Vaccine
Biden to rush vaccinators to Michigan as gov urges limits
Washington will rush federal resources to support vaccinations, testing and treatments, but not vaccines, to Michigan in an effort to control the state’s worst-in-the-nation COVID-19 outbreak, the White House said Friday.
The announcement came as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer strongly recommended, but did not order, a two-week pause on face-to-face high school instruction, indoor restaurant dining and youth sports. She cited more contagious coronavirus variants and pandemic fatigue as factors in the surge, which has led some hospitals to postpone non-emergency procedures.
Statewide hospitalizations have quadrupled in a month and are nearing peak levels from last spring and fall.
“Policy alone won’t change the tide. We need everyone to step up and to take personal responsibility,” Whitmer said Friday, while not ruling out future restrictions. Michigan’s seven-day case rate was 506 per 100,000 people, well above second-worst New Jersey, with 314 per 100,000 residents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
President Joe Biden outlined the federal actions late Thursday in a call with Whitmer to discuss the dire situation in the state, according to senior administration officials. The response will not include a “surge” of vaccine doses, a move Whitmer has advocated and which is backed by Michigan legislators and members of Congress.
Instead, Biden talked about how the federal government was planning to help Michigan better utilize doses already allocated to the state, as well as to increase testing capacity and provide more medications used to treat the sick.
Whitmer, a Democrat, confirmed that she asked Biden on the call to send more vaccine doses to Michigan, particularly the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot.
“I made the case for a surge strategy,” she said. “At this point, that’s not being deployed, but I am not giving up.”
“Today it’s Michigan and the Midwest,” she added. “Tomorrow, it could be another section of our country. I really believe that the most important thing we can do is put our efforts into squelching where the hot spots are.”
Doses are allocated to states proportionally by population, but Whitmer has called for extra doses to be shifted to states, like hers, that are experiencing a sharp rise in cases. The Biden administration isn’t ready to make such changes.
“We’re going to stick with the allocation system of allocating by state adult population,” said White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients, calling it “the fair and equitable way” to distribute vaccines. He said the administration was looking to help Michigan administer more of its vaccines efficiently.
When Whitmer began calling for more doses from Washington, the state had not maxed out its orders for vaccines from the federal government, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the situation.
Gen. Gustave Perna, the top federal official overseeing vaccine distribution, raised the issue of gaps between states’ allotments and their orders on Tuesday in a White House call with the nation’s governors. On Thursday, Biden administration officials huddled directly with the Michigan health department to discuss the state’s ordering strategy and ensure that it uses its entire allotment.
“We actually met with the White House team yesterday and walked through our entire ordering strategy, and when we ordered what and when,” Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, a top state health official, said Friday. “It’s very clear. They agreed with us that we are ordering all of the vaccines that are available to us.”
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Federal officials said providing more doses would not be as immediately effective in curbing Michigan’s virus spike as increasing testing, restoring measures like mask wearing, and foregoing high-risk activities. That’s because vaccines take at least two weeks to begin providing immunity.
Biden told Whitmer that his administration stands ready to send an additional 160 Federal Emergency Management Agency and CDC personnel to Michigan to assist in vaccinations, on top of the 230 federal personnel already deployed to the state to support pandemic response operations.
He’s also directing the administration to prioritize the distribution of doses through federal channels, like the retail pharmacy program and community health centers, to areas of the state Whitmer identifies.
“We are at war with this virus, which requires leaders from across the country to work together,” said White House spokesperson Chris Meagher. “We’re in close contact with Gov. Whitmer, who is working hard to keep Michigan safe, and working in close coordination through a range of options that can help stop the spread of the virus.”
Michigan ranked 35th among states in its vaccination rate. About 40% of Michigan residents ages 16 and older have gotten at least one vaccine dose.
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The governor’s recommended high school closure drew mixed reaction in education circles. Her administration closed high schools for a month during the state’s second surge late last fall.
“Research has shown schools can be safe places for in-person learning, so long as community spread is under control — but with higher risk in our communities comes higher risk in classrooms,” said Michigan Education Association President Paula Herbart, whose union urged a similar two-week suspension of in-person learning at elementary and middle schools and colleges.
Restaurants, meanwhile, questioned Whitmer’s recommendation not to eat inside but welcomed the call for more vaccines.
“We trust our operators to continue to provide a safe environment indoors or out in the coming weeks and we trust Michiganders to do their part to act responsibly and respectfully to help us all achieve that outcome,” said Justin Winslow, president and CEO of the Michigan Restaurant & Lodging Association.
Bangladesh far away from herd immunity; only massive vaccination can help: Experts
Achieving herd immunity through a massive vaccination drive can be the best option for Bangladesh to get rid of the deadly Coronavirus as all the steps, including the lockdown, have failed to slow down its upsurge in the country, experts said.
Though many people are believed to have developed antibodies through infections, Bangladesh is not on its way to achieving herd immunity as Covid’s new variants like South African one can dodge people’s that type of immune protection, according to the experts.
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They think the government should focus mainly on collecting at least 25 crore doses of the vaccine from different sources to attain herd immunity.
They also said though some studies have raised questions about the efficacy of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine against the South African variant, most studies suggest it can at least reduce the mortality and morbidity rates.
Herd immunity is a concept based on the body's immune resistance to the spread of a deadly disease or virus and it can be attained in two ways -- naturally or through infections of the majority population and artificially or through vaccinating at least 70% of the population of a country.
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Far away from herd immunity
Talking to UNB, Prof Muzaherul Huq, a former adviser to WHO South-East Asia region, said Bangladesh is not moving towards attaining herd immunity for the lack of a strong vaccination drive.
“Bangladesh is far away from achieving herd immunity as only around 55 lakh people have so far given the first dose of Covid vaccine. The official figure about the virus cases is only 6,73,594. We don’t know how many people here have the antibody. So, we’ve an option to vaccinate our majority people for attaining herd immunity,” he observed.
Also read: Is Bangladesh ready to distribute a Covid-19 vaccine?
Biden makes all adults eligible for a vaccine on April 19
President Joe Biden said he’s bumping up his deadline by two weeks for states to make all adults in the U.S. eligible for coronavirus vaccines. But even as he expressed optimism about the pace of vaccinations, he warned Americans that the nation is not yet out of the woods when it comes to the pandemic.
“Let me be deadly earnest with you: We aren’t at the finish line. We still have a lot of work to do. We’re still in a life and death race against this virus,” Biden said Tuesday in remarks at the White House.
The president warned that “ new variants of the virus are spreading and they’re moving quickly. Cases are going back up, hospitalizations are no longer declining.” He added that ”the pandemic remains dangerous,” and encouraged Americans to continue to wash their hands, socially distance and wear masks.
Biden added that while his administration is on schedule to meet his new goal of distributing 200 million doses of the vaccine during his first 100 days, it will still take time for enough Americans to get vaccinated to slow the spread of the virus.
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But he expressed hope that his Tuesday announcement, that every adult will be eligible by April 19 to sign up and get in a virtual line to be vaccinated, will help expand access and distribution of the vaccine. Some states already had begun moving up their deadlines from the original May 1 goal.
“No more confusing rules. No more confusing restrictions,” Biden said.
Biden made the announcement after visiting a COVID-19 vaccination site at Immanuel Chapel at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria. During his visit, he thanked everyone for administering the shots and for showing up to receive them.
“That’s the way to beat this,” Biden said. “Get the vaccination when you can.”
The president also said no one should fear mutations of the coronavirus that are showing up in the U.S. after being discovered in other countries. He acknowledged that the new strains are more virulent and more dangerous, but said “the vaccines work on all of them.”
Biden also announced that 150 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been shot into arms since his inauguration on Jan. 20. That puts the president well on track to meet his new goal of 200 million shots administered by his 100th day in office on April 30.
Biden’s original goal had been 100 million shots by the end of his first 100 days, but that number was reached in March.
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Still, he acknowledged Tuesday that his administration fell short of its goal to deliver at least one shot to every teacher, school staff member and childcare worker during the month of March, to try to accelerate school reopenings. Biden announced the target early last month and directed federal resources toward achieving it, but said Tuesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that about 80% of teachers, school staff and childcare workers had received a shot.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, also spent the day Tuesday focused on promoting the COVID-19 vaccine, each touring a vaccination center, Harris in Chicago and Emhoff in Yakima, Washington.
Harris praised the workers and those receiving their vaccine at a site set up at a local union hall, and spoke of spring as “a moment where we feel a sense of renewal.”
“We can see a light at the end of the tunnel,” she said.
Some states are making plans to ease their health restrictions, even as the country is facing a potential new surge in virus cases.
On Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, warned that the country is in a “critical time” because “we could just as easily swing up into a surge.”
“That would be a setback for public health, but that would be a psychological setback, too,” he said during an interview with the National Press Club. He noted that Americans are experiencing “COVID-19 fatigue” after more than a year of lockdowns and restrictions to public life aimed at slowing the spread of the virus.
Biden and many of his advisers have warned against reopening the economy too quickly and easing mask mandates, at the risk of driving a fresh surge in virus cases.
“We just don’t want to have to go back to really shutting things down. That would be terrible,” Fauci said.
But Biden’s announcement of the April 19 deadline was aimed at injecting optimism into a public that’s grown weary of the restrictions, and it comes as a flood of vaccine is being sent to states this week.
Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus coordinator, told governors Tuesday during a weekly conference call that more than 28 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines will be delivered to states this week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced at her daily briefing.
That allocation brings the total amount of vaccine distributed over the past three weeks to more than 90 million doses, Psaki said.
At least a dozen states opened eligibility to anyone 16 and older on Monday alone, while New Jersey and Oregon announced this week that all residents 16 and older will become eligible on April 19.
The president had announced just last week that 90% of adults would be eligible for one of three approved COVID-19 vaccines by April 19, in addition to having a vaccination site within 5 miles of their home.
But eligibility isn’t the same as actually being vaccinated. Being eligible means people can sign up to reserve their place in a virtual line until they can schedule an appointment.
“That doesn’t mean they will get it that day,” Psaki said, speaking of a vaccine shot. “It means they can join the line that day if they have not already done that beforehand.”
Seniors still waiting to be vaccinated should seek appointments quickly “because the lines are going to become longer” after April 19, Psaki said. “There are going to be more people waiting.”
The White House said Monday that nearly 1 in 3 Americans and over 40% of adults have received at least one shot, and nearly 1 in 4 adults is fully vaccinated. Seventy-five percent of people older than 65 have now received at least one shot, and more than 55% of them are fully vaccinated.
Two of the three vaccines requires two doses administered several weeks apart. The third vaccine requires just one shot.
Dutch temporarily halt AstraZeneca shots for under-60s
The Dutch government said Friday it is temporarily halting AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccinations for people under 60 following reports of very small number of people suffering unusual blood clots after receiving the shot.
The Dutch decision comes three days after authorities in Germany also stopped using the AstraZeneca’s vaccine in the under-60s, citing fresh concerns over unusual blood clots reported in a tiny number of those who received the shots.
Earlier Friday, a Dutch organization that monitors vaccine side effects said it had received five reports of blood clots with low blood plate counts following vaccinations. All the cases occurred between seven and 10 days after the vaccinations and all the people affected were women aged between 25 and 65 years.
The organization said in the period when the five cases were reported, some 400,000 people were vaccinated in the Netherlands with the AstraZeneca shot.
Health Minister Hugo de Jonge says the temporary halt is a precautionary measure.
“I think it is very important that the Dutch reports are also properly investigated,” De Jonge said. “We must err on the side of caution.”
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The news is another setback for the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is critical to Europe’s immunization campaign and a linchpin in the global strategy to get shots to poorer countries, for it is cheaper and easier to use than rival vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. It comes two weeks after the EU drug regulator said the vaccine does not increase the overall incidence of blood clots following a similar scare.
The European Medicines Agency said at the time that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks, but it could not rule out a link between the shot and some unusual kinds of clots, and recommended adding a warning about possible rare side effects.
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Most European Union countries, including Germany, resumed using the AstraZeneca vaccine on March 19.
De Jonge said the Dutch pause comes ahead of an update next week from the EU medicines agency on the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Trash scavengers who help keep cities clean plea for vaccine
The scavengers wait patiently for a dump truck to tip the trash on the summit of the landfill outside New Delhi. Armed with plastic bags, they plunge their bare hands into the garbage and start sorting it.
Every day, more than 2,300 tons of garbage is dumped at the landfill at Bhalswa that covers an area bigger than 50 football fields, with a pile taller than a 17-story building. And every day, thousands of these informal workers climb the precarious slopes to pick through what can be salvaged.
They are among the estimated 20 million people around the world — in rich nations and poor — who are pivotal in keeping cities clean, alongside paid sanitation employees. But unlike those municipal workers, they usually are not eligible for the coronavirus vaccine and are finding it hard to get the shots.
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The pandemic has amplified the risks that these informal workers face. Few have their own protective gear or even clean water to wash their hands, said Chitra Mukherjee of Chintan, a nonprofit environmental research group in New Delhi.
“If they are not vaccinated, then the cities will suffer,” Mukherjee said.
Manuwara Begun, 46, lives in a cardboard hut behind a five-star hotel in the heart of New Delhi and feels the inequity keenly. Chintan estimates that each year, those like her save the local government over $50 million and eliminate over 900,000 tons of carbon dioxide by diverting waste away from landfills.
Still, they are they not considered “essential workers” and thus are ineligible for vaccinations.
Begun has started an online petition pleading for vaccines and asking, “Are we not human?”
Sanitation workers employed by local governments in South Africa and Zimbabwe are likely to be in line for the COVID-19 vaccine after health workers, unlike those who sort through the trash. At the Dandora landfill in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi, some of the scavengers who are not eligible for a shot wear medical gear discarded by hospitals and health clinics, saying it especially protects them from the weather during the rainy season.
There is no doubt that these people provide an essential service, says Louise Guibrunet, a researcher at National Autonomous University of Mexico who has studied the issue.
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In Mexico, scavengers help municipal workers on garbage trucks and often collect trash from neighborhoods not served by authorities. The work is dangerous, and injuries are common, so governments have an incentive to not recognize them or provide benefits like health care, she said.
They often are already poor, moving to unfamiliar cities to eke out a living by sorting garbage, says Robin Jeffrey, a professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. That many of these workers in India belong to poor Muslim or Dalit communities, who once were known as “untouchables” at the bottom of the country's caste system, adds a layer of prejudice.
“The vaccine is just another, and very dramatic, example of an exclusion that has prevailed before COVID-19 came on the horizon,” said Jeffrey, who co-authored a book on waste in India in 2018.
India said it will give vaccines to everyone over 45 starting April 1. At private hospitals, each shot is sold for 250 rupees ($3.45), but they are free at government hospitals.
Because the pandemic sent the price of oil crashing, it became cheaper to make new plastic than to recycle it. In many countries, closed borders brought recycling markets to a halt, lowering demand for reused materials that the workers collect.
In New Delhi, a pound of plastic bottles sells for the equivalent of 11 U.S. cents, half of what it brought before the pandemic. Sahra Bano, 37, who lives near the Bhalswa landfill and sells what she can scavenge, says she used to earn about 400 rupees ($5) per day. Now, getting even half that is difficult.
Toxic runoff from the landfill infiltrates the groundwater, so she must spend 40 rupees (5 cents) per day on bottled water; the rest of what she earns goes for food. To earn enough to get one shot of the vaccine, she said she would have to collect and sell an additional 31 pounds of plastic bottles.
“We are struggling to feed our family. How can we buy vaccines?” she asks.
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To get the free vaccine from an overburdened public hospital, she would have to wait there for days, and each day away from work is one without food on the table. Moreover, the stigma associated with waste workers in India means they are often turned away from such facilities.
“They don’t treat us well,” Bano says.
Any illness means visiting a drugstore, not a doctor, for medicine.
If they’re lucky, the person recovers, she says, adding: “If not, what can we do?”
Covid-19: Bangladesh reports highest daily cases in 9 months
Bangladesh on Friday reported its highest daily coronavirus cases since July last year.
The health authorities confirmed 3,737 cases in the last 24 hours, highest since July 2 last year when the country reported 4,019 cases.
On Friday, the daily infection rate rose to 13.69% from 13.26% on Thursday.
Meanwhile, 33 deaths reported today pushed the country’s tally to 8,830. Twenty-six of the deaths were reported from Dhaka, six from Chattogram and one from Rajshahi.
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The death rate is currently 1.5 percent, the Directorate General of Health Services said in a handout.
So far, the government has confirmed 588,132 cases but 531,951 (90.45%) of them have recovered, including 2,057 new recoveries.
The country has so far tested 4,542,030 samples – 27,299 in the last 24 hours.
Bangladesh reported its first coronavirus cases on March 8 last year and the first death on the 18th of that month.
The country launched a countrywide vaccination drive on Feb 7. As the daily infection rate rose, the government extended the ongoing shutdown of educational institutions and announced to reopen them in May.
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Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has tested positive for the coronavirus two days after he received his first vaccine dose, officials announced Saturday.
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The Directorate General of Health Services in a statement Monday said there is no risk of testing Covid-19 positive as a result of taking the Covid-19 vaccine shot.
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