Consider This from NPR - How The Delta Variant Is Changing The Pandemic On A Global Scale

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

Cases are surging in countries around the world as the more transmissible delta variant spreads rapidly. Also growing: pressure on vaccine-rich countries to help people in countries where vaccines are still scarce. NPR's Will Stone reports on the waiting game. And Harvard's Junaid Habi argues vaccine hesitancy in America is a peculiar privilege. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In the U.S., we have plenty of vaccines. Our biggest challenge is getting more of them to more people. Of course, lots of other countries around the world are at a very different place in the pandemic. Fears of a coronavirus catastrophe in Indonesia as the Delta variant fuels record infections amid a shortage of oxygen and vaccines. Indonesia is setting records for daily cases. South Africa is dealing with a surge too. People flocking to labs to get tested for COVID-19 as the third wave grips the country. And in Bangladesh this week, the government locked down the capital.

Hospitals across Bangladesh have been overwhelmed with new COVID-19 cases, and the daily deaths have more than doubled. Health experts are alarmed by the surge in infections. So much of this is being fueled by the highly contagious Delta variant, which has only increased the pressure on vaccine-rich countries to help those without an adequate supply. The COVID pandemic cannot be addressed by a single country. We have to work on this together. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told NPR that the U.S. is still working to convince other countries to waive vaccine patents,

which the Biden administration argues will boost vaccine production around the world. The U.S. and its allies are also starting to send about 1 billion doses to Latin America, Africa and Asia. And we will continue to work to find a solution that is a global solution, not one that just addresses the needs of individual countries. Consider this. In just a matter of months, the Delta variant has altered the course of the pandemic. And there's growing pressure on vaccine-rich countries like the U.S. to do more. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish.

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So we can now say for sure that the U.S. will not achieve the goal set by President Biden to get 70 percent of adults at least one shot by July 4th. But heading into the holiday weekend, the White House was still striking an optimistic tone. Americans have good reason to celebrate. More than 180 million Americans, including 67 percent of adults, have now received at least one shot. That was White House coordinator Jeff Zients on Thursday. The relatively high vaccination rate in the U.S. mirrors that of other high-income countries, Canada, the U.K., Israel. Those countries have also vaccinated at least half of their populations, and so far, like the U.S., they are weathering the Delta variant without big spikes

in the number of people dying. But in many other parts of the world, vaccines are scarce, and the threat from Delta is greater. The U.S. effort to change that has included an offer of surplus vaccines, totaling more than 80 million doses. Including doses to the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Taiwan, Honduras, Colombia. Jeff Zients said by the end of the week, about half of those 80 million will be shipped out of the country. And just as our work to vaccinate Americans does not stop on July 4th, our work to help vaccinate the world does not stop at these 80 million doses.

Now, the U.S. has also pledged to buy and donate another 500 million doses over the course of the next year. But even that is a small share of the total number of vaccines that researchers estimate are needed to end the pandemic. It could be as high as 11 billion doses. Around the world, 2.6 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered so far. NPR's Will Stone can tell us more about the countries still waiting for their share. As doctors in the U.S. were celebrating their second COVID shots, Dr. Marcela Lasso Escalante says her father, a pediatrician in Peru, was going door to door seeing patients.

Eventually, he caught the virus. He transmitted the infections to my brother and both were to the ICQ unit and they didn't make it. That was in February. And now Peru has the most deaths per capita from COVID-19 in the world. All people have a story of death from COVID in Peru. Everyone. Yet even now, less than 10 percent of Peru's more than 30 million people are fully vaccinated. In African countries, vaccination coverage tends to be even lower and infections are soaring. We're really getting crushed. Stephen Neary lives in Namibia and runs public health programs in Africa for the

humanitarian group Project Hope. Oxygen is in short supply in many of the countries. ICU beds are in short supply, if not all being full, and the vaccine isn't available. It reminds Neary of what he saw there during the early years of HIV-AIDS. Africans could get testing and counseling, but not medications. So they're left waiting for help from more affluent countries. And it's not working. This could finally be changing. The U.S. plans to send half a billion doses to countries in need starting in August. Those shots will go through

COVAX, the Global Vaccine Distribution Program. Despite its ambitions, COVAX has only delivered about 90 million doses worldwide. Supplies are expected to ramp up in the fall, but there's still a lot of uncertainty. Gyan Gandhi with UNICEF, one of the groups behind COVAX, says that's making it hard for countries to prepare. Without knowing that the doses are going to be there, they are understandably reticent to use the limited resources to prime the pump. All the logistics that need to be in place, training healthcare workers, setting up the cold chain,

getting publicity so people know shots are there. There's been a lot of focus on the supply of vaccines, and actually right now we need to sort of turn our attention more to the more mundane things. Otherwise, he says, a glut of vaccines could arrive and countries may not be able to use them all. And there are already some examples of countries returning or destroying shots. But the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,

says these concerns are not only overblown, but distract from the real problem at hand. There is no vaccine. You can't even talk about delivery or absorption capacity when there is no vaccine. Since the fall, Tedros says COVAX has worked closely with countries on how exactly they will give out the shots. What I would like to assure those who are prepared to give vaccines is we have done our homework. And the WHO says countries in the global south have a lot of experience and success vaccinating against other infectious diseases.

Dr. Jarbis Barbosa is assistant director of the Pan American Health Organization. The countries in Latin America, for instance, when they receive the vaccine, they are deploying the vaccine very, very fast. The WHO also says problems of vaccine hesitancy may be overblown. Over in Uganda, Elijah Okea with the non-profit International Rescue Committee says it was hard to get people to show up for a shot during the spring. But now... He hopes they will soon have a place to find them. NPR's Will Stone. Like you just heard there, the U.S. has a problem some countries can only dream of. How to convince more people to take advantage of the country's massive vaccine supply. The fact that that is our biggest public health challenge is something that really struck

Dr. Junaid Nabi. Vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. especially is a very complicated issue. I don't think it's black and white. I know of the history that underserved and minority populations in this country have faced. But at the same time, I live in the U.S. right now, but I have a lot of family in India, in a lot of countries in Africa. And what I see is that there is this large disparity in the attitudes. Nabi is a physician and health systems researcher at Harvard and the Aspen Institute. And as he recently wrote in an essay for NPR, that's made it easy for him to see just how different American attitudes towards vaccination can be. What I noticed in the U.S. was this casual recklessness towards vaccinations.

And it's been a little disturbing because in the U.S., there are healthcare facilities and in general, there's a lot of support for getting vaccinations. To refuse getting vaccinations, that to me is a big privilege because this is not something that's available to people in other parts of the world. They are struggling to get vaccinations. So the idea of hesitancy, that's sort of on the micro level. I want to talk about another trend you write about, which is vaccine nationalism. What's going on there and how is that actually playing out? So we noticed early on that when the conversation around development of vaccines

and how they need to be distributed, that was mostly concentrated in certain countries of the world. And what started happening is that rich countries, mostly in the West, they started hoarding vaccines, and they're not helping other countries in terms of raw materials or technology transfer. And what's instead happening is that there is this donation approach where, okay, we're going to distribute 500 million doses, but these will not be enough. We need almost 10 billion doses at the global level. But can I stop here? Because, you know, President Biden announced that the U.S. will purchase, just like you said, and donate half a billion Pfizer doses and donate them to 92 countries. I mean, aren't those numbers showing that there's a little more effort? Or are you saying that

donating is not as good as creating a scenario where countries can do this on their own? So there's definitely effort. And I do think these actions are in the right direction. I just don't think they're enough. Because we need to understand that there's a lot of variants in circulation right now. Right, like the Delta variant. Yes. And that's causing a lot of devastation. So we don't know all the dynamics around viral transmission. And that means that other countries need to have the capacity to build their own systems and build their own manufacturing units. And by just donating them once in a while, it's not an approach that is sustainable or fair. In the end, what do you think that this chapter is revealing about global health and how particularly people in the U.S. see the issue of

global health. We know already if we look at Ebola response or what's happening in terms of tuberculosis or malaria in so many other countries, there has always been an attitude of this is not our problem. But even after more than a year of being in a pandemic, I see that the attitudes haven't changed that much. And a lot of people in developed countries think that these are problems in these other places. There is this notion of otherness, not an attitude of this is our problem. So that to me reveals what has been happening and why we haven't been able to control diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, or others,

why there hasn't been enough investment, because a lot of them never reach Western rich nations. You say Americans can do something to alleviate the dire situation in a country like India, where most of your family is and a number of vaccinated Indians is still under 5%. So fundamentally, are you implying that this is something that Americans can somehow help on an individual level? Yes. At the individual level, I feel that if Americans were to participate fully in the vaccination programs and play a role, not just for their own country, but this would also enable the US government, for example, to worry a little less about the national response and start helping other countries more broadly.

Because at some level, there is a concern, how are we going to control this spread if variegans get spread too much or a certain vaccine doesn't work? So a lot of governments are worried about that. The more people participate in these programs, the more they alleviate that concern that we have a certain level of protection where we can start thinking about other countries. Dr. Junaid Nabi, he's a physician and health systems researcher at Harvard and the Aspen Institute. There's a link to his essay for NPR's Goats and Soda blog. You can find that in our episode notes. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.