Total Doses Distributed = 736,029,755. Total Doses Administered = 580,915,871. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 257,738,565. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 220,502,022.
COVID-19 Vaccination Data Updates
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Shanghai will try again to reopen in a few days after it has eliminated COVID-19 transmission among the population at large as an outbreak in China’s largest city subsides, an official said Friday.
The strict lockdown of the city — now in its seventh week but moved, lifted and reinforced at times to the frustration of residents — is part of the ruling Communist Party’s “zero-COVID” goal that has exacted a mounting economic toll and that even the World Health Organization says may be unsustainable.
The goal in Shanghai is to achieve “elimination in society,” meaning any new cases would only be in people already in isolation, Vice Mayor Wu Qing said at a news conference. That would allow for an “orderly opening, limited (population) flow, and differentiated management,” Wu said.
No exact date beyond the middle of the month was given, nor did Wu say how the reopening would occur except that the city intends to gradually restore industrial production, education and medical services.
Shanghai officials have made similar past assurances, only to see restrictions return even as cases wane in the city of 25 million people.
Complaints about food shortages and other hardships and videos posted online showing people in Shanghai and other areas arguing with police have been deleted by censors.
Amid a much smaller outbreak in Beijing, more daily testing has been ordered, classes have been suspended, people have been ordered to work from home, restaurants are restricted to take-out service and many shops, tourist sites, banks and government offices closed.
Some residential communities are under lockdown and residents have been warned to avoid traveling between city districts.
Shanghai reported 2,096 new COVID-19 cases on Friday, all but 227 of them in people not showing symptoms. Beijing reported 50 cases, in line with recent daily totals.
China’s Foreign Ministry dismissed as “irresponsible” WHO’s doubts expressed earlier this week about continuing the “zero-COVID” approach mandating strict lockdowns, mass testing and the compulsory removal to crowded centralized quarantine centers of anyone who tests positive or is a close contact.
Experts have questions the policy’s continued use given vaccines are widely available, and it has affected growth in the world’s second largest economy as well as global supply chains.
Yet it has become ever-more closely identified with China’s president and Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, who is determined to maintain tight social control and shore up his and the party’s authority ahead of a key party congress later this year.
Already highly limited rights to privacy, free speech and personal autonomy have been further restricted in the name of fighting the pandemic. China’s borders have been largely closed for more than two years, and this week the government said it would tighten restrictions on outbound travel by Chinese citizens and increase scrutiny over the issuance of passports.
At a meeting last week, the party’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee, the leadership said it was committed to “resolutely fighting any attempts to distort, question or dismiss China’s anti-COVID policy.”
“In the face of mounting uncertainties due to COVID-19, one thing remains certain — China will stick to its dynamic zero-COVID policy that has proven pragmatic and effective,” the official Xinhua News Agency said in an editorial Thursday.
China’s outbreaks and the ensuing restrictions have led to a number of events being canceled or postponed, most recently the Asian Games originally scheduled for September in the city of Hangzhou, 177 kilometers (110 miles) west of Shanghai.
Total Doses Distributed = 734,783,455. Total Doses Administered = 580,514,653. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 257,707,346. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 220,461,007.
COVID-19 Vaccination Data Updates
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White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha issued a dire warning Thursday that the U.S. will be increasingly vulnerable to the coronavirus this fall and winter if Congress doesn’t swiftly approve new funding for more vaccines and treatments.
In an Associated Press interview, Jha said Americans’ immune protection from the virus is waning, the virus is adapting to be more contagious and booster doses for most people will be necessary — with the potential for enhanced protection from a new generation of shots.
His warning comes as the White House says there could be up to 100 million infections from the virus later this year — and as President Joe Biden somberly orders flags to half-staff to mark 1 million deaths.
“As we get to the fall, we are all going to have a lot more vulnerability to a virus that has a lot more immune escape than even it does today and certainly than it did six months ago,” Jha said. “That leaves a lot of us vulnerable.”
Jha predicted that the next generation of vaccines, which are likely to be targeted at the currently prevailing omicron strain, “are going to provide a much, much higher degree of protection against the virus that we will encounter in the fall and winter.” But he warned that the U.S. is at risk of losing its place in line to other countries if Congress doesn’t act in the next several weeks.
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The first factory to produce COVID-19 vaccines in Africa says it has not received enough orders and may stop production within weeks, in what a senior World Health Organization official described Thursday as a “failure” in efforts to achieve vaccine equity.
South Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare said that it cannot let its large-scale sterile manufacturing facilities sit idle, and will return instead to making anesthetics. At the outset of the COVID pandemic, the company shifted its production and achieved capacity to produce more than 200 million doses annually of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
“It was widely hailed as a great achievement for Africa, a game-changer for the continent. But it has not been followed up with orders. We have not received any orders from the big multilateral agencies,” Stavros Nicolaou, senior executive for strategic trade development at Aspen Pharmacare, told The Associated Press Thursday.
“COVAX has placed orders for 2.1 billion doses of COVID vaccines and not a single one has been placed with Aspen or any other African manufacturers,” said Nicolaou, referring to the U.N.-backed effort to distribute coronavirus vaccines to poorer countries.
“It’s a cardinal sin to have valuable sterile manufacturing capacity and not put it to use,” said Nicolaou. “We cannot leave this production capacity idle. We will have to repivot from vaccine manufacturing and return to producing anesthetics unless in the short term we get firm orders for our COVID-19 vaccine.”
Nicolaou said the lack of orders “is not great for Africa’s ambition to reduce its dependence on imported vaccines from 99% to 40%. If we fail at this first step, this is bad not just for Aspen but for all others aspiring to make vaccines in Africa.”
At a press briefing on Thursday, Dr. Abdou Salam Gueye, the WHO’s emergencies chief in Africa said: “it may be a failure but we will learn from it.” He added that if orders were to ramp up, the factory could likely be restarted relatively quickly.
“It is unfortunate that this plant did not receive enough orders,” he said, saying that Africa got two-thirds of its vaccines via COVAX and that those vaccines were ordered by vaccines alliance Gavi.
He said Gavi has previously said they do not plan to order any more vaccines, since about 30% of shots shipped to Africa have yet to be administered, given persistent logistical problems.
Health officials have repeatedly decried the concentration of vaccine production in rich countries, saying the lack of manufacturing capacity in poorer countries was among several factors that put them at the back of the line when COVID-19 vaccines were initially made last year.
Some experts said Aspen’s imminent closure should change the world’s approach to public health security.
“The global community spends billions of dollars to shore up military defenses that might never get used, but refuses to spend a fraction of that to support global health defense,” said Zain Rizvi, research director at the advocacy group, Public Citizen.
He said global purchasers like COVAX should support manufacturers in poorer countries and described globally distributed vaccine manufacturing as “our protection against this virus.”
The production of locally-made shots at Aspen’s factory was heralded as a first step toward Africa’s efforts to meet its own vaccine needs — but there was significant criticism after reports emerged last year that the majority of its shots were being exported to Europe, according to its deal with J&J;.
While nearly 70% of people in rich countries have been immunized against the coronavirus, just 17% of Africa’s 1.3 billion people have been vaccinated, according to statistics issued by the Africa CDC on Thursday. In South Africa, 45% of adults are fully vaccinated, although about 85% of the population is thought to have some immunity based on past exposure to the virus.
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Cheng reported from London.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
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At the height of the pandemic, the meat processing industry worked closely with political appointees in the Trump administration to stave off health restrictions and keep slaughterhouses open even as COVID-19 spread rapidly among workers, according to a Congressional report released Thursday.
The report by the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis said meat companies pushed to keep their plants open even though they knew workers were at high risk of catching the virus. The lobbying led to health and labor officials watering down their recommendations for the industry and culminated in an executive order President Donald Trump issued in the spring of 2020 designating meat plants as critical infrastructure that needed to remain open.
Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, who leads the subcommittee, said USDA officials and the industry prioritized production and profits over the health of workers and communities as at least 59,000 workers caught the virus and 269 workers died.
“The shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated,” Clyburn said.
Former Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue, who now leads the University System of Georgia, didn’t immediately respond Thursday.
The report is based on communications between industry executives, lobbyists and USDA officials and other documents the committee received from government agencies, Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS, Cargill, National Beef, Hormel and other companies. Those firms control 85% of the beef market and 70% of pork production nationwide.
The North American Meat Institute trade group said the report distorts the truth and ignores the steps companies took as they spent billions of dollars to retool plants and purchase protective gear for workers as the world learned more about the virus in 2020.
“The House Select Committee has done the nation a disservice,” the trade group’s President and CEO Julie Anna Potts said. “The Committee could have tried to learn what the industry did to stop the spread of COVID among meat and poultry workers, reducing positive cases associated with the industry while cases were surging across the country. Instead, the Committee uses 20/20 hindsight and cherry picks data to support a narrative that is completely unrepresentative of the early days of an unprecedented national emergency.”
One of the major unions that represents workers at the processing plants condemned the way the Trump administration helped the meat industry.
“We only wish that the Trump Administration cared as much about the lives of working people as it did about meat, pork and poultry products,” said Stuart Appelbaum, President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “We understood that poultry plants needed to shut down for deep cleaning and to save worker’s lives. If the Trump Administration had developed meaningful safety requirements for workers early on as they should have, this would not have even become an issue.”
The report said meat companies were slow to take measures to protect workers from the virus and pushed to make government recommendations to require masks to be worn, install dividers between work stations and encourage social distancing in their plants optional. The industry has defended its response to the pandemic in the past and major meat companies say they aggressively worked to meet those safety standards and took additional steps to protect workers.
But the report cited a message that a Koch Foods executive sent a lobbyist in the spring of 2020 that said the industry shouldn’t do more than screen employees’ temperatures at the door of plants. The lobbyist agreed and said “Now to get rid of those pesky health departments!”
To that end, the report said USDA officials — at the behest of meat companies — tried to use the executive order Trump issued to stop state and local health officials from ordering plants to shut down.
Even with those efforts, U.S. meat production still fell to about 60% of normal during the spring of 2020 because a number of major plants were forced to temporarily close for deep cleaning and safety upgrades or operated at slower speeds because of worker shortages.
Documents uncovered by the committee showed that meat companies pushed hard for the executive order partly because they believed it will help shield them from liability if workers got sick or died — something a federal appeals court later rejected in a lawsuit against Tyson over worker deaths at an Iowa plant. Emails show that the companies themselves submitted a draft of the executive order to the administration days before it was issued.
Early on in the pandemic, meat companies knew the virus was spreading rapidly among their workers because infection rates were much higher in the plants and their surrounding communities. The report said that in April 2020, a doctor at a hospital near a JBS plant in Cactus, Texas, told the company and government officials in an email that there was clearly a major outbreak at the plant because every COVID-19 patient at the hospital either worked at the plant or was related to a worker. “Your employees will get sick and may die if this factory remains open,” the doctor warned.
The report also highlighted the way meat companies aggressively pushed back against government safety recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That led to the final guidance including language that effectively made the rules optional because it said the recommendations should be done “if feasible” or “where possible.”