The Next Steps In Global Health And The Effects Of The Pandemic
To prevent resurgence of a global pandemic, the US and EU should think beyond vaccinating the world.
The Covid-19 pandemic has been one of the most devastating pandemics in human history and has completely changed the way we live our lives. While vaccines have been widely available in the developed world, many countries continue to struggle to vaccinate their populations. These struggles revolve around a multitude of different factors. In wealthier countries the problems are not as much distributing vaccines, but more so vaccine hesitancy and misinformation. While is poorer countries the problem was receiving vaccines, but that situation is continuing to improve as time passes.
Israel vaccinated half of its population in March 2021, while India is still struggling to get to 45%. Today low-income states have less than 2% of adults that are fully vaccinated while high income states have 50% fully vaccinated. If rich countries do not redistribute surplus vaccines this year, between 1 to 2.8 million lives could be lost.
India hit one of the lowest points in May 2020 and at one point registered nearly 400,000 Covid-19 cases in a day. There are a multitude of failures that can be attributed to these results. The failure to be able to share these vaccine formulas was one at the start but has been improving steadily. The new issue is the spread of misinformation but also the lack of any treatment protocols which has unfortunately allowed for the virus to continue to spread and mutate according to infectious disease experts at the World Health Organization (WHO). In reaction to these failures there has been an increasing number of calls to waive intellectual property rights around vaccines and treatments for Covid-19, but also an increase of certain movements against what is the mainstream Covid narratives in the propagation of alternative treatments.
According to a new study which compiled a multitude of surveys from low-, middle-, and high-income countries showed that vaccine hesitancy was a larger factor in high-income countries like the United States. The reluctance of getting vaccinated has been a growing concern far before Covid-19, but it seems that the issue has grown especially in countries such as the United States where vaccines are in surplus. One aspect that the study points out that high income countries have successfully eliminated numerous vaccine-preventable diseases and consequently it may have led to a place of complacency. However, it seems there are multiple reasons that this issue has grown ranging from conspiracy theories to actual concerns over side effects such as myocarditis. As well as the point of view of some who say that if they natural immunity, then why should they receive the vaccine. Then with the use of the internet and social media, opinions whether they are based in science or not are spread like wildfire which has led to an issue of misinformation. To combat that concern there has been a policy of censoring this information which may only booster the cause seeing as how trust in the mainstream media is at an all-time low according to a Reuters Institute Report.
Recently the United States and the European Union have partnered to increase Covid vaccinations worldwide to help stop this pandemic. President Biden announced this plan two weeks after the WHO slammed wealthy countries for failing to distribute Covid vaccines and other resources to other countries. The United States purchased and donated over 1.1 billion doses to poorer countries, and the EU committed to donating 500 million doses. While this is a step in the right direction, it remains to be seen how fast the rollout is going to be, and whether the WHO’s goal of reaching 40% of each of these country’s populations to be vaccinated before the end of the year. Another step that needs to be taken is the push for treatments, and luckily as time has passed there has been more research into treating this disease process to help avoid hospitalization.
It is important that the United States takes these measures to help these countries not only for humanitarian purposes but also in our own interest because we have seen the damage that new variants can cause with the example of the Delta variant. The next step is in the development of an actual outpatient treatment protocol because unfortunately as we have seen in the case of Israel, vaccines alone will not be effective enough to stop this pandemic. Israel was the first country to fully vaccinate most of its citizens, and now it has one of the world’s highest daily infection rates. What we have learned is that vaccine immunity declines over time and that with the spread of new variants, the pandemic will linger on. There needs to be a plan of action long term to help produce more vaccines for booster shots in these poorer countries as well. Also, we recommend an increase of funding to study treatments for Covid because we cannot put all our eggs in the one basket that is vaccines. The program announced by Dr. Fauci in June to discover drugs for Covid is only receiving 3.2 billion dollars’ worth of funding which is hardly enough compared to the funding into vaccine research. Failure to find adequate outpatient treatment we believe unfortunately puts us at a massive disadvantage when combatting this virus.
There have been a multitude of claims about certain drug’s effectiveness for Covid, but none have been accepted by the FDA besides remdesivir and baricitinib but both are used in the hospital and have been underwhelming. Recently however there seems to be a bright spot with the company Merck’s new antiviral drug called molnupiravir and is currently in the works to be used within five days of a positive Covid test. This is good news because according to the experts and current science it is most effective to treat this disease process earlier rather than later when you are in the hospital. Hopefully this is the first step in a multilayered strategy and a solution for the problem of vaccine hesitancy.
To fight vaccine hesitancy with censorship and brute force is a losing battle and is only going to bolster those who would fight against the action. The way we counteract bad speech is with truth, and we must be transparent with what we know and do not know. What we do know is that these vaccines decrease the rates of hospitalization but have not seemed to be as effective as we would have liked in stopping people from contracting the virus and spreading it. What we can take away with those two facts is that we must protect the elder population as well as at risk population with multiple comorbidities. We believe it should be at upmost importance to fight this pandemic with a multilayered strategy of vaccination and treatment with therapeutics.
With everything considered, we recommend that the President-Elect’s National Security Transition Team recognize the gravity of this issue, and look beyond just donating vaccines, but also look to fund developments into actual treatment protocols so that the rest of the world won’t have to go through what Israel is currently going through. It is important that we tackle this problem swiftly because with how globalized our society is, the spread of disease is an increasing concern, and the longer this virus is allowed to spread and mutate, there is going to be a prolongation of this problem for us like we have seen this summer with the Delta variant.
References
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“As a Rich-World Covid-Vaccine Glut Looms, Poor Countries Miss Out.” The Economist, The Economist Newspaper, https://www.economist.com/international/2021/09/04/as-a-rich-world-covid-vaccine-glut-looms-poor-countries-miss-out.
“Calls for Drug Companies to Share Vaccine FORMULAS Grow as Global COVID Crisis Worsens.” CBS News, CBS Interactive, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-patents-drug-companies-waivers/.
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Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/photos/vaccine-vaccination-covid-19-5926664/
