The Overseas Situation Report Friday 26 October 2021
by Mike Evans
“We can no longer rely on these big superpowers to come in and save us.”
– Emile Hendricks, 22 years old, Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines
As of this past weekend the world total of recorded cases of Covid 19 reached 244.5 million and is very close to 5 million deaths. In this report we look at some of the covid stories from around the world and what nations are doing to combat the pandemic.
First to Africa,where scientists in South Africa are attempting to reverse engineer and replicate the Moderna vaccine amid a global vaccine disparity that has disadvantaged the continent. In a pair of Cape Town warehouses converted into a maze of airlocked sterile rooms, young scientists are assembling and calibrating the equipment needed to reverse engineer a coronavirus vaccine that has yet to reach South Africa and most of the world’s poorest people.
The energy in the gleaming labs matches the urgency of their mission to narrow vaccine disparities. By working to replicate Moderna’s COVID-19 shot, the scientists are effectively making an end run around an industry that has vastly prioritized rich countries over poor in both sales and manufacturing.
And they are doing it with unusual backing from the World Health Organization, which is coordinating a vaccine research, training and production hub in South Africa along with a related supply chain for critical raw materials. It’s a last-resort effort to make doses for people going without, and the intellectual property implications are still murky.
“We are doing this for Africa at this moment, and that drives us,” said Emile Hendricks, a 22-year-old biotechnologist for Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, the company trying to reproduce the Moderna shot. “We can no longer rely on these big superpowers to come in and save us.”
Some experts see reverse engineering — recreating vaccines from fragments of publicly available information — as one of the few remaining ways to redress the power imbalances of the pandemic. Only 0.7% of vaccines have gone to low-income countries so far, while nearly half have gone to wealthy countries, according to an analysis by the People’s Vaccine Alliance.
That WHO, which relies upon the goodwill of wealthy countries and the pharmaceutical industry for its continued existence, is leading the attempt to reproduce a proprietary vaccine demonstrates the depths of the supply disparities.
The U.N.-backed effort to even out global vaccine distribution, known as COVAX, has failed to alleviate dire shortages in poor countries. Donated doses are coming in at a fraction of what is needed to fill the gap. Meanwhile, pressure for drug companies to share, including Biden administration demands on Moderna, has led nowhere.
Until now, WHO has never directly taken part in replicating a novel vaccine for current global use over the objections of the original developers. The Cape Town hub is intended to expand access to the novel messenger RNA technology that Moderna, as well as Pfizer and German partner BioNTech, used in their vaccines.
“This is the first time we’re doing it to this level, because of the urgency and also because of the novelty of this technology,” said Martin Friede, a WHO vaccine research coordinator who is helping direct the hub.
In response, U.S. vaccine maker Moderna has announced plans to build an African factory that would manufacture up to half-a-billion doses annually, after facing sharp criticism for selling its COVID-19 vaccines primarily to wealthy countries.
Moderna says it will invest up to US$500-million in the factory, but it has not yet selected a site or even a country in Africa. The construction and approval of the facility is expected to take two to four years, leaving it unable to help in the current massive global shortage of vaccines.
The company said it expects to “begin a process for country and site selection soon.” The factory would be capable of producing other vaccines in addition to the COVID-19 vaccine, it said.
Vaccines are desperately needed across Africa, the region with the lowest COVID-19 immunization rate in the world. Less than 5 percent of Africans are fully vaccinated, even though surplus doses are still arriving in rich countries with high vaccination rates. There has been a “horrifying inequity” in the distribution of vaccines, according to World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
While high-income and upper-middle-income countries have used 75 percent of all vaccines so far, low-income countries have received less than half of 1 percent of the world’s doses, he told a media briefing on Thursday. “We stand on the precipice of failure if we don’t make the benefits of science available to all people in all countries right now,” he said.
In a statement on Thursday, Moderna chief executive officer Stéphane Bancel said, “We are determined to extend Moderna’s societal impact through the investment in a state-of-the-art mRNA manufacturing facility in Africa.” Critics say Moderna should do more to share its vaccine technology with poorer countries because its costs were heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. By some estimates, it has received more than US$8-billion in public funding from the U.S. government, including research and development funding and supply contracts.
Next, In Asia-Pacific, Melbourne, Australia, one of the world’s most locked-down cities that emerged from its latest spate of COVID-19 restrictions heading into the weekend, will see more curbs eased later this week when the Australian state of Victoria reaches an 80 per cent full vaccination rate, officials said on Sunday.
Australia’s 2nd largest city has seen 6 separate lockdowns since March 2020, Residents of Melbourne, Australia, flocked to the city’s pubs, restaurants and hair salons in the early hours of Friday after the world’s most locked-down city emerged from its latest spate of restrictions designed to combat the spread of COVID-19.
Australia’s second-largest city has so far endured 262 days — or nearly nine months — of restrictions during six separate lockdowns since March 2020, representing the longest cumulative lockdown for any city in the world. Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, last year went through 234 straight days of lockdown.
In Melbourne, people were seen cheering and clapping from their balconies, while cars honked horns continuously at 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, when lockdown restrictions in place since early August ended. Many venues, including food outlets and even hair salons, opened at the unusual hour for the occasion.owner of The Bearded Man barbershop in Melbourne, told Reuters he is nearly booked out for the next month and he is encouraging customers to make appointments for Christmas.
“We all love cutting hair and being on the floor is such a lovely feeling, being around people,” he said.”I have urged our customer base: ‘Make sure you have booked in your Christmas cut.'” Similar jubilant scenes were seen in the country’s largest city, Sydney, almost two weeks ago, when authorities started easing restrictions as COVID-19 vaccination rates rose.
Just over 70 per cent of adults in Australia are now fully vaccinated and many residents are planning to fly overseas again as international border restrictions start to ease.
Under relaxed rules in Melbourne, restaurants and cafés can reopen with up to 20 people indoors and 50 outdoors — all of whom must be vaccinated — while 10 guests can gather at homes. Masks will remain mandatory. Australia had stayed largely virus-free for most of this year until a third wave of infections fuelled by the delta variant spread across its southeast starting in late June, forcing months-long lockdowns in its largest cities.
The virus got a foothold in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, while the rest of the country remains largely COVID-19 free. Melbourne’s reopening will be a boost for the country’s $2 trillion AUS ($1.85 trillion Cdn) economy after recent lockdowns pushed it to the brink of a second recession in as many years.
Even with the delta outbreaks, Australia’s coronavirus numbers are still far lower than those of many comparable nations, with some 152,000 cases and 1,590 deaths.
And to end this report we go to the USA where a vaccine especially for 5 to 11 year olds is expected to be available from Mid November.Children ages 5 to 11 could start getting vaccinated as soon as early November, predicted Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert.
A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee is set to meet on Tuesday to discuss a request from Pfizer to allow its lower-dose pediatric vaccine to be administered to 5- to 11-year-olds. That will inform the FDA’s decision, which will then be examined by the Centers for Disease Control Prevention, Fauci said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
“So, if all goes well … it’s entirely possible, if not very likely,” that vaccines will be available to that age group “within the first week or two of November,” Fauci said, noting “the data look good as to the efficacy and the safety” of the vaccine for children.
A trial conducted by the companies found that their vaccine was 90.7 percent effective at protecting children between 5 and 11 from covid-19. On Friday, the FDA appeared to pave the way for approval when it said in a briefing document that the benefits of the Pfizer-BioNTech pediatric vaccine “clearly outweigh the risks” for that age group in most scenarios.
Still, “you never want to get ahead of the FDA and their regulatory decisions,” Fauci cautioned. In September, there was confusion among American patients and doctors as advisers to the FDA voted against recommending boosters for all Americans after the White House repeatedly endorsed them.
This month, the Biden administration laid out a plan to distribute the vaccine to every eligible child as soon as it receives regulatory approval.
Until the next time Stay Safe.
Total Cases Worldwide – 244,539,061
Total Deaths Worldwide – 4,966,190
Total Recovered Worldwide – 221,551,845
Total Active Cases Worldwide – 18,021,024 (7.4 % of the total cases)
Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 226,518,035
https://www.worldometer.info/coronavirus/
Information and Resources:
https://www.usnews.com/news/world
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/melbourne-lockdown-ends-covid-19-1.6220474
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/25/covid-delta-variant-live-updates/