Consider This from NPR - The Pandemic Is Still Global. Here's How Vaccination Is Going In Other Countries

Episode Date: March 11, 2021

Less than 4% of Brazil's population has been vaccinated, and now a dangerous new variant has overwhelmed parts of the country's health care system. Duke University's Miguel Nicolelis tells NPR what it's like in Sao Paulo, where hospitals are turning patients away.Other countries are also struggling to contain the coronavirus, combat disinformation, and distribute vaccines. NPR international correspondents survey the obstacles: Diaa Hadid in Islamabad, Ruth Sherlock in Beirut and Julie McCarthy, who covers the Philippines. In participating regions, you'll also hear from local journalists about what's happening in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. Earlier this year, public health experts in Brazil warned that hospitals in some parts of the country were headed for a catastrophic collapse by the end of March. Now it looks like they may get there early. And you just see your comrades dying, your friends, your parents, your relatives. They're dying in ambulances in other parts of Brazil.

They're dying at home. They die on the streets. And you are seeing scenes which reminds me of what we saw in New York, you know, where you cannot even handle the bodies of the victims. Dr. Miguel Nicoleles is a neuroscientist at Duke University. He's from Brazil and has spent the last year in Sao Paulo, where he's been advising the government on the pandemic. The country has been inundated with cases from a more contagious variant, one that appears to reinfect people who've already been sick. Some hospitals there are now turning patients away.

Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, has argued against face masks. He's undermined shutdowns and said this week, enough fussing and whining. How much longer will the crying go on? Now Brazil, not the U.S., leads the world in daily deaths. At this point, less than 4% of the country has been vaccinated. The government, which has been slow to secure doses, is scrambling to get more. And Nicoleles says it's not just Brazil that's in trouble.

Brazil is becoming the largest open sky laboratory for new variants to come about. Because if you have this large number of people infected, you are going to have a huge number of mutations taking place. And eventually, some of these mutations can become more lethal or more infected. Consider this. While there's a growing sense of hope in the U.S., that kind of hope feels worlds away in some countries. We'll check in on vaccine progress in three of them. From NPR, I'm Adi Kornish. It's Thursday, March 11th. Support for NPR comes from Sotva, the comfort company.

Sotva luxury mattresses are sold online and priced at about 50% less than mattress stores. Visit sotva.com slash NPR today and save an additional $225. This message comes from NPR sponsor BYU Radio's Top of Mind with Julie Rose. Julie dives deep into a topic to get to understand the whys and the hows of the story, free of speculation and hot takes. Find new episodes of Top of Mind with Julie Rose wherever you get your podcasts. We are still in the middle of this pandemic. And right now, having science news you can trust, from variants to vaccines, is essential. NPR Shortwave has your back.

About 10 minutes every weekday, listen and subscribe to Shortwave, the daily science podcast from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. In terms of raw numbers, the United States is doling out more vaccines per day than any other country, more than 2 million. The next closest country, India, just passed 1 million daily doses this week, but India has four times the population. There are few nations that per capita have vaccinated a greater share of their population, Israel, Chile, the UK, but the U.S. is near the top of the pack. Nearly one in four adults has already had a dose. On Saturday, we hit a record of 2.9 million vaccinations in one day in America. President Biden announced this week the U.S. will

purchase an additional 100 million doses of vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, even though the country is already scheduled to have enough doses for every adult in America by the end of May. I'm doing this because in this wartime efforts, we need maximum flexibility. There's always a chance that we'll encounter unexpected challenges or there'll be a new need for a vaccine effort, a vaccination effort. Now, reporters at the White House asked the president, well, what if the U.S. has a vaccine surplus? The surplus will, if we have a surplus, we're going to share it with the rest of the world. But the White House has also suggested that the extra vaccine could be used

here, possibly for children if authorized or as booster shots for adults. Biden also pointed out the U.S. has already committed $4 billion to an international effort to supply vaccines to low- and middle-income countries. That effort is known as COVAX. But critics of it point out that it's competing for the same vaccines that richer countries are buying up. This is not something that can be stopped by a fence, no matter how high you build a fence or a wall. So we're not going to be ultimately safe until the world is safe.

And so we're going to start off making sure Americans are taken care of first, but we're then going to try to help the rest of the world. Thank you. Worldwide, more than 325.5 million vaccine doses have been administered. That's 4.2 doses for every 100 people. But those doses are not flowing everywhere equally. If you break it down by continent, North America and Europe are vaccinating their populations way faster than others. Elsewhere, some countries are facing supply problems. Others are grappling with logistical hurdles and powerful vaccine disinformation. This week, we gathered three NPR correspondents stationed in different countries to hear how the vaccine effort is going internationally. Julie McCarthy covers the Philippines.

Dia Hadid is based in Islamabad. And Ruth Sherlock is in Beirut. The three of them spoke to NPR's Mary Louise Kelly. Welcome all three of you. Hello, Mary Louise.. Welcome, all three of you. Hello, Mary Louise. Julie, you start. The Philippines is getting a significant number of its vaccines from China.

Let's start there. How's it going? Well, the Philippines has just over a million vaccine doses. 500,000 are from AstraZeneca. And 600,000 are from the Chinese vaccine maker Sinovac, a donation from China. And the Philippine health care workers are finally getting vaccinated. But Dr. Maaluddin Birwar with the National Kidney and Transplant Institute told me he took the Sinovac shot out of desperation. Ninety five percent of doctors, Mary Louise, at the country's biggest hospital said they're wary of Sinovac and how much protection it provides. Trials show strikingly different results.

But Birwar says he read the data. He's convinced that Sinovac was safe to use and he'll take his chances on efficacy. So Birwar decided for a vaccine that won't harm him against a virus that could. Here he is. What's at stake? It's your life. So for me, I didn't want to gamble with my health and my life. So I decided to take it. It's not really like saying I trust the government.

It's just that's the only thing you can give me right now. So I have no choice. The Philippines has secured Western vaccines, but they haven't arrived. China really has stolen the march in distributing vaccines there. Dia, hop in here, because Pakistan's also gotten a bunch of vaccine from China. Is that right? Are you seeing or hearing the same distrust there? Yeah, we do get a sense of that here, Mary Louise. Consider a recent poll of more than 500 doctors found only 9% were willing to take Sinopharm. 9%? Wow.

Yeah, 9%. And it's a different Chinese vaccine than the one that's being offered in the Philippines, but the sentiment is broadly similar. Doctors say it's because Pakistanis see Chinese products as shoddy. But it's the only vaccine presently available because the Chinese government donated half a million batches. But even a month after frontline health workers began being vaccinated, only about half that supply has been used. Government health officials do say the rollout is going on smoothly. But consider this, health ministers of Pakistan's two largest provinces have had to threaten their health workers to get jabbed. And so experts say if that's what it's

like for health workers, vaccinating the public is going to be an even bigger challenge. And that's not just because the available vaccine here is Chinese, but because COVID hasn't really hit Pakistan very hard. And so there isn't a sense of urgency. I want to circle back to these questions about how the rollout to the general public might go. But Ruth Sherlock, let me bring you in. What is the general situation in Lebanon right now? So Lebanon got a $34 million loan from the World Bank to buy its first tranche of the vaccines. It's the Pfizer vaccine. It's the first country to be given this kind of loan. So, you know, keen to make it all work,

the World Bank tried to make Lebanon promise that there would be no waster or favoritism in how these vaccines get distributed. They even tasked the Red Cross to monitor the process. And did it work or was there waster? People jumping the line. Well, they have been. And, you know, it's people right at the very top,

including the president. So just days after the vaccination campaign started, a group of politicians ordered up a van full of vaccines to Parliament where they got it off the books, apparently without the monitors looking. The president is in his 80s, so at least he's old enough to qualify for those eligible for this round of vaccines,

but others weren't. And the health minister was quoted as trying to justify this by saying it was a move to boost politicians' morales. But you know, lots of Lebanese mocked him scornfully for that comment, pointing out that it's healthcare workers that have been going through hell in this pandemic. And the health minister's comment also seems especially tone deaf, given that Lebanon is going through a catastrophic economic crisis that experts agree is largely brought on by the government, by corruption and by ineptitude. Speaking of presidents in your part of the world, Ruth, I saw the news this week that Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, has tested positive. I know you're not in Syria, obviously, but you cover Syria quite closely from Lebanon. And it got me thinking about just the incredible challenges of trying to pull off a vaccination program in a war zone. How's it going there?

Well, it's extremely complicated, as you say, Mary Louise. So for starters, the country is divided into different areas of control. COVAX, that's the global mechanism for getting vaccines to poorer countries, has promised a batch of vaccines to both the Syrian regime and opposition rebels. In the opposition-held areas in Idlib province, for example, one of the key problems is that these areas are so battered. You know, hospitals have been destroyed by airstrikes. Doctors have been killed. That there's barely even the infrastructure to distribute these vaccines. Then you have the regime-held parts of the country. Vaccinations there are underway,

though, as you noted, President Bashar al-Assad and his wife, Asma, have come down with COVID-19. The real issue in this area is whether the government will play ball in making sure everybody that needs it gets the vaccine. Rights groups say there's a precedent here where the regime politicizes aid, trying to steer help from the United Nations and other aid groups, or in this case, vaccines, to areas where loyalists live. The World Health Organization says the regime has promised to cooperate, but lots of aid workers I've spoken to who operate in Syria say they're skeptical.

Let me loop back to the Philippines and Pakistan, because Julie and Dia, you were both talking about how skeptical healthcare workers, doctors are in these countries. What about the general public and how the rollout might play out? Julie, you first. Well, it's going to be a big climb. There is vaccine hesitancy already built into the system, into the country over a botched anti-dengue vaccine a few years ago where children died. But the big picture now in the Philippines is public health policy colliding with foreign policy. President Rodrigo Duterte leans heavily towards China. He reviles the Western vaccines. But the public, the Philippine public, is on a different page.

Before the pandemic, opinion polls showed a deep distrust of China. So a negative reaction to a vaccine made in China is fairly predictable. But the Philippines now has nearly 3,000 new cases a day. It has the second worst outbreak of COVID-19 in Southeast Asia. It needs to contain this thing. And low public confidence in vaccines is a real threat to achieving that. And, Dia, in Pakistan? Well, here, health officials will be challenged to max vaccinate.

As I said before, there really isn't here a sense of urgency. But that's complicated by something else. Here, there are pockets of violent resistance. Militants routinely try to kill vaccinators. So experts say authorities might just end up focusing on high priority groups like health workers, the elderly, Pakistan's large numbers of foreign workers, and international students who likely need the vaccine to travel. NPR international correspondents Dia Hadid, Julie McCarthy, and Ruth Sherlock. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography.

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