It cannot be overstated how dangerous disinformation is and how vital it is to be voices of truth. — Molly
The Biden administration has vowed to increase the rate of vaccinations as COVID-19 continues to spread uncontrollably across the entire U.S., with 90,000 people predicted to die in the next four weeks. President Biden announced plans to acquire another 200 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech and is devising ways to allow retired nurses and doctors to administer vaccines. Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, says the Trump administration’s lies and inaction around the pandemic laid the groundwork for the current explosion in cases. He also warns that a “globalized anti-science movement” has grown stronger in recent years, spreading dangerous disinformation and threatening the public health response to COVID-19. “It’s a killer, because now people are tying their political allegiance to not getting vaccinated, to not wearing marks, to not social distancing.”
AMY GOODMAN: Another 4,000 people died in the United States from COVID-19 over the past day in what’s been the deadliest month since the pandemic began. The Biden administration projects as many as 90,000 more people will die in the next four weeks as the virus spreads uncontrollably across the United States. The total number of recorded COVID deaths in North and South America has just topped a million — nearly half the world’s total. And that actual death toll is believed to be even higher.
On Wednesday, the Biden White House vowed to take more steps to increase the rate of vaccinations, after the Trump administration left behind no national vaccination plan. Biden’s coronavirus adviser, Andy Slavitt, said it will take months before many people are vaccinated.
ANDY SLAVITT: We are taking action to increase supply and increase capacity. But even so, it will be months before everyone who wants a vaccine will be able to get one.
AMY GOODMAN: To help speed up the effort, the Biden administration is devising ways to allow retired nurses and doctors to administer vaccines. Earlier this week, Biden announced plans to acquire another 200 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech.
The race to vaccinate the nation comes as more infectious — and possibly more deadly — variants of the virus are spreading across the globe, including variants originating in the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa. On Wednesday, the Biden administration admitted the United States is far behind many other countries in genetic sequencing to track the different variants. By one ranking, the U.S. is 43rd in the world.
We now go to Houston, Texas, where we’re joined by Dr. Peter Hotez. He’s co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Hotez is the author of the forthcoming Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-science.
Dr. Hotez, thanks so much for joining us. If you can explain right now the new approach that the Biden administration is taking here in the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, yet we have more than a fifth of the world’s deaths and more than a fifth of the world’s infections, with less than 5% of the population? What is happening? And why is the rollout so problematic, where about half — what? — 20 of 40 million vaccines are not accounted for?
DR. PETER HOTEZ: Yeah. You know, we’ve had huge issues around COVID-19 containment and control all through 2020. And there were two pieces to that, mostly coming out of the Trump White House. There was this insistence, number one, on not having the federal government in the lead, having the individual states take the leadership, with the federal government providing the backup support for supply chain management and that sort of thing. But the states never had the epidemiologic horsepower, didn’t have the modeling, didn’t have the knowledge base to really know how to contain this virus. And so that was a failed strategy.
And then you had, over the summer, or late spring, early summer, this concerted disinformation campaign coming from the White House to downplay the severity of the epidemic, dismiss masks as being an important public health control tool, spectacularizing hydroxychloroquine, which really had no impact. And all of those combined led to this steep acceleration that we saw in the summer in the Southern states, then in the Midwest in the fall.
And then, with the National Vaccine Program, there really wasn’t much of a national vaccine program. There was Operation Warp Speed, which was a development program for new vaccines, but then there were no real logistics for getting it out to individuals to be vaccinated. The logistics were about putting the boxes on the backs of the FedEx and UPS trucks and delivering them to the states without any national plan.
So, this is what the Biden administration has inherited. And now it’s a matter of trying to catch up as rapidly as possible and actually create a program for vaccinating the American people. And it’s tough, because we have a very depleted health system that’s overly reliant on the pharmacy chains and the hospital chains. It’s not a health system as we would know it with a carefully orchestrated system of community clinics and that sort of thing.
So, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, and we’re not doing well. We’ve only vaccinated about 5 or 6% of the American population. We need to get to about 75% before we interrupt transmission. And we have to do it soon, with all the new variants coming in. And so, now there’s a race against the new variants. And I think that means we have to vaccinate around 3 million Americans a day to get those half a billion immunizations — 240 million people times two doses each — over the next few months. And it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to get there, either.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. Hotez, could you talk about — you’ve written about this problem, of course, in a Washington Post — a recent Washington Post article. What will happen, if the scenario that you’re suggesting is essential, namely, 500 million — that’s half a billion — vaccines in the next five months — if those are not given in the next five months, what do you see happening in the U.S., in particular, given the new variants that have surfaced?
DR. PETER HOTEZ: Well, the bottom line is, the deaths will increase. Our Centers for Disease Control estimates that the new U.K. variant, for instance, could become a dominant variant in the U.S. as early as the spring. And we also have the Brazilian variant here. As far as we know, we don’t have the South African variant here. But, you know, we’re not really looking. As you pointed out, we rank near the bottom of doing genomic sequencing of viruses, even though we have the world’s largest capacity for doing genomic sequencing. So, again, there’s been this disconnect between the science, our scientific horsepower and our public health response. And hopefully we can begin correcting that in the new administration.
So, the numbers are chilling. We’ll get to 500,000 Americans who will lose their lives, and get to 600,000. And the reason I wrote the piece in The Washington Post was to kind of remind not only the Biden administration, but the American people, that we don’t have to get there. We just need to do some levers, in terms of pulling and pushing, in order to get the population vaccinated quicker. And I think part of that relies on not being so reliant on the mRNA vaccines, that tend to be a fussy technology in terms of scale-up and production, and bringing on some of the other vaccines, including the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, which we think may be approved by the European Union tomorrow, and if we could do the same in the United States, get the J&J adenovirus vaccine. And, you know, we have a recombinant protein COVID vaccine that’s now being produced in India. They have the capacity for producing 1.2 billion doses. And no one from the federal government has approached us about bringing that vaccine into the U.S.
So I think there are many more things that we can do to get the population vaccinated faster. And it was a tough op-ed to write, because, you know, the Biden administration gets it. They’re science- and evidence-based. They’re trying to — they’ve got good people in place. They’ve inherited a mess. And so, you don’t — a week into their term, it’s not really fun to say, “Yes, but you’ve got to do more. Here’s what I suggest.” But, you know, when it comes to saving lives, sometimes you have to do those things.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Dr. Hotez, in addition to all of the logistical problems that you’ve outlined in administering the vaccines here in the U.S., and also, of course, around the world, you’ve written about the rise of strong anti-science aggression in the U.S. If you could talk about that and the fact that the World Health Organization has listed a vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 threats to global health, and a recent Kaiser Foundation poll — in December, that is — that found that 25% of Americans say they will probably or definitely not take the vaccine, even once it becomes available to them?
DR. PETER HOTEZ: Yeah. In fact, we’ve also published a similar paper. I was part of it, but it was led by a group of social scientists at Texas A&M University in the School of Public Health. And both the Kaiser survey and our survey found the same thing, that there are two very different groups that are highly vaccine hesitant in the U.S. when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines. One are what we call Trump voters, what the Kaiser survey called Republicans, but same idea of people from the political right. And then add the African American population. If you think about it, wow, what two very disparate types of populations that are meeting around vaccine hesitancy.
So, trying to understand that, I think with the — in terms of the political right, this is a movement that we saw building up in 2015 around the time of the Trump election. It really took off where I am, in Texas, with the formation of organizations like Texans for Vaccine Choice, Oklahomans for Vaccine Choice. This came out of a new health freedom or medical freedom ideology that government can’t tell us what to do. And then, starting in 2020, those same anti-vaccine groups glommed on protests against masks and social distancing. And this is when you had national anti-vaccine groups form. And then this globalized to Western Europe last year, and there were anti-mask, anti-vaccine protests linked to QAnon and the same kind of health freedom ideology. And these protests were in Trafalgar Square in London, in Berlin, in Paris. So, this is now a full-on, globalized anti-science movement.
And today we’re releasing a paper that will come out in PLOS Biology, the Public Library of Science, PLOS Biology, really looking at the historical thread of this anti-science movement. And it’s a killer, right? Because now people are tying their political allegiance to not getting vaccinated, to not wearing masks, to not social distancing. And this was promoted by the White House through their disinformation campaign last year. And on top of that, you have the Russian government flooding our internet with what’s been termed “weaponized health communication” through their bots and trolls. So, looking at this, what was a kind of a fringe group has now blossomed in a terrible way to a full-on anti-science confederacy or empire. And we have to figure out ways to counteract that. So I go through the historical thread of that in this PLOS Biology paper.
To continue the transcript, and for the original full program: https://www.democracynow.org/2021/1/28/covid_19_vaccination_rollout_peter_hotez
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