The head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tested positive again for COVID-19.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky had mild symptoms Sunday and is isolating at her home in Massachusetts, the CDC said Monday.
Walensky, 53, first tested positive on Oct. 21. She took a course of the antiviral pill Paxlovid, and later tested negative. But the symptoms returned and Walensky is again in isolation, working and holding virtual meetings, the CDC said.
Paxlovid has proven effective at preventing serious disease and death among those at highest risk, including older people and those who are immune compromised. But the pill appears to provide little or no benefit for younger adults. Some who take the drug have experienced a return of symptoms after completing Paxlovid’s five-day regimen of pills.
CDC officials said Walensky is up to date on her vaccines.
Walensky took over the CDC in January 2021. She is one of several U.S. health officials who have gotten COVID-19.
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The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
China’s largest city of Shanghai is ordering mass testing Friday on all 1.3 million residents of its downtown Yangpu district and confining them to their homes at least until results are known.
The demand is an echo of measures ordered over the summer that led to a two-month lockdown of the entire city of 25 million that devastated the local economy, prompting food shortages and rare confrontations between residents and the authorities.
At the start of the lockdown, authorities said they would last just days but then kept extending the deadline.
China has shown no sign of backing away from its hardline “zero-COVID” policy since a major congress of the ruling Communist Party that concluded this week by awarding authoritarian leader Xi Jinping a third five-year term in power and packed top bodies with his loyalists.
Strict measures have been imposed across the country, from Shanghai in the east to Tibet far to the west, where anti-lockdown protests have also been reported.
Cell phone footage smuggled out of the region showed crowds of both native Tibetans and Han Chinese migrants milling in the streets of Lhasa to protest a lockdown that has lasted as long as 74 days. The footage was reportedly shot on Wednesday night but there was no sign of violence.
Lhasa has been under tight surveillance since bloody anti-government protests broke out in the city in 2008 before spreading across Tibetan areas.
Despite public anger, the former chairman of Shanghai’s Communist Party Committee, the city’s top official who was ultimately responsible for the lockdown measures, was given the No. 2 spot in the party’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee — an indication of Xi’s elevation of political loyalty above those capable of gaining public support through competent administration.
Li Qiang, who had been Xi’s virtual chief-of-staff while he headed the eastern province of Zhejiang, has been replaced by Beijing Mayor Chen Jining, a former president of Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University and minister of environmental protection.
Chen, 58, was educated at Brunel University London and worked at Imperial College London, where he earned a PhD degree in civil and environmental engineering in 1993.
Many Chinese had hoped for a relaxation of the strict anti-COVID-19 protocols, which remain in place even while the rest of the world has opened up. China’s borders remain largely closed and arrivals must undergo a 10-day quarantine at a designated space.
Despite its costs, and the World Health Organization calling it unsustainable, China credits the strategy with keeping case numbers and deaths at a fraction of those in other countries, although Beijing’s figures have frequently been questioned.
China on Friday reported a 1,337 new cases — most of them asymptomatic — and no new deaths. Shanghai reported 11 asymptomatic cases and Tibet had one confirmed case with symptoms and five asymptomatic cases. China says it has recorded a total of 258,660 cases and 5,226 deaths since the pandemic was first detected in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019.
In a sign China’s tough measures will be maintained in the long term, Shanghai plans to build a permanent quarantine center on an island in the Huangpu River that divides the financial hub, according to the business magazine Caixin.
The 1.6-billion-yuan ($221 million) project on Fuxing Island will expand existing facilities to create 3,009 isolation rooms and 3,250 beds, with construction expected to be completed in six months, Caixin said.
China’s domestically developed vaccines are considered relatively ineffective and it has refused to approve foreign brands such as Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and J&J;.
Still, China wants more people to get booster shots before it relaxes its restrictions. As of mid-October, 90% of Chinese were fully vaccinated and 57% had received a booster shot.
China has relied on domestically developed vaccines, primarily two inactivated vaccines that have proven effective in preventing death and serious disease but less so than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines at stopping the spread of the disease.
Chinese authorities also have not mandated vaccination — entering an office building or other public places requires a negative COVID-19 test, not proof of vaccination. And the country’s strict “zero-COVID” approach means that only a small proportion of the population has been infected and built immunity that way, compared to other places.
As a result, it’s unclear how widely COVID-19 would spread if travel warnings and quarantine mandates were lifted. Until then, a hodgepodge of regulations and restrictions will remain in place across the country of 1.4 billion.
In Tibet’s second-largest city of Shigatse, authorities announced that “normal living and production order” would resume from Friday.
Meanwhile, authorities on Wednesday ordered the lockdown of 900,000 people in Wuhan for at least five days. In remote Qinghai province, the urban districts of Xining city have been locked down since last Friday.
In Beijing, Universal Studios has closed its hotels and attractions “to comply with pandemic prevention and control.”
Total Doses Distributed = 890,758,935. Total Doses Administered = 636,871,557. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 266,031,472. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 226,933,827.
The Chinese city of Shanghai started administering an inhalable COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday in what appears to be a world first.
The vaccine, a mist that is sucked in through the mouth, is being offered for free as a booster dose for previously vaccinated individuals, according to an announcement posted on an official city social media account.
Needle-free vaccines may persuade people who don’t like getting a shot to get vaccinated, as well as help expand vaccination in poor countries because they are easier to administer.
China doesn’t have vaccine mandates but wants more people to get booster shots before it relaxes strict pandemic restrictions that are holding back the economy and increasingly out of synch with the rest of the world.
A video posted by an online Chinese state media outlet showed people at a community health center sticking the short nozzle of a translucent white cup into their mouths. Accompanying text said that after slowly inhaling, one individual held his breath for five seconds, with the entire procedure completed in 20 seconds.
“It was like drinking a cup of milk tea,” one Shanghai resident said in the video. “When I breathed it in, it tasted a bit sweet.”
A vaccine taken in the mouth could also fend off the virus before it reaches the rest of the respiratory system, though that would depend in part on the size of the droplets, one expert said.
Larger droplets would train defenses in parts of the mouth and throat, while smaller ones would travel further into the body, said Dr. Vineeta Bal, an immunologist in India.
Chinese regulators approved the vaccine for use as a booster in September. It was developed by Chinese biopharmaceutical company Cansino Biologics Inc. as an aerosol version of the same company’s one-shot adenovirus vaccine, which uses a relatively harmless cold virus.
Cansino has said the inhaled vaccine has completed clinical trials in China, Hungary, Pakistan, Malaysia, Argentina and Mexico.
Regulators in India have approved a nasal vaccine, another needle-free approach, but it has yet to be rolled out. The vaccine, developed in the U.S. and licensed to Indian vaccine maker Bharat Biotech, is squirted in the nose.
About a dozen nasal vaccines are being tested globally, according to the World Health Organization.
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Associated Press writer Aniruddha Ghosal in New Delhi and video producer Olivia Zhang in Beijing contributed to this report.
President Joe Biden was scheduled to get his updated COVID-19 booster shot on Tuesday and urge the public to get theirs to ensure a healthy holiday season.
Biden was to appear at the White House with the doctors who are leading administration efforts against the spread of the coronavirus.
They were set to be joined by executives from several major drug store chains, which are mounting renewed efforts to help people to get a dose of COVID-19 vaccine that’s been reformulated to target the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of omicron, the most dominant strains in the United States.
Over 20 million people, including nearly 1 in 5 older adults, have already gotten the updated COVID-19 booster, the White House said.
Three respiratory viruses are currently circulating in the U.S: the flu, COVID-19 and RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, said Dr. Ashish Jha, leader of the White House response to COVID-19.
Jha said during several morning TV show appearances that the combination of a flu shot and updated COVID booster now will help people avoid serious illness and stay out of the hospital as they get ready to celebrate Thanksgiving and other holidays with friends and family.
RSV has been affecting children, but there is not shot available to treat it, though companies are working to develop one, he said.
“So if people went out and got their vaccines, we could really get through this without getting into a lot of trouble,” Jha said Tuesday on “CBS Mornings.”
“If you’re relying on your old vaccine from nine months ago or an infection from a year ago, that’s probably not going to be good enough and that’s one of the reasons we’re urging all Americans — but particularly older Americans, particularly seniors — to get the new updated COVID vaccine, because I do think it’s going to make a really big difference,” Jha said on “Today” on NBC.
Biden had to wait a few months to get his updated COVID booster because he was infected, then reinfected, with COVID-19 over the summer.
Follow the AP’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
The head of the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean region told staff in an internal email that he is “very disturbed” by allegations reported by the Associated Press last week that the U.N. health agency’s Syria director misspent millions, abused staff and violated the organization’s own COVID-19 protocols as the pandemic swept across the war-torn country.
In a message sent to all staff in the Middle East on Friday, Dr. Ahmed Salim Al-Mandhari said “the allegations negatively impact the people of Syria, whom we strive to serve.”
This week, two members of WHO’s ethics department in Geneva, including its director, are visiting the agency’s Eastern Mediterranean headquarters in Cairo, which oversees Syria.
“The purpose of the visit is to advance awareness through various sessions, on the ethical conduct, principles, values and expectations,” staff were told in an internal email sent on behalf of WHO’s director of business operations in Cairo.
The AP on Thursday published an investigation based on more than 100 confidential U.N. emails, documents and other materials showing that WHO staffers told investigators the agency’s Syria representative, Dr. Akjemal Magtymova, engaged in abusive behavior, pressured WHO staff to sign contracts with high-ranking Syrian government politicians and plied government officials with gifts. Magtymova declined to comment and called the allegations “defamatory.”
The misconduct claims from more than a dozen WHO staffers have triggered one of the biggest internal probes in years, involving more than 20 investigators.
“As the investigation continues, we have already taken mitigating action,” Al-Mandhari said in his message to staff, referring to the decision to name an acting Syria representative in May. “We also proactively informed our donor partners of the ongoing investigation.” Still, Magtymova remains in her position and continues to draw a director-level salary.
Karam Shaar, a Syria expert at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, said that although there have been rumors of U.N. corruption in Syria for years, the AP report showed that “they are more extreme than we ever thought.”
“What reportedly happened at the WHO Syria office is particularly egregious because at this point in time, Syrians have never been more vulnerable,” Shaar said. “It’s exactly at this time that WHO should be responsible, yet we have never heard as serious allegations from any other U.N. agency. The charges against WHO are by far the worst.”
Syria’s health system has been devastated by more than a decade of war, and for years the country has relied almost exclusively on humanitarian aid. Nearly 90% of the population lives in poverty and more than 7 million people have been displaced by the conflict.
Adam Kamradt-Scott, a professor specializing in global health at the European University Institute in Italy, said that because WHO’s funds come from taxpayers, the agency must prove its spending is warranted.
Financial documents obtained by the AP showed, among other examples, that WHO’s Magtymova once spent more than $11,000 of WHO funds on a party mostly to honor her own achievements during COVID-19. Numerous WHO staffers also alleged that Magtymova used WHO funds to buy inappropriate gifts for Syrian government officials, including gold coins and expensive cars.
“If it were any other context than the U.N. and there was a misappropriation of funds, you would likely see employees being held criminally responsible,” Kamradt-Scott said. “But we still have a situation where WHO staff are essentially investigating other WHO staff, which is not exactly the best approach.”
In his email to WHO staffers in the Eastern Mediterranean, regional director Al-Mandhari encouraged officials to report suspected misconduct through WHO’s own “integrity hotline.”
Eight WHO personnel who complained internally about Magtymova’s reported misconduct as early as last year told the AP their concerns have yet to be addressed.
One former Syrian staffer wrote to the WHO chief earlier this month, pleading for help after earlier emails went unanswered.
“I would like to inquire about the next step regarding the damages due to stress caused by workplace and the potential loss of employment as a result of harassment,” wrote the former employee, who asked for $35,000 in compensation. “Your support and feedback in this regard is essential to save the image of WHO in my beloved country, Syria.” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has not responded, despite insisting in the past that WHO has “zero tolerance” for misconduct.
According to WHO figures, there are more than 250 ongoing internal investigations involving abusive behavior or sexual exploitation and harassment.
Sheba Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, said the U.S. was in contact with WHO and was closely following its internal probe in Syria, where it is a major U.N. donor.
“Responsible leadership as well as stewardship of member state resources must always be a requirement for leadership positions in international organizations,” Crocker said in a statement.
Natasha Hall, a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, said there were structural failures that consistently allowed for U.N. abuses to occur.
“The knee-jerk reaction in the U.N. is to just cover up these violations and hope they go away,” she said, comparing the U.N. response in Syria to the Catholic Church’s handling of the sexual abuse of children. “Unless donor governments collectively push back on this, it’s likely we will keep hearing about these kinds of abuses.”
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Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.
