination, though most of the data collected was from before the Delta variant took over.

In Florida, hospitalizations among those over age 70 have returned to January levels even though 80% of those over age 65 are fully vaccinated and 91% have received at least one dose. Evidence from Israel suggests protection against severe disease may be waning as time passes and the Delta spreads, as we noted on Wednesday. Hospitals are reporting that most of their vaccinated patients are older or have an underlying medical condition that puts them at higher risk for severe disease.

But the unfortunate reality is that most Americans have at least one risk factor. Limiting boosters to just those Americans with certain medical conditions would prompt political lobbying and complaints about fairness, as when states designated vaccine priority groups. Yet the U.S. and other wealthy countries can’t wait for the WHO to acknowledge the evidence that boosters are needed to prevent severe disease because it may never do so.

One other important consideration ignored by the WHO is that another surge of mild or moderate illness in wealthier countries—which make up an outsize share of global GDP and trade—could significantly slow the economic recovery in lower-income countries. The World Bank last fall warned that the pandemic would push some 150 million more people into extreme poverty this year. One reason is economic disruptions in higher-income countries ripple out to poorer ones.

Poverty and its coinciding miseries will kill far more people in low-income countries this year than Covid. The quicker wealthier countries recover from the pandemic, the better off the world’s poor will be. Rather than shaming wealthy countries for protecting their citizens and economies, the WHO should be making sure vaccinations against other deadly diseases like tuberculosis and measles continue in low-income countries.

As Mr. Tedros warned last summer, “Even as countries clamour to get their hands on COVID-19 vaccines, we have gone backwards on other vaccinations, leaving children at risk from devastating but preventable diseases like measles, polio or meningitis. . .Multiple disease outbreaks would be catastrophic for communities and health systems already battling COVID-19, making it more urgent than ever to invest in childhood vaccination and ensure every child is reached.”

The White House’s Other Rescue Mission

As Americans and their trapped Afghan partners beg to be rescued, Politico reports that California Gov. Gavin Newsom has issued an SOS to the Biden Administration:

The White House has contemplated getting more invested in Newsom’s defense in recent days, and the governor said Saturday that the two camps are in the process of trading schedules to see when President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would be available to join the campaign trail.

For readers unfamiliar with California’s non-intuitive recall process, voters are asked two questions—first whether to remove the governor and second on a candidate to replace him. If a majority votes to boot Mr. Newsom, whichever candidate receives the most votes on the second question becomes the new governor.

Mail-in ballots are already being delivered to voters, and recent polls show Mr. Newsom with his head just above water. In this week’s CBS News/YouGov poll, 48% of likely and 46% of registered voters would recall the governor. Polls by Emerson College and Berkeley IGS/LA Times late last month showed similar support for the recall.

Mr. Newsom is struggling among voters across the board, but most surprisingly among young people. In the Berkeley/IGS poll, 47% of likely voters ages 18 to 39 favor Mr. Newsom’s recall. The poll determined likely voters based on their “self-reported intentions to vote, their level of interest in voting in this election, and their history of voting in past statewide elections.”

The governor still draws large support among young and self-described liberal registered voters. So he should be able to hold onto his office if he can energize his Democratic base. Working in his favor is that all registered voters will automatically receive ballots in the mail. Mr. Newsom just has to make sure Democratic voters cast and return their ballots, which must be postmarked by or on Election Day (which means Californians may not know if the recall succeeds until sometime in October).

But many Democratic-leaning voters remain lukewarm on the governor and may not care too much if he loses since Democrats will still retain control of the state Legislature and other statewide offices. Hence Mr. Newsom is trying to raise the stakes of the race.

As Politico reports:

“Don’t think for a second this isn’t also about 2022 and being able to hold the House. The consequences are profound,” Newsom said at a get-out-the-vote rally in San Jose on Monday. “A ‘no’ vote would be heard loud and clear, not only across this state, but across the country.”
. . .Leading Democrats are warning voters that the effects would go well beyond Covid-19 and political momentum. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, at a South Central Los Angeles gathering of teachers and parents to celebrate the “Biden child care tax credit,’’ called the California recall a GOP effort at “skullduggery” aimed to undo the national Democratic agenda.

. . .“If they get this state,” Newsom told supporters on a recent get-out-the-vote call, “they can weaponize it from a national meta-narrative, the impacts are profound for Chuck Schumer, for Nancy Pelosi, for President Biden.”

Mr. Newsom is right that losing the California governorship would be an enormous blow for Democrats since no state has done more to advance progressive policies. It would rightly be portrayed as a referendum on the Democratic agenda. A GOP victory in the recall could also give the party momentum heading into the Virginia governor’s race this November, which polls also show is tight. Recall how Republican victories in the 2009 New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races heralded the rise of the tea party, which helped Republicans sweep control of the House in 2010.

But it says something that Mr. Newsom isn’t campaigning on anything he has done to improve the state (in part because he hasn’t). Instead, he’s been trying to scare voters by portraying his Republican opponents as Trumpists, conspiracy theorists and kooks.

Now he’s to scare Democratic partisans by warning that a loss would energize Republicans nationwide and could undermine the radical left-wing agenda in Washington. This no doubt has progressives in Congress worried too, which explains why Elizabeth Warren recently recorded an ad for the Newsom campaign.

“We’ve seen Trump Republicans across the country attacking election results and the right to vote. Now, they’re coming to grab power in California, abusing the recall process and costing taxpayers millions,” Ms. Warren says. “Vote ‘no’ to protect California and our Democracy.”

Nancy Pelosi also knows that she won’t be able to pass the Bernie Sanders-Joe Biden $3.5 trillion spending bill if she loses more than a handful of moderate Democrats in her caucus. Mr. Newsom’s defeat might make Democrats who represent swing districts, including California’s Katie Porter and Raul Ruiz, more reluctant to support the bill.

Nine so-called moderate Democrats have warned they will vote against the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation resolution unless the Senate’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill gets voted on first. Mrs. Pelosi essentially dared them to do so on Tuesday when she announced that she plans to put the resolution up for a vote next week.

Mrs. Pelosi learned during the first two years of the Obama Administration that speed was of the essence in passing enormously consequential legislation. The more time Americans have to digest the Democrats’ agenda, the less popular it becomes. Their goal is to jam through the spending bill before Democratic moderates’ feet get so cold they freeze.

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