Total Doses Distributed = 708,450,345. Total Doses Administered = 563,999,093. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 255,975,678. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 218,135,613.
COVID-19 Vaccination Data Updates
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In the latest Senate package targeted at stopping the coronavirus, U.S. lawmakers dropped nearly all funding for curbing the virus beyond American borders, a move many health experts slammed as dangerously short-sighted.
They warn the suspension of COVID-19 aid for poorer countries could ultimately allow the kind of unchecked transmission needed for the next worrisome variant to emerge and unravel much of the progress achieved so far.
The U.S. has been the biggest contributor to the global pandemic response, delivering more than 500 million vaccines, and the lack of funding will be a major setback. The money has paid for numerous interventions, including a mass vaccination campaign in the Cameroonian capital that saw hundreds of thousands of people get their first dose, as well as the construction of a COVID-19 care facility in South Africa and the donation of 1,000 ventilators to that country.
Other U.S.-funded vaccination campaigns in dozens of countries, including Uganda, Zambia, Ivory Coast and Mali, could also come to a grinding halt.
“Any stoppage of funds will affect us,” said Misaki Wayengera, a Ugandan official who heads a technical committee advising the government on the pandemic response. He said Uganda has leaned heavily on donor help — it received more than 11 million vaccines from the U.S. — and that any cuts “would make it very difficult for us to make ends meet.”
“This is a bit of a kick in the teeth to poor countries that were promised billions of vaccines and resources last year in grand pledges made by the G7 and the G20,” said Michael Head, a global health research fellow at Britain’s Southampton University.
“Given how badly we’ve failed on vaccine equity, it’s clear all of those promises have now been broken,” he said, adding that without concerted effort and money to fight COVID-19 in the coming months, the pandemic could persist for years.
While about 66% of the American population has been fully immunized against the coronavirus, fewer than 15% of people in poorer countries have received a single dose. Health officials working on COVID-19 vaccination in developing countries supported by the U.S. say they expect to see a reversal of progress once the funds disappear.
“Vaccination will stop or not even get started in some countries,” said Rachel Hall, executive director of U.S. government advocacy at the charity CARE. She cited estimates from USAID that the suspended funding would mean scrapping testing, treatment and health services for about 100 million people.
Although vaccines are more plentiful this year, many poorer countries have struggled to get shots into arms and hundreds of millions of donated vaccines have either expired, been returned or sat unused. To address those logistical hurdles, U.S. aid has financed critical services in countries across Africa, including the safe delivery of vaccines, training health workers and fighting vaccine misinformation.
For example, in November the U.S. Embassy in the Cameroonian capital set up a tent for mass vaccination: Within the first five days, more than 300,000 people received a dose. Those kinds of events will now be harder to conduct without American funds.
Hall also noted there would be consequences far beyond COVID-19, saying countries struggling with multiple disease outbreaks, like Congo and Mali, would face difficult choices.
“They will have to choose between fighting Ebola, malaria, polio, COVID and more,” she said.
Jeff Zients, the outgoing leader of the White House COVID-19 task force, expressed regret the legislation doesn’t include resources for the international pandemic fight, noting that would also compromise efforts to track the virus’ genetic evolution.
“It is a real disappointment that there’s no global funding in this bill,” he said. “This virus knows no borders, and it’s in our national interest to vaccinate the world and protect against possible new variants.”
Still, Zients announced the U.S. would be the first to donate “tens of millions” of doses for children to poorer countries and said more than 20 nations had already requested the shots.
J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, lamented that lawmakers were erring on the side of optimism about the pandemic precisely when another surge might be arriving.
“We’ve made that mistake several times in this pandemic. And we may be making that mistake again,” he said. In recent weeks, COVID-19 cases caused by the hugely infectious omicron subvariant BA.2 have surged across Europe, and American officials say they expect a U.S. spike soon.
Other experts worried the suspension of U.S. global support for COVID-19 might prompt officials to drop current vaccination goals. The World Health Organization had set a target of immunizing at least 70% of people in all countries by the middle of this year, but with nearly 50 countries vaccinating fewer than 20% of their populations, hitting that target is highly unlikely.
Instead, some organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and Duke University have pushed for officials to “refocus vaccination goals away from vaccinating 70% of all adults by summer to vaccinating 90% of those most at-risk in each country,” in what some critics say is an implicit acknowledgment of the world’s repeated failures to share vaccines fairly.
In Nigeria, which has so far received at least $143 million in COVID-19 aid from the U.S, authorities dismissed suggestions their coronavirus programs would suffer as a result of lost funding. The Nigerian president’s office said help from the U.S. was mostly “in kind” via capacity building, research support and donations of laboratory equipment and vaccines. “We are confident that this will not cause any disruption of our current programs,” it said.
However, others warned the U.S. decision set an unfortunate precedent for global cooperation to end the pandemic at a time when fresh concerns like the Ukraine war are drawing more attention.
U.S. President Joe Biden originally planned to convene a virtual summit in the first quarter of this year to keep international efforts on track, but no event has been scheduled.
“In light of the ongoing war in Ukraine, we don’t yet have a final date for the summit, but we are working closely with countries and international partners to advance commitments,” said a senior Biden administration official who was not authorized to comment publicly.
As of this month, WHO said it had gotten only $1.8 billion of the $16.8 billion needed from donors to speed access to coronavirus vaccines, medicines and diagnostics.
“Nobody else is stepping up to fill the void at the moment and the U.S. decision to suspend funding may lead other donor countries to act similarly,” said Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, director of Duke University’s Global Health Innovation Center.
Keri Althoff, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, described the U.S. suspension of funding as “devastating.”
“How could this possibly be what we’re debating right now?” she asked. “It’s a moral obligation to the rest of the world to continue to contribute to this global pandemic response, not only to protect ourselves but to protect people from around the world.”
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Megerian reported from Washington. AP writers Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda; Mogomotsi Magome and Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg, and Chinedu Asadu in Lagos, Nigeria, contributed to this report.
WKMG News 6 & ClickOrlando
The World Health Organization said that up to 65% of people in Africa have been infected with the coronavirus and estimates the number of actual cases may have been nearly 100 times more cases than those reported.
In a new analysis released Thursday, the U.N. health agency reviewed 151 studies of COVID-19 in Africa based on blood samples taken from people on the continent between January 2020 and December 2021. WHO said that by last September, about 65% of people tested had some exposure to COVID-19, translating into about 800 million infections. In contrast, only about 8 million cases had been officially reported to WHO during that time period.
“This undercounting is occurring worldwide and it’s no surprise that the numbers are particularly large in Africa where there are so many cases with no symptoms,” WHO’s Africa director Matshidiso Moeti said in a statement. WHO’s analysis found that a large proportion of people with COVID-19 — 67% — showed no symptoms when infected with the disease, a higher percentage than other world regions.
Despite repeated warnings from WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus that the coronavirus would devastate Africa, the continent has been among the least affected by the pandemic. In its new analysis, WHO said the milder COVID-19 cases seen in Africa were attributable in part to the continent’s much smaller proportion of people with underlying risk factors like high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease.
“Africa’s youthful population is also a protective factor,” the U.N. health agency said. Some studies have also suggested that previous infection with diseases including malaria, may offer people some protection against the coronavirus, although those hypotheses have yet to be confirmed.
To date, Africa has reported 11.5 million COVID-19 cases including more than 250,000 deaths. WHO said the virus has been trending downwards since January, although there have been some variations in some countries and some, including South Africa, have been hit particularly hard during successive waves of disease. Last week, WHO said the number of COVID deaths fell by about 30% on the continent.
“Despite Africa’s declining infections and high exposure to the virus, we cannot declare victory yet against COVID-19,” said WHO Africa chief Moeti.
“The risks of more lethal variants emerging which overwhelm immunity gained from past infections cannot be brushed aside,” she said, calling for increased vaccination rates across the continent. To date, only about 15% of people in Africa have been immunized against COVID-19.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
WKMG News 6 & ClickOrlando
Residents of Shanghai are struggling to get meat, rice and other food supplies under anti-coronavirus controls that confine most of its 25 million people in their homes, fueling frustration as the government tries to contain a spreading outbreak.
People in China’s business capital complain that online grocers often are sold out. Some received government food packages of meat and vegetables for a few days. But with no word on when they will be allowed out, anxiety is rising.
Zhang Yu, 33, said her household of eight eats three meals a day but has cut back to noodles for lunch. They received no government supplies.
“It’s not easy to keep this up,” said Zhang, who starts shopping online at 7 a.m.
“We read on the news there is (food), but we just can’t buy it,” she said. “As soon as you go to the grocery shopping app, it says today’s orders are filled.”
The complaints are an embarrassment for the ruling Communist Party during a politically sensitive year when President Xi Jinping is expected to try to break with tradition and award himself a third five-year term as leader.
Shanghai highlights the soaring human and economic cost of China’s “zero-COVID” strategy that aims to isolate every infected person.
On Thursday, the government reported 23,107 new cases nationwide, all but 1,323 of which had no symptoms. That included 19,989 in Shanghai, where only 329 had symptoms.
Complaints about food shortages began after Shanghai closed segments of the city on March 28.
Plans called for four-day closures of districts while residents were tested. That changed to an indefinite citywide shutdown after case numbers soared. Shoppers who got little warning stripped supermarket shelves.
City officials apologized publicly last week and promised to improve food supplies.
Officials say Shanghai, home of the world’s busiest port and China’s main stock exchange, has enough food. But a deputy mayor, Chen Tong, acknowledged Thursday getting it the “last 100 meters” to households is a challenge.
“Shanghai’s battle against the epidemic has reached the most critical moment,” Chen said at a news conference, according to state media. He said officials “must go all out to get living supplies to the city’s 25 million people.”
At the same event, a vice president of Meituan, China’s biggest food delivery platform, blamed a shortage of staff and vehicles, according to a transcript released by the company. The executive, Mao Fang, said Meituan has moved automated delivery vehicles and nearly 1,000 extra employees to Shanghai.
Another online grocer, Dingdong Maicai, said it shifted 500 employees in Shanghai from other posts to making deliveries.
Li Xiaoliang, an employee of a courier company, complained the government overlooks people living in hotels. He said he is sharing a room with two coworkers after positive cases were found near his rented house.
Li, 30, said they brought instant noodles but those ran out. Now, they eat one meal a day of 40 yuan ($6) lunch boxes ordered at the front desk, but the vendor sometimes doesn’t deliver. On Thursday, Li said he had only water all day.
The local government office “clearly said that they didn’t care about those staying in the hotel and left us to find our own way,” Li said. “What we need most now is supplies, food.”
After residents of a Shanghai apartment complex stood on their balconies to sing this week in a possible protest, a drone flew overhead and broadcast the message: “Control the soul’s desire for freedom and do not open the window to sing. This behavior has the risk of spreading the epidemic.”
The government says it is trying to reduce the impact of its tactics, but authorities still are enforcing curbs that also block access to the industrial cities of Changchun and Jilin with millions of residents in the northeast.
While the Shanghai port’s managers say operations are normal, the chair of the city’s chapter of the European Chamber of Commerce in China, Bettina Schoen-Behanzin, said its member companies estimate the volume of cargo handled has fallen 40%.
Some large factories and financial firms are having employees sleep at work to keep operating. But Schoen-Behanzin said with no timetable to end lockdowns, “some workers aren’t volunteering any more.”
Residents of smaller cities also have been confined temporarily to their homes this year as Chinese officials try to contain outbreaks.
In 2020, access to cities with a total of 60 million people was suspended in an unprecedented attempt to contain the outbreak. The ruling party organized vast supply networks to bring in food.
A resident of the Minhang district on Shanghai’s west side who asked to be identified only by her surname, Chen, said her household of five was given government food packages on March 30 and April 4. They included chicken, eggplant, carrots, broccoli and potatoes.
Now, vegetables are available online but meat, fish and eggs are hard to find, Chen said. She joined a neighborhood “buying club.” Minimum orders are 3,000 yuan ($500), “so you need other people,” she said.
“Everyone is organizing to order food, because we can’t count on the government to send it to us,” Chen said. “They’re not reliable.”
A message from a viewer of an online news conference by the city’s health bureau challenged officials: “Put down the script! Please tell leaders to buy vegetables by mobile phone on the spot.”
Gregory Gao, an operations specialist for an automaker who lives alone in the downtown Yangpu district, said only Meituan remains after food sellers said supply sites in the area were closing.
“I can’t get anything for two or three days in a row,” said Gao, 29.
Zhang said some of her neighbors have run out of rice.
“The government told us at the beginning this would last four days,” she said. “Many people were not prepared.”
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AP researchers Chen Si in Shanghai and Yu Bing in Beijing contributed.
WKMG News 6 & ClickOrlando
Greek authorities say a man who was seriously injured in a fire that broke out in the COVID-19 ward of a hospital in northern Greece has died of his injuries, bringing the total death toll from the blaze to two.
The 52-year-old man who died Thursday had been a patient in the Papanikolaou Hospital’s coronavirus ward when the fire broke out Wednesday morning due to as yet undetermined causes, police said. Firefighters discovered the body of a 79-year-old coronavirus patient at the scene on Wednesday.
One more patient is being treated for burns in the hospital, while two more COVID-19 patients are under enhanced observation after smoke from the fire exacerbated their condition. More than 30 patients were evacuated from the ward during the fire, which was extinguished shortly after it broke out.
Several fatal fires in COVID-19 hospital wards in several countries have been linked to the large quantities of oxygen being administered to patients, and which causes fire to burn faster and with greater intensity.
“The danger was from the oxygen supply to the patients. That could have made the situation much worse,” Health Minister Thanos Plevris told reporters outside the hospital Wednesday.
“The supply was cut off quickly and the response from the fire department was swift,” he added.
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Follow all AP stories on the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic.
WKMG News 6 & ClickOrlando
A compromise $10 billion measure buttressing the government’s COVID-19 defenses stalled in the Senate Wednesday and seemed all but certainly sidetracked for weeks, victim of a campaign-season fight over the incendiary issue of immigration.
There was abundant finger-pointing but no signs the two parties were near resolving their stalemate over a bipartisan pandemic bill that President Joe Biden and top Democrats wanted Congress to approve this week. With Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., prioritizing the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson by week’s end — quite possibly Thursday — the COVID-19 bill seemed sure to slip at least until Congress returns after a two-week recess.
A day earlier, the GOP blocked the Senate from even beginning debate on the bill, which would increase funding for COVID-19 treatments, vaccines and testing. Republicans were demanding that Democrats allow a vote on an amendment preserving immigration curbs imposed by President Donald Trump that the Biden administration is slated to end on May 23.
“Why did Republicans say no? Because they wanted to cripple COVID funding legislation with poison pills that they knew would derail this bill,” Schumer said Wednesday.
Schumer and a team of GOP negotiators led by Utah Sen. Mitt Romney struck a deal Monday on the pandemic bill. Democrats say Republicans are walking away from that agreement.
“The question we have is whether Republicans are acting in good faith to provide the resources we need to save American lives, or if they’re just playing politics,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki. “The virus is not waiting for Republicans in Congress to get their act together.”
While there would likely be at least the 10 GOP votes needed to push the pandemic bill through the 50-50 Senate, overall Republican support for it is tepid. And the GOP’s effort to refocus the fight to immigration — an issue that polls show hurts Biden — has clearly put Democrats on the defensive.
A vote on extending the immigration restrictions would expose Democratic senators, especially those facing tight reelections in November, to dangerous fissures. Liberal immigration advocates want Biden to erase the curbs, but doing that is expected to prompt an explosion of migrants entering the U.S. from Mexico that could trigger a voter backlash.
“We can win it,” No. 2 Senate GOP leader John Thune of South Dakota said about a potential immigration vote. “They’ve got a number of Democrats who are for it. But their leadership is adamantly opposed, I would say hostile to the idea” of a vote.
When the pandemic was full-blown in 2020, Trump began letting authorities immediately expel asylum seekers and other migrants, citing the threat to public health. COVID-19’s intensity has since waned in the U.S., though BA.2, a new omicron variant, is beginning to spread widely here.
Even GOP supporters of the pandemic bill say Democrats must resolve the legislative roadblock.
“They’re in the majority. And the administration says they need this money. And I actually agree with the administration,” said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who helped negotiate the package. “And the majority has to figure out how to get this done.”
Among Democrats who favor retaining the immigration restrictions for now is Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who is facing reelection. He and several others cite a need for federal officials to gear up staffing and facilities to handle the expected influx of migrants.
“I have not seen a plan for how the administration will deal with what I think is a pretty predictable surge on the border,” he said Wednesday in a brief interview.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., declined to discuss what she would do if the Senate sent her chamber a pandemic measure that also extended Trump’s immigration strictures.
“Is that even something that the Senate would do?” she told a reporter. “When they send something, I’ll let you know what we would do with it.”
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., bristled when asked why Democrats wouldn’t simply accept the immigration restrictions as the price for winning the pandemic spending Biden says is needed.
“Your premise is whatever they put in there, take,” Hoyer said. “Uh uh, we’re not going to play that game.”
That reflects a Democratic view that the Republican effort to force an immigration vote is all about setting a political trap.
“Trust me, this is one of the pillars of their reelection campaign, immigration,” said No. 2 Senate Democratic leader Richard Durbin of Illinois. “The numbers appearing at our border are a real challenge, and I’m sure they’re going to make an issue of it.”
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Associated Press writer Chris Megerian contributed to this report.