Karachi

Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah said on Friday that Covid-19 and Omicron cases have started spreading fast but the government has not yet decided to impose lockdown, as the situation is under control.

“On January 1, 2022 there were 300 Covid-19 cases and on January 12, 2022 some 2289 cases have been detected – which means almost 2000 cases have increased within 12 days,” he said while talking to newsmen.

He added that the Omicron variant has also started showing fast infections and we have 331, of them three belonged to Hyderabad.

To a question, Shah said that though the COVID cases were increasing but even then the situation was under control. “Our health facilities are not under pressure, therefore we are not planning to impose lockdown,” he said and added that his government would follow the decisions of NCOC in respect of lockdown or closing of schools.

Earlier, inaugurating the Asif Rehman Simulation Center at Dow University of Health Sciences, Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah urged Dow University to establish a Central Simulation Center at Dow so that the rest of the public sector medical universities can enable their professionals to learn through virtual reality.

Health Minister Dr. Azra Pechuho, VC, DUHS Prof. Saeed Qureshi, Pro V.C. Prof. Zarnaz Wahid, Faculty members, Principal D.D.C Arshad Hassan, Dow class of 1990 –Dr. Asim Hashmi, Dr. Faryal and others were present.

“Since Dow University has established a state of the art “Simulation Centre” with the assistance of Dow Class-1990 that would enable health professionals, particularly the novice, to learn more efficiently, I want a Central Simulation Center to be established at Dow university and its satellite centers be established in all the government medical universities and colleges so that students in other universities and colleges can learn through virtual reality,” he said and added his government was ready to invest for the purpose.

It may be that Simulation-based medical education is defined as any educational activity that utilizes simulation to replicate clinical scenarios and its tools serve as an alternative to real patients.

The CM said that healthcare simulations could be said to have four main purposes – education, assessment, research, and health system integration in facilitating patient safety. He urged all universities to give special attention to research areas in which we lag.

The chief minister after unveiling the plaque to inaugurate the center visited different wards and witnessed the demonstration of a simulation process performed in different wards.

The Centre has been established at a cost of Rs.230 million, of which Rs.30 million have been contributed by the Dow Class 1990.

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Sindh Courier

The post Surge in Covid-19 cases, yet no lockdown – Murad Shah first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Karachi

In order of ascertain prevalence of Omicron in the province, Sindh government conducted 351 tests of which 175 were detected as Omicron which constitutes 50 percent of the tests beside delta and other variants.

This emerged in a meeting held under the chairmanship of Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah here at CM House on Monday.

The meeting was told that out of 175 few had travel history predominantly from the UK, Dubai, USA, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Nairobi and Angola.

It was pointed out that during the last 30 days – Dec 3, 2021 to Jan 2, 2022, the number of COVID cases have started increasing. On December 3, 2021, some 261 new cases were detected which kept on showing an upward trend and finally on January 2, 2022 reached 403.

At this the chief minister said that the situation was critical and urged the health department to start an extensive vaccination drive and increase tests of the people all over Sindh. He urged people of the province to adopt precautionary measures otherwise his government would have to take strict measures.

The meeting was told that during the last 30 days, Dec 4, 2021 to Jan 1, 2022, 51 patients died, of them 40 or 78 percent were on ventilators, six or 12 percent off ventilators, five or 10 percent at home.

To a question, the CM was told that so far 29,579, 471 vaccinations have been administered all over Sindh.

The meeting was attended by Minister Health Dr. Azra Fazal Pechuho, Advisor law Murtaza Wahab, Parliamentary Secretary on Health Qasim Soomro, acting Chief Secretary Qazi Shahid Pervez, Secretary Health Zulfiqar Ali Shah, Dr. Ari of Indus Hospital and other concerned officers.

 Current situation

Fortunately no death stemming from Coronavirus reported on Monday however 339 new cases emerged when 10,632 tests were conducted.

Murad Shah, in his statement said that fortunately no death was reported on Monday. He added that till last Sunday the number death and was 7,673. He said that 10,632 samples were tested which detected 339 cases that constituted 3.2 percent current detection rate. He added that so far 7,169,055 tests have been conducted against which 481,949 cases were diagnosed, of them 97.1 percent or 468,200 patients have recovered, including 33 overnight.

The CM said that currently 6,076 patients were under treatment, of them 5,880 were in home isolation, 42 at isolation centers and 154 at different hospitals. He added that the condition of 148 patients was stated to be critical, including 16 shifted to ventilators. According to the statement, out of 339 new cases, 236 have been detected from Karachi, including 110 from South, 93 East, 18 Central, 10 Korangi, 3 Malir and 2 West. Hyderabad has 25, Shaheed Benazirabad 13, Dadu and Tharparkar 10 each, Badin 9, Jamshoro 8, Matiari 7, Shikarpur 4, Ghotki, Umerkot and Sukkur 3 each, Jacobabad, Sanghar, Tando Allahyar and Mirpurkhas 2 each.

Vaccination

Sharing vaccination data the CM said that 29,313,787 vaccinations have been administered upto December 31st, and added during the last 24 hours 265,684 vaccines were inoculated – in total 29,579,471 vaccines have administered which constituted 53.62 percent of the vaccine eligible population. The chief minister urged people of the province to follow SOPs. (PR)

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The post 175 Cases of Omicron detected in Sindh first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Nazarul Islam

Adults wherever they may be, have little time for reflection, as the New Year dawns—about matters beyond our own back yard. The “tidal wave” of Omicron has struck, the Nightingale hospitals are understaffed, the PCR tests have run out, the hospitality industry has been hit by panic, and large parts of the economy seem barely able to function as hundreds of thousands self-isolate.

And yet, however bad matters of public health might be, and however diverting the implosion of possibly the most dishonest and incompetent government in British history, there is scope for life to get much, much worse.

Recently, I found myself in an intelligent conversation with a minister in the present government. That itself was something of an achievement: one reason why the governments may be so bad, because thee heads as far as possible—may have surrounded themselves with yes-men and deep mediocrities. There is hope, perhaps, that they would be slow to recognize laziness, nonseriousness and inability to cope with the high office responsibilities; and that their inadequacies would distract the electorate from focusing on him.

My ‘interlocutor’ slipped through the net — and had been thinking about the wider world quite deeply.

And the conclusions were depressing. They were, in short, that it is an exceptionally dangerous place, far more so than most realize; and that however grim 2020 and 2021 were, 2022 could be the most perilous year, particularly for the West, since the end of the Cold War.

We talked through his reasons for this gloom, beginning close to home. Since it was at the forefront of most people’s minds, we discussed the fear, promoted by the government that the Healthcare Services could collapse as a result of the supposedly highly-transmissible Omicron variant. In Britain particularly, before the NHS had reached that stage (with its inevitable effects on public morale), action would have to be taken that would badly affect the economy here, with the promise of a renewed taxpayer-funded furlough scheme if businesses were forced to close.

The Conservative party was divided over the need for such measures, not least because the lethality of the Omicron variant had yet to be proved. Now, although the rate of infections has reached record levels, the rate of hospitalizations and deaths lag far behind. This is encouraging a substantial cadre of MPs to argue that we must learn to live with Covid, supported by a vaccination program.

The new wave of Covid has now attacked America and Europe, disrupting “normal” life. Even “rich” nations such as Germany (where the cost of the pandemic now exceeds €2 trillion, and inflation is above the EU average of 2.2%) are feeling the financial effects of a long period of subsidizing non-productivity; in poorer countries in southern and eastern Europe, the prospects are even more stark, and tempers are fraying.

Italy has a budget deficit of around 10%, and a new wave of restrictions will cause growth targets to be missed. Inflation will drive up interest rates across Europe, and the higher cost of servicing debt would put pressure on everyone with a bank loan or a mortgage: a factor behind, it seems, the Bank of England’s reluctance to raise rates in Britain, a reluctance that cannot be maintained indefinitely.

Poland and Hungary have both been sniping with Brussels over what they consider to be undue EU interference with their internal affairs — Poland about its justice system, Hungary about migration. Both countries, with an eye on the money that Brussels contributes to them — stress in public their commitment to a future within the EU, but an internal debate is being cranked up in both countries about when a breaking point will come, as it did in Britain in 2016. The EU has learned nothing from Brexit — quite the reverse, it seems — which is always a sign that history may repeat itself.

On the eastern, western and southern fringes of the EU, there is a respite in illegal immigration, brought on by the fact that, even in the balmy Mediterranean, it is winter. But the constant traffic (and trafficking) of predominantly economic migrants from Africa into Greece and Italy will keep up and doubtless expand during 2022, with the EU apparently as incapable of restricting it with a coherent policy for all 27 of its members as it was to fight the arrival of the pandemic.

In the East, with the cynical and mischievous support of Vladimir Putin, Belarus has been allowing illegal migrants to mass on its borders with Poland and Lithuania in the hope of destabilizing the Union still further. And Anglo-French relations have, according to various historians, reached a low not seen since Waterloo (the less hysterical might point to the results of the Royal Navy sinking much of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in 1940, before the Nazis could get their hands on it), because of France’s willingness to allow its own illegal migrants easy passage out of its jurisdiction while attempting to enter the United Kingdom.

This has now been compounded by President Macron’s decision (made with an eye to grandstanding before his attempt at re-election) to close his borders to visitors from Britain for fear of importing more Omicron — a disease with which his country is now, in any case, swamped.

The divisions in the EU over the management of the pandemic exploded the myth that the only difficulties in the bloc were over Brexit, and once Britain had gone all would be serene. That serenity has turned out to be elusive, with fissures opening up not just between eastern and western states, but between southern and northern ones.

And there are other aspects of politics within the European Union that make matters seem highly unstable, and inward-looking, as 2022 arrives. Olaf Scholz, the new German Chancellor, has a near-impossible act to follow after Angela Merkel’s 16 years in office. One of his difficulties is that the man who would succeed Merkel as the leading political figure in Europe, Emmanuel Macron, must fight a presidential election in April and May; and despite being notionally of the center is engaging in straightforward Gaullism — or rather populism — to get himself back into the Élysée palace.

With another five-year term under his belt, Macron could successfully pull rank on the novice Scholz. There is nothing in Scholz’s political DNA that suggests he is remotely interested in such a virility contest; instead, he is likely to assume that because Germany has a significantly larger population, and significantly larger economy both in absolute terms and per capita compared with France, that leadership of the EU is his by right.

Macron had no choice but to defer to Merkel; he would defer to Scholz only with insincerity and ill-grace. Suddenly, however, he faces a highly plausible Républicain candidate in Valérie Pécresse, and an off-the-wall populist in Éric Zemmour, who shares many of the views of Marine Le Pen but has none of her movement’s baggage. The French election is one of the least predictable in the history of the Fifth Republic: an outcome that destablizes not just France, but the EU, is not beyond possibility.

Yet it is in wider geopolitics that my ministerial friend believed the real dangers lie. Until recently, these were questions that attracted the interest only of foreign policy wonks, but they have started to force their way out of the foreign pages and into the front parts of newspapers and home pages of websites. Might Russia continue to unsettle Europe, and especially Germany, with threats to limit gas supply, and so push up energy prices during the coldest months of the year?

Perhaps not, since those higher prices wouldn’t compensate for the loss of business and Putin needs all the money he can get. But is Russia massing 100,000 of its troops on the border with Ukraine purely to twist the tail of the West, or does it propose to invade and raise its flag over Kiev? The answer to that, given Putin’s populist tendencies, is less predictable.

Similarly, have China’s naval exercises off Taiwan been merely a show of strength, or does it intend to attempt re-incorporating into the homeland the island that resisted the Communist takeover in 1949, and has flourished by comparison ever since? And if you were an aggressive power that has either little idea of western democratic standards, or little interest in emulating them, what better time could you choose to engage in lethal provocation than when an under-performing Joe Biden is, nominally, leader of the Free World?

Recently Biden admitted that if either China or Russia were to engage in acts of aggression the United States would be unable to intervene. Contrast this with the highly ambitious rhetoric of our Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, who has warned Russia of “severe consequences” were it to invade Ukraine. But both Biden and Truss feel economic sanctions would bring Russia to heel, which would seem to be the triumph of hope over experience.

Sanctions have been operating on Russia since Putin’s first attack on Ukraine in 2014, and have been tightened progressively. However, they have had no effect on the behavior of the country’s kleptocratic leadership, whose management of rivals to Putin ensures that the “electorate” in Russia has nowhere else to go, despite the existence of courageous resistance groups. All gung-ho threats of sanctions need to be tempered by recognition of Russia’s indifference to the views of tens of millions of its people.

Recent protests by the West about the treatment of Alexei Navalny, one of Putin’s highest-profile opponents, have done nothing to get him released from his corrective labor camp just over 100 miles from Moscow.

No-one expects America or any other western power to send troops in to resist an invasion of either Ukraine or Taiwan.

But the West has forgotten one Cold War lesson, which is that neither of these potentially aggressive powers — Russia very much one in decline, in terms of its population, wealth and demand for its resources, whose international last hurrah this might conceivably be; China very much one in the ascendant — gives the slightest respect to other “powers” they consider decadent.

And decadence in this case has been the determination of the West, and particularly of Britain and of EU nations, to run down their armed forces since the end of the Cold War. Again, the purpose of these forces was not aggressive: it was to observe the old truth that no nation can engage in serious diplomacy unless it has force as a last resort. When Russia and China spot so-called powers that take a relaxed view of defending themselves, they act accordingly.

Biden could take a detached view of the Ukraine problem (as the Obama administration did when Russia helped itself to the Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine in 2014) because no NATO power was involved. But what if Russia were to engage in further provocation, by demanding permit- and visa-free travel across Lithuania from its puppet state of Belarus to its exclave of Kaliningrad, formerly Konigsberg in East Prussia, a spoil of the Second World War?

If Putin really wants to turn ugly, he would demand a 100km land corridor across the Suwalki gap, which runs from Belarus along the border between Poland and Lithuania. Both are members of the EU and NATO. What would Biden, or for that matter the EU, do then?

It could be that we sail through 2022 with vaccination programs bringing down Covid, with the West’s economies reviving rapidly, stability reasserting itself in its democracies, America establishing a new authority in the world and the bullies of Beijing and Moscow abandoning their aggressive designs.

For good measure, inflation could suddenly fall, and the West’s ambitious climate change policies could be implemented without some of the feared economic consequences. Sadly, however, the alternative to each of those conjectures appears the more likely short-term outcome.

But what should perhaps worry the West most of all, at the dawn of this dangerous year, is that none of its constituent nations has a leader of the experience, the clout and the moral authority required to deal with this bouquet of challenges if, or when, they arrive.

Nazarul Islam

The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.

The post Dawn of a perilous year 2022? first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Ewen Callaway

The fast-spreading Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant is highly likely to compromise some of the protection from vaccines, suggest the first laboratory studies of Omicron’s ability to evade immunity.

But the preliminary results — released overnight by teams in South Africa, Germany, and Sweden, as well as the Pfizer-BioNtech collaboration — hint that protection conferred by existing COVID-19 vaccines won’t be totally wiped out, and that boosters should improve immunity to Omicron.

“We’re likely to see reduced effectiveness of vaccines against preventing infection,” says Penny Moore, a virologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who co-authored one of the studies. “I think it’s a strong argument to get boosters out there.”

The studies, which measure the capacity of antibodies in people’s blood to block the infection of cells in a dish, have not yet been peer reviewed, and do not tell researchers the extent to which vaccines’ ability to protect against COVID-19 — in particular, its most severe forms — could be compromised by Omicron.

“We still need to wait for more effectiveness data and clear signals from the places where this is blowing up first,” says Ben Murrell, an interdisciplinary virologist and immunologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who co-led one of the studies.

Many mutations

Researchers in Botswana and South Africa identified Omicron in late November, and teams worldwide have since been racing to understand the variant’s properties and the risks it poses. Preliminary data from South Africa and elsewhere suggest that the variant is highly transmissible — spreading several times faster than Delta — and might have the capacity to infect people who are immune to other variants.

Omicron carries a large number of mutations in its spike protein — the prime target of immune responses — and some of these changes, when present in other variants, affect the ability of antibodies to recognize the virus and block infection.

Scientists used two types of laboratory assay to test how well Omicron can evade neutralizing, or virus-blocking, antibodies triggered by vaccination and infection. One approach uses infectious SARS-CoV-2 particles, typically isolated from individuals infected with Omicron. The other employs pseudovirus particles — a genetically modified version of another virus (often HIV) that uses the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to infect cells.

The results from the four separate teams all suggest that Omicron blunts the potency of neutralizing antibodies more extensively than any other circulating SARS-CoV-2 variant. But the magnitude of Omicron’s impact varied between the different studies, which examined blood from people with different vaccination and infection histories.

A study led by virologist Alex Sigal, at the African Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, found that serum – the antibody-containing portion of blood — from 12 people who received the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine was 40 times less potent against Omicron, on average, compared to an earlier strain of SARS-CoV-2. That was similar to two other studies: one reported by Pfizer and BioNtech in an 8 December press release, and the other released on Twitter by virologist Sandra Ciesek at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.

A fourth study, led by Murrell and virologist Daniel Sheward, also at the Karolinska Institute, reported a smaller reduction in levels of Omicron neutralizing antibodies in two different groups of participants: 17 healthcare workers, who had all been previously infected, and 17 Swedish blood donors. The researchers cannot determine the vaccine status of the anonymous blood donors, but say they will soon update their paper with vaccination information from the healthcare workers.

Despite differences in the labs’ results — which are common in such virus neutralisation assays — their conclusions are similar, and show that Omicron’s effects on neutralizing antibodies are “not complete knockouts”, says Murrell. “The magnitude is still a little up for question.”

Booster protection

The results suggest that vaccines are likely to be significantly impacted by Omicron — but precisely how much is hard to say. Sigal’s team found that people who were previously infected before vaccination tended to have higher levels of neutralizing antibodies against Omicron than vaccinated people with no known history of infection. “I think retaining some neutralization against Omicron can only be helpful,” says Moore, a co-author on the study, whose lab is also working on neutralization experiments.

A prior case of COVID-19 isn’t the only way to improve antibody levels against Omicron. The Pfizer-BioNtech study found that people who had received a third dose of its vaccine had neutralizing antibody levels against Omicron comparable to those against other SARS-CoV-2 variants that were raised by 2 vaccine doses. Based on those results, “we expect significant protection against any type of COVID-19 mediated by Omicron in individuals who have received the third vaccine”, BioNTech CEO Uğur Şahin said at a press conference on 8 December.

Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London, agrees that jacking up antibody levels with booster shots should help protect against Omicron, in the same way that boosters have improved protection against the Delta variant. “Omicron is scarier than anything we’ve known before, because it’s a little bit worse still than Delta. But we were in quite a bad situation with Delta in un-boosted populations,” Altmann says.

Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, says that it will be important to determine the extent to which immune mechanisms other than neutralizing antibodies, such as T-cells, ameliorate severe disease caused by infection.

It will also be important to see further studies confirming the latest results, because variables such as the type of cell used can affect their conclusions, says Pei-Yong Shi, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “In the next week or ten days, there will be a lot of confirmatory results coming out,” he says.

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Courtesy: Nature

The post Omicron likely to weaken COVID vaccine protection first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Nazarul Islam

In hindsight, I continue to believe that last year’s pandemic had not been so bad for everyone. I mean everyone! Vaccine manufacturers— notably Moderna and Pfizer—have gained billions of dollars in value from making and selling the injections. Again, the rise of the Omicron variant means they will benefit from another windfall—doing this all over, again; the CEO of Pfizer thinks we’ll be needing boosters every year for years, and it seems unlikely that he’ll be too disappointed about that. The vaccines have ended up in rich arms rather than poor ones, leading to accusations of vaccine “apartheid”. Or, perhaps you are inclined to think differently?

Globally (filthy) rich Pharma’s indecent behavior is not new. For example: there’s a thing in patent law—called “evergreening”. It is most famously used by big pharmaceutical companies or entities that don’t want their expensive drugs to reach the end of their 20-year patent and become available as a generic, so they develop a very slightly different version of the same drug and get a new patent on that.

Take the example of drug Venlafaxine. This is an antidepressant, marketed as Effexor. As it neared the end of its patent, the manufacturer developed a new version – desvenlafaxine, marketed as Pristiq. Desvenlafaxine is what the body naturally breaks venlafaxine down into; your liver takes the venlafaxine and metabolises it into desvenlafaxine. It is also either less effective or no more effective than the original.

Industry doctors know that the patent for Effexor expired in December 2008; Pristiq entered the market in early 2009. By 2014, Pristiq was the second most prescribed antidepressant in the US, despite being “a slightly worse version of an older antidepressant with no proven advantages that also costs fifteen times as much”. (A month’s supply of Effexor at the time cost $20; a month’s supply of Pristiq cost $300.)

The buck does not stop here, because it’s not the only bad thing they do. When a drug reaches the end of its patent, other companies can make generic versions. To encourage that, the US FDA says that the first company to do so gets 180 days of exclusivity, so it can establish itself in the market. “Until recently,” says Dr. Vishal Gulati, a venture capitalist specializing in healthcare, “it was legal for the original company to pay off the company to not launch the product.

Companies would get a license to make the generic, and then be paid to not launch it.” They were literally paying to prevent patients from getting cheaper healthcare.

Don’t we realize something sinister is going on here? There’s a very tempting explanation, which is that big pharma is evil. But I never find that satisfying as an explanation. Instead, I’d rather think about incentive structures.

Well…there is an inherent tension at the heart of any knowledge-based business — anything which develops new technology or information and sells it. You want it to do two things: to create that knowledge, to advance our understanding; and to spread it around, so that the world can benefit from it. Information is a “non-rival good”: if I benefit from it, that doesn’t stop you from benefiting from it too.

An old fashioned example is a lighthouse. If I see the beam, and avoid the rocks, it doesn’t stop you from doing the same. By contrast, a hamburger is a “rival good”: if I eat it, you can’t.

In today’s world, some people can make money selling hamburgers. But it’s much harder to do so by operating a lighthouse.

The trouble with knowledge-based businesses is that they are more like lighthouses than like burgers. If you create a new piece of software, or a new technology — or a piece of investigative journalism — then there’s nothing stopping me from simply copying it. And then you won’t make any money off it. That makes it less likely that you’ll spend the time and effort to create any more new things. I am sure my reader friends associated with the industry are very familiar with this.

To safeguard this, we created intellectual property laws in order to stop what would happen with research based, new and effective products. Creators of a thing can get a patent or a copyright, and are granted exclusive rights to produce that thing for some number of years — 20 years, in the case of pharmaceuticals.

Problem solved, right? Well, obviously not. Because we don’t just want a world in which new things are created.

We also want a world in which everyone can gain access to those things.

Intellectual property rights prevent us from making extremely cheap copies of things that we already know how to make. If a foreign correspondent reports human rights abuses in India, it’s best for society if as many people as possible to read that report, so that we can act on it.

But intellectual property rights (and their downstream effect, paywalls in journalism) stop that from happening.

This is a direct trade-off. “My mental image of all this is we’re basically squeezing a balloon,” says Owen Barder, a development economist. You can squeeze the top, and move the problem to the bottom. Or you can squeeze the bottom, and move the problem to the top. But the balloon is still there.

And this isn’t the whole problem. We want pharma companies to develop drugs and vaccines for the developing world. But people in the developing world can’t pay as much money as people in the rich world, obviously.

We do need to understand the fact that Pharma R&D is expensive: sometimes billions of dollars go into research simply one drug. And for every drug that is successful, there might be 20 that aren’t, and the research into those needs to be paid for as well. That money needs to come from somewhere. At the moment, it comes from patients in rich countries paying sometimes hundreds of dollars for pills that might, individually, cost a few cents to make.

The “marginal cost” of each dose is tiny — Jacobin and Oxfam fume that the Covid vaccines, for instance, are priced at many times the manufacturing cost — but that cost needs to cover the “fixed cost” of all the R&D (and marketing, staff costs, etc.) you’ve put in.

The ideal solution to this would be selling the drug to everyone at the maximum cost they’re willing to pay. Charge hundreds of dollars in the US, a bit less in the UK and EU, much less in Bulgaria, and almost nothing in Bangladesh! If you could perfectly price-discriminate, you’d be charging above the marginal cost in lots of countries, and at the marginal cost for the ones who couldn’t afford more than that,” says Barder.

But that’s not possible. For one thing, if they tried it, people would buy the pills in Kushtia, Bangladesh for a few cents and fly to the US and sell them at a profit. But more important, Congress or Parliament (and the press) would kick off – why are our citizens paying hundreds of times over the odds? It would be politically impossible to do.

So, instead, they make the drug at a single price, which only rich countries can pay, until the sales in those countries have paid off the R&D costs. “Drug companies are just responding to the incentives we’ve set,” says Barder. “They’re doing the thing we asked them to do.”

However…. the temptation, when faced with problems like these, is to argue that big pharma should be destroyed, and all drug research run by publicly funded university laboratories. And maybe that would work – but it’s a huge gamble. Pharma companies do some bad things, but they objectively do make drugs that are hugely valuable to society.

And it’s not that publicly funded bodies are free of bad incentives. Academica has huge problems of its own — academics are rewarded for publishing lots of papers, rather than for necessarily finding out true things. Government’s incentives are to remain popular, rather than to fund the most effective things: it would be easy to imagine lots of money going to fund treatments for picturesque children with cancer, rather than for, say, diabetes, even if it were a much less effective way of saving lives.

Then again, it still might work. At the moment, as Barder says, there’s a tendency to “socialize the losses and privatize the gains”: private companies get rich off research that is often begun in university departments. A starting point might be to pump lots of money into university research, let them bring drugs to market, and see if they can outperform big pharma.

What would be really crazy, though, is to destroy big pharma first, and then hope that our new nationalized version can keep new drugs coming through.

A more low-key version, opines Dr. Gulati, (not Kapil Sharma show, fame) might be for academic institutions to become better at demanding equity in pharmaceutical products that are based on their early research. He also suggests that countries such as the UK could negotiate cheaper drugs by offering the NHS as a source of clinical trial subjects — as has happened with Novartis’s new cholesterol drug inclisiran, aka Leqvio.

Obviously, that is hugely valuable to pharma companies, and it’s something the British NHS can do easily and safely, with its huge, centralized, well-protected data systems.

Those ideas might help make drugs cheaper in the UK and other rich countries: getting them to poorer countries is a different problem, with different solutions. Governments could buy out patents — if a firm thinks it can make $10 billion over the next 10 years for its product, we could say that we’ll give them the $10 billion now (or a bit less) in exchange for the rights to make the drug available at cost.

Barder likes one idea, put forward by the late economist Jean Olson Lanjouw. “Her suggestion was,” says Barder, “that if I’m AstraZeneca and I show up at the UK patent office asking for IP protection for a new drug, the patent office should say ‘Well done. Can you tell me what you expect the market value for this drug to be in all 200 countries in the world?’”

Next, AstraZeneca or whoever would say “I expect most of my revenue to come from the US, UK, EU and Japan, and relatively little from sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh.” And the patent office would grant them a patent, on the condition that they license it for free use in those countries that make up the bottom 2% of their revenue. “It’s like a tax of 2%,” says Barder, “but those countries might well make up 80% of the disease burden.”

It hasn’t been tried, as far as I know, but it’s worth thinking about, and it would avoid the problems of America’s Congress or Britain’s Parliament demanding that the drug be made cheap here — although it would only work for global diseases that affect the rich world as well as the poor — diseases like cancer, or heart disease, or hypertension. It wouldn’t help incentivize research into diseases like malaria or dengue, which have no impact on the rich world.

The “advanced market commitment”, which was discussed here, and involves Western governments promising to give pharma companies a bonus for every dose bought by developing nations, might be more effective for that.

Andrey Zarur, the CEO of the biotech firm GreenLight has been on record to state that those who are producing their own mRNA vaccine for Covid at the moment, looks at the whole thing from a different angle. Pfizer was not designed to make low-cost therapeutics available to every corner of the world,” he says: it’s a 150-year-old company with settled investors and a particular way of working.

He compares it to Apple. “You have a $1,000 iPhone 13,” he says. “Who’s that designed for? My children. Idiot teenagers with rich parents.” Poorer countries need smartphones too, but the solution is not to force Apple to sell smartphones to users in Nepal or Malawi at a discount. “What you need is an innovative company with different processes.”

Instead of demanding changes from 150-year-old companies that are very good at the specific things that they do, create smaller, newer companies which do the thing you want. “There’s six billion people (other than one billion who are rich) in the developing world,” says Zarur. “You should be able to figure out a way to turn a reasonable profit with reasonably priced drugs.”

It’s obviously true that pharma companies have done bad things. It’s also obviously true that they’ve done marvelous things — I have relatives who are alive today who wouldn’t be without the pharmaceutical industry’s products.

Perhaps there are other systems which could have produced those drugs, other than the undeniably cutthroat capitalist system we have today. But any system would have bad incentives and obvious, easy-to-publicize disasters.

Should this not be the job of governments in this situation to find the bad incentives, the market failures, and to patch them; to make it work, to decide which end of the balloon to squeeze? Moving forward…The Indian government, for example, decided a few years ago that it would not accept evergreening any more — it passed a law saying that it would only offer new patents on drugs that were sufficiently different from existing ones.

In 2013, the government won a court case against Novartis, which had tried to get a new patent on a cancer drug, imatinib mesylate — a crystalline version of an existing cancer drug, imatinib. The government said that the new version was no better than the existing one and was simply an attempt to squeeze more money out of the healthcare system.

And this had really worked! You could catch on the argument (as Novartis did) that it will reduce innovation; but the point is you can change the system, change the incentives, encourage the behavior you want, without having to smash the system entirely.

And that is how we can work through disparities of the great divide of the rich and the deprived masses!

Nazarul Islam

The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.

The post Pandemics Created Big Pharma Monsters first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Smriti Mallapaty

More than 50 countries have stepped up border controls to slow the spread of Omicron, a highly mutated SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern that is sweeping through South Africa. But researchers say many of the restrictions — especially those targeting only travelers from a handful of countries — are unlikely to keep Omicron out, and come at significant cost to the countries concerned.

Scientists in some of the affected countries also say that travel bans risk slowing down urgent research on Omicron, by limiting the arrival of imported lab supplies.

“I’m not that optimistic that the way in which these measures are being rolled out right now will have an impact,” says Karen Grépin, a health economist at the University of Hong Kong, who studies border-control measures.

“It’s too late. The variant is circulating globally,” agrees Kelley Lee, who studies global health at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.

Dangerous deterrent

Most travel bans target South Africa, which raised the alarm about Omicron on 24 November, and Botswana, which also reported early cases. Many nations are also banning visitors from neighboring Lesotho, Eswatini, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

In South Africa’s most populous province, Gauteng, Omicron accounts for the majority of virus samples sequenced in the past few weeks. The World Health Organization (WHO) has designated Omicron a variant of concern because it has numerous mutations in its spike protein, some of which could make it more infectious or improve its ability to evade antibodies.

The extent of travel restrictions varies. The United States is preventing only non-US citizens who have been in selected countries from entering; Australia is also requiring 14 days of quarantine for its own citizens and residents who have visited those countries in the past two weeks.

Researchers say border restrictions might deter nations from alerting the world to future variants. They will also slow down urgent research, because few planes carrying cargo — including lab supplies needed for sequencing — are now arriving in South Africa. Researchers are racing to understand how Omicron’s transmissibility and ability to evade immunity created by vaccines differ from those of pre-existing variants of SARS CoV-2. They’re also investigating the relative severity of the illness Omicron causes.

“The travel ban will paradoxically affect the speed at which scientists are able to investigate,” says Shabir Madhi, a vaccinologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Researchers might also struggle to share samples with global collaborators.

Threat to genomic surveillance

Tulio de Oliveira, a bioinformatician at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, says the slashing of commercial flights could threaten crucial genomic surveillance efforts by a network of institutions in the country. “By next week, if nothing changes, we will run out of sequencing reagents,” he says.

Earlier this week, in response to the border restrictions, the WHO published guidance that recommended against travel bans to control viral spread. The advice includes specific recommendations for measures that would be useful, including quarantining new arrivals, and testing travelers for SARS-CoV-2 before and after they make their journeys.

The WHO guidance represents a clear shift in researchers’ understanding of the effectiveness of travel restrictions over the course of the pandemic. Before COVID-19, scattered data led many public-health agencies to denounce border restrictions — although almost every country imposed them in early 2020 anyway. But the pandemic has revealed that restrictions can be useful in certain contexts1, especially for relatively geographically isolated nations such as Australia2 and New Zealand.

However, more rigorous studies are needed to flesh out when and how restrictions work best, in particular for countries with more porous borders, says Steven Hoffman, an international lawyer and epidemiologist at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Buying time

One clear lesson has been that restrictions are most effective when they are implemented rapidly, but the Omicron-related border closures were too late, says Grépin.

The variant has now been detected on every populated continent and in more than 20 countries and territories, including the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan. Some nations acquired the infection even before South Africa reported the variant to the WHO. “As soon as countries start looking for it, they’re finding it, so the advantage of time is probably gone,” says Grépin.

Restrictions are also probably most effective at slowing the number of initial cases in a country when they reduce the total volume of international arrivals, rather than when they pick and choose specific countries, says Lee.

For example, one modelling study3 from the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, which closed its borders to non-residents on 4 May 2020, found that the restrictions helped to reduce the average number of COVID-19 cases by 92% in the 9 weeks after they were imposed.

For border-control measures to be effective, they also need to be comprehensive, including regular testing and at least a week of quarantine4,5 for those travelers who do arrive, says Catherine Worsnop, who studies international cooperation during global health emergencies at the University of Maryland in College Park. But this, she says, is something “most countries have not done”.

Border-control measures should be used alongside efforts to strengthen public-health interventions such as social distancing, mask wearing and vaccination, says Grépin, because genomic studies6 have shown that cases will eventually slip through.

Ultimately, travel restrictions are intended to buy countries time to prepare their health systems for Omicron’s potential impact. But unless they implement domestic measures, it’s hard to know what “we’re buying time for”, adds Worsnop.

__________________________

Courtesy: Nature

The post Omicron-variant border bans ignore the evidence, say scientists first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Ewen Callaway & Heidi Ledford

Barely a week has elapsed since scientists in Botswana and South Africa alerted the world to a fast-spreading SARS-CoV-2 variant now known as Omicron. Researchers worldwide are racing to understand the threat that the variant — now confirmed in more than 20 countries — poses to the world. Yet it might take scientists weeks to paint a more complete picture of Omicron, and to gain an understanding of its transmissibility and severity, as well as its potential to evade vaccines and cause reinfections.

“Wherever I go, everyone says: tell us more about Omicron,” says Senjuti Saha, a molecular microbiologist and director of the Child Health Research Foundation in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “There is so little understanding of what’s going on, and that’s true, even for scientists.”

Nature rounds up what scientists know so far about the Omicron variant.

How fast is Omicron spreading?

Omicron’s rapid rise in South Africa is what worries researchers most, because it suggests the variant could spark explosive increases in COVID-19 cases elsewhere. On 1 December, South Africa recorded 8,561 cases, up from the 3,402 reported on 26 November and several hundred per day in mid-November, with much of the growth occurring in Gauteng Province, home to Johannesburg.

Epidemiologists measure an epidemic’s growth using R, the average number of new cases spawned by each infection. In late November, South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) in Johannesburg determined that R was above 2 in Gauteng. That level of growth was last observed in the early days of the pandemic, Richard Lessels, an infectious-disease physician at KwaZulu-Natal University in Durban, South Africa, told a press briefing last week.

Gauteng’s R value was well below 1 in September — when Delta was the predominant variant and cases were falling — suggesting that Omicron has the potential to spread much faster and infect vastly more people than Delta, says Tom Wenseleers, an evolutionary biologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Based on the rise in COVID-19 cases and on sequencing data, Wenseleers estimates that Omicron can infect three to six times as many people as Delta, over the same time period. “That’s a huge advantage for the virus — but not for us,” he adds.

Researchers will be watching how Omicron spreads in other parts of South Africa and globally to get a better read on its transmissibility, says Christian Althaus, a computational epidemiologist at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Heightened surveillance in South Africa could cause researchers to overestimate Omicron’s fast growth. But if this pattern is repeated in other countries, it would be very strong evidence that Omicron has a transmission advantage, adds Althaus. “If it doesn’t happen, for example, in European countries, it means things are a bit more complex and strongly depend on the immunological landscape. So we have to wait.”

Although genome sequencing is needed to confirm Omicron cases, some PCR tests can pick up a hallmark of the variant that distinguishes it from Delta. On the basis of this signal, there are preliminary indications that cases, although extremely low in number, are rising in the United Kingdom. “That’s certainly not what we want to see right now and suggests that Omicron could indeed also have a transmission advantage in the UK,” Althaus adds.

Can Omicron overcome immunity from vaccines or infection?

The variant’s swift rise in South Africa hints that it has some capacity to evade immunity. Around one-quarter of South Africans are fully vaccinated, and it’s likely that a large fraction of the population was infected with SARS-CoV-2 in earlier waves, says Wenseleers, based on heightened death rates since the start of the pandemic.

In this context, Omicron’s success in southern Africa might be due largely to its capacity to infect people who recovered from COVID-19 caused by Delta and other variants, as well as those who’ve been vaccinated. A 2 December preprint1 from researchers at the NICD found that reinfections in South Africa have increased as Omicron has spread. “Unfortunately, this is the perfect environment for immune-escape variants to develop,” says Althaus.

How well the variant spreads elsewhere might depend on factors such as vaccination and previous infection rates, says Aris Katzourakis, who researches viral evolution at the University of Oxford, UK. “If you throw it into the mix in a highly vaccinated population that has given up on other control measures, it might have the edge there.”

Researchers want to measure Omicron’s ability to evade immune responses and the protection they offer. For instance, a team led by Penny Moore, a virologist at the NICD and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, is measuring the ability of neutralizing, or virus-blocking, antibodies triggered by previous infection and vaccination to stop Omicron from infecting cells. To test this in the laboratory, her team is making ‘pseudovirus’ particles — an engineered version of HIV that uses SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein to infect cells — that match Omicron, which harbours as many as 32 changes to spike.

Another South Africa-based team, led by virologist Alex Sigal at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, is conducting similar tests of virus-neutralizing antibodies using infectious SARS-CoV-2 particles. So is a team led by Pei-Yong Shi, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, who is collaborating with the makers of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine to determine how it holds up against Omicron. “I was really very concerned when I saw the constellation of mutations in the spike,” he says. “We just have to wait for the results.”

Previous studies of Omicron’s spike mutations — particularly in the region that recognizes receptors on human cells — suggest that the variant will blunt the potency of neutralizing antibodies. For instance, in a September 2021 Nature paper2, a team co-led by Paul Bieniasz, a virologist at Rockefeller University in New York City, engineered a highly mutated version of spike — in a virus incapable of causing COVID-19 — that shares numerous mutations with Omicron. The ‘polymutant spike’ proved fully resistant to neutralizing antibodies from most of the people they tested, who had either received two doses of an mRNA vaccine or recovered from COVID-19. With Omicron, “we expect there to be a significant hit”, says Bieniasz.

How will vaccines fare against Omicron?

If Omicron can dodge neutralizing antibodies, it does not mean that immune responses triggered by vaccination and prior infection will offer no protection against the variant. Immunity studies suggest that modest levels of neutralizing antibodies may protect people from severe forms of COVID-19, says Miles Davenport, an immunologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Other aspects of the immune system, particularly T cells, may be less affected by Omicron’s mutations than are antibody responses. Researchers in South Africa plan to measure the activity of T cells and another immune player called natural killer cells, which might be especially important for protection against severe COVID-19, says Shabir Madhi, a vaccinologist at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Madhi, who has led COVID-19 vaccine trials in South Africa, is also part of efforts to conduct epidemiological studies of vaccines’ effectiveness against Omicron. There are anecdotal reports of breakthrough infections involving all three vaccines that have been administered in South Africa — Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer–BioNTech and Oxford–AstraZeneca. But Madhi says researchers will want to quantify the level of protection against Omicron provided by vaccines, as well as by previous infection.

He suspects that the results will be reminiscent of how the AstraZeneca–Oxford vaccine performed against the Beta variant, an immune-evading variant that was identified in South Africa in late 2020. A trial led by Madhi found that the vaccine offered little protection against mild and moderate disease, while a real-world analysis in Canada showed greater than 80% protection against hospitalization.

If Omicron behaves similarly, Madhi says, “we’re going to see a surge of cases. We’re going to see lots of breakthrough infections, lots of reinfections. But there’s going to be this unhinging of the case rate in the community compared to the hospitalization rate”. Early reports suggest that most breakthrough infections with Omicron have been mild, says Madhi. “For me, that is a positive signal.”

Will current boosters improve protection against Omicron?

The threat of Omicron has prompted some rich countries, such as the United Kingdom, to accelerate and broaden the roll-out of COVID vaccine booster doses. But it’s not yet clear how effective these doses will be against this variant.

Third doses supercharge neutralizing-antibody levels, and it’s likely that this will provide a bulwark against Omicron’s ability to evade these antibodies, says Bieniasz. His team’s work on the polymutant spike found that people who had recovered from COVID-19 months before receiving their jabs had antibodies capable of blocking the mutant spike. To Bieniasz, those results suggest that people with repeated exposure to SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein, be it through infection or a booster dose, are “quite likely to have neutralizing activity against Omicron”.

Does Omicron cause milder or more severe disease than previous variants?

Early reports linked Omicron with mild disease, raising hopes that the variant might be less severe than some of its predecessors. But these reports — which are often based on anecdotes or scant scraps of data — can be misleading, cautions Müge Çevik, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of St Andrews, UK. “Everyone is trying to find some data that could guide us,” she says. “But it’s very difficult at the moment.”

A major challenge when assessing a variant’s severity is how to control for the many confounding variables that can influence the course of disease, particularly when outbreaks are geographically localized. For example, reports of mild disease from Omicron infection in South Africa could reflect the fact that the country has a relatively young population, many of whom have already been exposed to SARS-CoV-2.

During the early days of the Delta outbreak, there were reports that the variant was causing more serious illness in children than did other variants — an association that dissolved once more data were collected, Çevik says.

Researchers will be looking for data on Omicron infections in other countries. This geographical spread, and a larger sample size as cases accrue, will give researchers a better idea of how generalizable the early reports of mild disease might be. Ultimately, researchers will want to conduct case-controlled studies, in which two groups of participants are matched in terms of important factors such as age, vaccination status and health conditions. Data from both groups will need to be collected at the same time, because the number of hospitalizations can be influenced by overall hospital capacity in a region.

And, crucially, researchers will need to control for the level of economic deprivation. A rapidly spreading new variant may reach vulnerable groups more rapidly, Çevik says, by nature of their work or living conditions. And such groups often experience more severe disease.

All of this will take time. “I think the severity question will be one of the last bits that we’ll be able to untangle,” she says. “That’s how it happened with Delta.”

Where has Omicron spread and how are scientists tracking it?

More countries are detecting the Omicron variant, but the capacity to rapidly sequence viruses from positive COVID-19 tests is concentrated in wealthy countries, meaning that early data on Omicron’s spread will be skewed.

Surveillance efforts in Brazil and some other countries are taking advantage of a distinctive result on a particular PCR test that could allow them to pinpoint potential Omicron cases for sequencing, says virologist Renato Santana at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. The test looks for segments of three viral genes, one of which is the gene that encodes for the spike protein. Mutations in Omicron’s spike gene prevent its detection in the test, meaning that samples containing the variant will test positive for only two of the genes.

Even so, not everyone uses that test and it could take some time before Omicron’s spread is fully mapped. Despite some guidelines urging countries to sequence 5% of their samples that test positive for SARS-CoV-2, few can afford to do so, says computational virologist Anderson Brito at the All for Health Institute in São Paulo, Brazil. And Brito worries that the travel bans enacted by some countries against South Africa, and other southern African nations, in the wake of its Omicron discovery could discourage governments from sharing genomic surveillance data. “We are punishing those who did a good job,” he says.

In Bangladesh, which sequences about 0.2% of positive coronavirus samples, researchers would be eager to ramp up sequencing to keep tabs on Omicron and other emerging variants, says Saha. But resources are limited. Bangladesh is recovering from a large dengue outbreak, she adds. “In the global south, we are all worried about COVID, but let’s not forget our endemic diseases,” Saha says. “We can only do so many.”

_________________________

Courtesy: Nature

The post How bad is Omicron? What scientists know so far? first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Nazarul Islam

It is extremely difficult for us to maintain our calm when there is yet another variant of the coronavirus, possibly even more transmissible than Delta—dangerously circulating in the United States. The first domestic case — an air passenger from South Africa — was reported in California on Wednesday, and several more have been confirmed since then. But we must stay cool for the moment, anyway.

The spread of the Omicron variant is worth watching, but it does not yet signal a need for drastic measures such as shutting down schools or businesses or holing up inside? We realize that it’s a matter of serious concern. The fact that the Omicron variant’s several mutations on the spike protein, the part of the virus that infects cells, may allow it to get past our current vaccines and lead to more infections.

It is also a matter overall concern that it might be more resistant to treatment with monoclonal antibodies.

However, at this point we just don’t know enough to either relax or panic.

Not all the early indications of this mutant’s behavior are frightening. There’s anecdotal information that infections with Omicron might be no more deadly than Delta and earlier strains, though the numbers of confirmed cases are too small and confined to a limited population for assurance on that.

Hospitals in South Africa, where the variant was first identified, are reporting a big increase in COVID-19 patients, but they have not been overwhelmed….so far.

Some reports have indicated that—those hospitalized were mostly the unvaccinated or partially vaccinated patients!

Again, we are also in better shape to fight this shapeshifter coronavirus. It’s been a wearying roller-coaster ride since March 2020 — and let’s not forget that the Delta variant is still burdening the medical system in many corners of the nation — but we now know more about how the virus operates and how to minimize risk.

Masks still help, without cramping our ability to get through the day. So does avoiding crowded indoor spaces. And of course, getting vaccinated is the most effective thing we can do to avoid serious illness.

Anecdotal evidence further, has suggested that vaccinated people in South Africa were more likely to have mild cases than the unvaccinated. Pressed urgently, the US President had announced yesterday that public health experts believe— that even if there are more breakthrough infections, the current vaccines will still help prevent hospitalization and death.

Vaccine makers have said they can tailor upcoming vaccines to ward off Omicron more effectively, if needed.

Momentarily though, we should feel more frustrated than fearful because the leaders of the U.S. and other developed nations have failed to provide enough vaccine to developing countries, especially in Africa.

When the idea of booster shots in the U.S. were first floated, scientists had warned us that we’d get a lot more bang for our vaccine buck by sending more doses overseas. Not only was that the humane thing to do, but it was a step in the right direction. Obviously, this would benefit everyone. Viruses jump national and even continental borders with relative ease.

The good news today is—60% of Americans are fully vaccinated, but only 24% of South Africans are at this point — and the vaccination rate is much lower for other African countries. So far, only about 12%of the doses promised by the U.S., European Union and various countries to developing nations have been delivered.

Also needed is help in distribution of donated doses; problems with timing and distribution have frustrated efforts to get more Africans vaccinated and resulted in precious doses being tossed.

Despite immediate and inaccurate attacks on Biden from leaders of, responding to Omicron is not a political issue. “More mandates, restrictions and fearmongering will not offset the empty words and broken promises from Biden’s failed administration,” Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said Thursday.

But President Biden has done none of that, other than to impose testing requirements on travelers from the nations most affected by Omicron. Instead, the president is doubling down on vaccines and testing.

What was missing from Biden’s new pandemic strategy was a commitment to helping get more vaccine doses into the arms of people in any area where woefully large numbers remain unprotected.

The more the virus is allowed to circulate, the higher the likelihood of new mutations, especially in those with chronic infections, scientists say. That means we need to vaccinate the world.

The threat from COVID-19 won’t end for the planet until it ends for everyone. Let us learn to live with realities!

Nazarul Islam

The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.

The post Nature has designed viruses to mutate! first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Tom Arms

I told you so. In all humility, I was not alone. The WHO issued a veritable flood of dire warnings. Dozens of NGOs did the same. So did an army of globalists who argued that common sense dictated that Covid is a global problem that requires global cooperation to save lives and a world economy of which we are all a part.

We argued that Africa, with its poor health conditions and poorer health facilities, was likely to produce a highly transmissible mutant virus that would find its way north and bite a Europe and America that ignored Africa firmly in the bum.

I may be overstating the case. Scientists are waiting for more data before a judgement on the seriousness of the Omicron variant. So far there appears to be good news and bad news in initial reports from Africa and the 29 non-African countries to which it has spread in a matter of days.

But there is good reason to believe that the Omicron mutant may not have developed, or we would be able to control it better,  if the developed world had made more vaccines available to the developing world through the WHO’s Covax scheme. Their support was Scrooge-like at best. They made noises and then dispatched a few million here and another million there to a continent which required ten billion of doses.

The result is that an estimated 60 percent of Europeans have been vaccinated and only seven percent of Africans. One billion doses in Europe were destroyed because they were not distributed before their sell-by date.

At the root of this problem is the conflict between the needs of the nation state versus the needs of the world as a whole and the inability of the national politician and their public to comprehend that the two complement more than they compete. Unfortunately that view fails to win votes.

It is an instinct that when faced with fear based on problems such as disease, immigration or economic disaster,  to withdraw behind borders; pull up the drawbridge; lock the doors and shutter the windows. But it is wrong. The virus ignores all those barriers.

Covid is not the only example of the need for counter intuitive international cooperation and statesmanship. Climate change is an even bigger and arguably more important challenge. The pandemic will hopefully become endemic and cease to rule our daily lives. But if nothing is done about global warming the waters will continue to rise and rise and….

And yet China and India managed to scupper the COP26 climate change conference with their last minute spanner to protect their national interest by allowing fossil fuel production, especially coal, at indeterminate levels. It should be clear that they were not the only villains of the piece. Cheering them from the sidelines were Australia, America’s Republican Party, The OPEC countries and Russia.

Even Norway—which is usually associated with the environmental lobby—argued that they should maintain their profitable offshore oil operations. A government spokesman explained: “We use very little the oil. So it is not our responsibility to reduce production. It is the responsibility of the consumers.”

Then there is migration. There were 47.5 million displaced people in the world in 2020, and that was before Western withdrawal from another estimated 3 million. They are victims of climate change, war, and acute poverty. In many instances their problems are the direct consequence of developed world policies.

And yet they are vilified by many in Europe and America when they seek to cross vast land masses or seas to improve their lives or, in many cases, to simply pursue the survival instinct. Governments respond by erecting walls, razor wire fences, and, in some cases (Britain) actually cut overseas aid that helped people stay in the countries of their origin.

They argue amongst themselves about responsibility for the refugees. Sometimes the refugees are used as political pawns (Belarus and to a lesser extent Turkey) to extract money and concessions. In other countries (Britain and France) they are exploited for votes from the large and loud xenophobic minority.

The migration problem, like the pandemic and climate change, can only be solved through international cooperation. In this case involving investment, trade, security guarantees, overseas aid and internationally agreed rules and methods for migration. But this is unlikely to happen because the perceived the needs of the nation state v the refugees.

In modern history there are probably only one and a half attempts to solve world problems with international cooperation. The half was the creation of the League of Nations whose failure was one of the main causes of World War Two. It took the tragedy of an estimated 80 million deaths in the Second Great War to persuade politicians that an international body—the United Nations and its constituent organizations—was needed. It does much good work, but unfortunately it has been perennially hamstrung by the national interests of its membership.

So far the coronavirus pandemic has claimed 5,215,414 lives as of 0900 GMT 3 December 2021. This is still far short of the wartime figures. But the WHO has predicted another 700,000 deaths in Europe alone by the end of February. This was before Omicron made its entrance. What lethal figure has to be reached for the developed nations to accept that Covid in their countries and others can only be defeated through international cooperation?

World Review

• The French Presidential elections are hotting up. Far-right candidate Eric Zemmour announced his candidacy this week. He is Euro-sceptic, virulently anti-immigrant and possibly the most anti-Semitic Jew in European politics. The 63-year-old journalist claims that he will save France from decadence and minorities that “oppress the majority.” Zemmour is neck and neck with seasoned extreme right campaigner Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally Party – Which means that the extreme-right vote is split. The left-wing parties are in disarray and have been effectively written off by the French media in the April presidential elections. On Sunday, primary elections for the Gaullist-oriented Les Republicains ends – There are five candidates: Michel Barnier, Xavier Bertrand, Eric Ciotti, Philippe Juvin and Valerie Pecresse. In the past Les Republicains were described as centre right. But no longer. Emmanuel Macron has stolen those clothes, especially the economic threads. In response, all five Les Republicains candidates have moved to the right with anti-immigration and Eurosceptic policies. All of the above is good news for Macron, who is staunchly pro-European and staying aloof from the immigration debate.  Not that he is popular. His approval ratings have slipped from a high of 48 percent in 2017 to under 20 percent. But he stands alone in the winning circle of the center/center right. At this moment the betting is on Macron to win as the last man standing.
• Another former colony—Barbados—has ditched the British monarch as its head of state. Queen Elizabeth II is out. There are good reasons for the change. It is a natural progression from colony, to self-governing colony, to independent former colony with links to the imperial power and finally the severing of those mainly symbolic ties to a past based largely on the British-imposed slave trade for which Barbadians are seeking reparations. But British and American intelligence think there is more to the story—mainly China. They believe that Beijing is using its economic muscle to move into the Western-dominated Caribbean lake (with the exception of Cuba). Since the turn of the century, China’s investment in Barbados has increased 20-fold. Barbados is now part of China’s belt-road initiative. Chinese construction companies are active on the island as is its Confucius Institute. Barbadian students are being sent to China and Chinese tourists are a regular sight in Chinese-built Barbadian hotels. China is now Barbados’s third largest trading partner after the US and Trinidad and Tobago. The Barbadian government wants to please the country that butters its bread and China is pleased at the departure of the Queen.
• Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov this week floated the idea of a new European Security Pact to “protect Russia from NATO expansion.” How ironic when you consider that NATO was created in 1949 to protect Western Europe from Russian expansion after it had absorbed all of Eastern Europe and a third of Germany. Lavrov’s speech before the influential Organisation of Security and Cooperation (which was the 1975 child of Détente) was long on rhetoric and short on details. Is Moscow proposing a Mark Two Warsaw Pact and a carve-up similar to the Yalta Agreement? If so, Putin could easily have his eye on the following: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia and possibly the Black Sea coastline of Romania in an effort to turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake. He is also keen to keep Finland and Ukraine out of NATO. Both countries are “enhanced partners” and have participated in NATO exercises. But any such pacts are beset with problems. Self-determination is now the political buzzword in Eastern Europe and that means the decision about with whom a country is allied lies with the people of that country rather with a diplomatic coven in Moscow, Washington and Brussels. Central and Eastern Europe have unhappy memories of their membership of the Soviet Empire.
• Britain’s MI6 chief (that is James Bond’s boss) emerged from the shadows this week to give a public warning about China, Russia, Iran and international terrorism. Richard Moore told the International Institute for Strategic Studies that those four areas were, in descending order, the major threats to Britain and the wider Western world. Russia represented the most acute short and mid-term military threat. China was more subtle, invidious and long term. It has, said Mr. Moore, weaponized its economic power to push countries into a “debt trap” and uses its investments to steal security data. The MI6 chief made two other interesting points: He would be making more appearances to gain public support and he wanted to work more closely with data engineers in the private sector to protect British data and counter cyber-attacks. Both could be construed as disturbing trends. One reason a spy chief would want to go public is because he fears that the public may disapprove of his agency’s actions. And secondly, seeking technical support from the private sector blurs the lines between government and the already questionable actions of the social media companies.
• It is not looking good for abortion rights in America. This week the Supreme Court heard the Mississippi case that would ban nearly all abortions after 15 weeks. Currently federal law, as a result of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, allows abortions in all states up until the time the foetus is “viable”, which doctors say is 24 weeks. Except for one case in 1993, the Supreme Court has refused to even consider discussing abortion. At least four, and possibly five, voted to consider Mississippi’s case. So the fact that the Justices listened to arguments was a victory in itself for the anti-abortion lobby. Next was the fact that the tone of several of the Justice’s questions during the hearings was decidedly anti-abortion, especially those from the Trump appointees Amy Comey Barrett and Brett Kavanagh. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Mississippi then 24 other states have anti-abortion laws ready to be placed on the statute books. But that does not mean the end of abortion in America. There are likely to be 26 states (mainly Democratic-controlled) where abortion is expected to still be easily available. This means abortion tourism. But three-quarters of the 630,000 US annual abortions are among low income women. They would have difficulty in finding travel money. They are also the ones least able to support a child. The Supreme Court’s final ruling on the issue is expected in June.

Tom Arms

Tom Arms is Foreign Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of the recently published “America Made in Britain.” He also regularly lectures on international relations.

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