The Pandemic’s “Holy Grail”, the Elusive Vaccine: For the “Global Public Good” or an Inward-looking Assertion of Vaccine Nationalism?

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Commerce & Business, International Relations, Politics, Public health,, Science and society

At this point in the war on COVID-19 there are over 120 separate vaccination projects—involving Big Pharma, the public sector, academe, smaller biotech firms and NGOs—all working flat out worldwide trying to invent the ‘magical’ vaccine that many people believe will be necessary to bring the current pandemic to an end. While nothing is guaranteed (there’s still no cure for the HIV/AIDS virus around since the Eighties), the sheer weight of numbers dedicated to the single task, even if say 94% of the efforts fail, there’s still a reasonable chance of success for achieving a vaccine for coronavirus✱ [“Former WHO board member warns world  against coronavirus ‘vaccine nationalism’”, (Paul Karp), The Guardian, 18-May-2020, www.theguardian.com].

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(Source: CEPI)

If and when the vaccine arrives, will it get to those in greatest need? The way the coronavirus crisis has been handled between nations so far doesn’t exactly give grounds for optimism. Collective cooperation on fighting the pandemic has been sadly absent from the dialogue. We’ve seen the US attack China over coronavirus’ origins with President Trump labelling it the “China virus” and the “Wuhan virus”, and China retaliating with far-fetched accusations of America importing the virus to Wuhan via a visiting military sporting team, and the whole thing becoming entwined in a looming trade war between the two economic powers❂.
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(source: www.socioecomonics.net)

The advent of COVID-19 has introduced us to terms such as “contact tracing”, “social distancing”, “covidiot” and the like, but recently we‘ve been hearing a new term thrown about, one with more ominous implications – “vaccine nationalism”. As the scattered islands of scientific teams continue the hunt for the “silver bullet” that presumably will fix the disease, there is a growing sense that the country or countries who first achieve the breakthrough will adopt a “my nation first” approach to the distribution of the vaccine. There are multiple signs that this may be the reality…the US government has launched the curiously named “Operation Warp Speed”, aimed at securing the first 300 million doses of the vaccine available by January 2021 for Americans [‘Trump’s ‘Operation Warp Speed’ Aims to Rush Coronavirus Vaccine’, (Jennifer Jacobs & Drew Armstrong), Bloomberg, 30-Apr-2020, www.bloomberg.com]. In the UK Oxford University is working with biopharma company AstraZeneca to invent a vaccine that will be prioritised towards British needs.

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(Source: IndiaMart)

A “vac race”
Not to be outdone, China, operating through Sinovac Biotech, is at the forefront of testing potential cures for COVID-19. The pressing need for a vaccine to safeguard its own population aside, Beijing’s rationale includes a heavy investment in national pride and the demonstration of Chinese scientific superiority (cf. Trump’s motivation). The Sino-US rivalry over finding a cure for the pandemic has been compared to the Cold War era ”Space Race” between the US and the USSR (Milne & Crow). A political war of superpower v superpower on a new battlefield…noted as bring part of a longer trend of the “securitisation of global health “ where the health objective increasingly has to share the stage with issues of national security and international diplomacy (E/Prof Stuart Blume, quoted in ibid.).

An environment of competition in lieu of collaboration
Even prior to the start of serious talk about the vaccine, the coronavirus crisis was provoking an “everyone for themselves”, non-cooperative approach. With the onset of equipment shortages needed to combat the virus outbreak, an international bunfight developed over access to PPE (personal protection equipment). 3M masks destined for Germany were intercepted by the White House and re-routed to US recipients; French president, Emmanuel Macron, seized millions of masks that were on route to Sweden; Trump purportedly tried to buy CureVac, a German biopharma company working on the vaccine [‘Why vaccine ‘nationalism’ could slow the coronavirus fight’, (Richard Milne & David Crow), Financial Times, 14-May-20320, www.ft.com/]. India (under Hindu nationalist Modi), the world’s largest supplier of hydroxychloroquine (touted as a cure for the virus), withheld it from being exported. As part of this neo-protectionism of the corona medical trove, more than 69 countries banned the export of PPE, medical devices and medicines [‘A New Front for Nationalism: The Global Battle Against a Virus’, (Peter S Goodman, Katie Thomas, Sui-Lee Wee & Jeffrey Gettleman), New York Times, 10-Apr-2020, www.nytimes.com].

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Politics and economics over science and global health?
Will narrow self-interest and economic advantage prevail? Will Big Pharma sell the virus panacea to the highest bidders? A zero-sum game  in which those who can’t afford the cost fall by the wayside? There are precedents…the distribution of the H1N1 vaccine for the 2009 Swine Flu was predicated on the purchasing power of the higher-income countries, not on the risk of international transmission [‘The Danger of Vaccine Nationalism’, (Rebecca Weintraub, Asaf Britton & Mark L Rosenberg), Harvard Business Review, 22-May-2020, www.hbr.org/]. The availability of the vaccine is seen as integral to restarting the global economy (Milne & Crow).

The eclipse of multinationalism?
With WHO in the eyes of some international players seemingly tarnished by its relationship with China, and by Trump’s undermining of its effectiveness by threatening to withdraw American support, multilateralism is on the back foot. There have been some attempts to stem the tide, CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations’)▣, with a mission of promoting a collective response to emerging infectious diseases, is trying to advance both the development of coronavirus vaccines and equitable access to them (http://cepi.net/).

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Getting to an “equitable distribution” of the vaccine
As CEPI recognises, and is committed to redressing, there is no formal mechanism in existence for fairly distributing vaccines for epidemics…one step being taken is to try to get  an equitable distribution strategy accepted by the G20 nations. The only way forward to ensure that allocation is fair and prioritised according to needs is through a coordinated global effort (Milne & Crow; Weintraub eg al).

The fear is thus well founded that if and when a vaccine is discovered and developed, the richer nations will secure a monopoly over it and prevent it getting to poorer nations where it would be urgently needed by the elderly, the immunocompromised and the “first responder” health workers. There are many who hope fervently that a different scenario will be played out, that a more enlightened type of self-interest will prevail. This would require the wealthier countries seeing the bigger picture – the danger that if they don’t redistribute the cures, the outcome will be an adverse effect on the global supply chain and on the world‘s economies. As Gayle Smith (CEO of “One Campaign“, a Washington-based NGO fighting extreme poverty) put it: it is in the richer countries‘ own interests ”to ensure that the virus isn’t running rampant in other countries” (Milne and Crow). “If an international deal can be reached“, CEPI CEO Dr Richard Hatchett said, ”Everyone will win, if not, the race may turn into a free-for-all” with the losers in plain sight [‘Why the race for a Covid-19 vaccine is as much about politics as it is about science’, (Paul Nuki), The Telegraph (UK), 10-Apr-2020, www.telegraph.co.uk].

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(Source: www.euroweeklynews.com)

PostScript: Its no done deal! – reining in the wave of vaccine optimism
Even some of the scientists working on developing a vaccine are less than sanguine about the prospects. As immunologist Professor Ian Frazer (UQld) explains: there is no model of how to attack the virus. Trying to come up with a vaccine for upper respiratory tract diseases is complicated due to “the virus landing on the outside of you”, as we have seen with the common cold. What’s needed is “an immunise response which migrates out to where (the coronavirus) lands” [‘No vaccine for coronavirus a possibility’, (Candace Sutton), News, 19-Apr-2020, www.news.com.au].

 

_______________________________________________________________________________
✱ a matter of getting “the maximum shots on goal” as Jane Halton, a former member of the WHO board, put it
❂ with Trump aided and abetted in this mission by Peter Navarro (who Bloomberg calls “Trump’s Trade Warrior”) enthusiastically leading the charge in the undeclared trade war with China
▣ with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Pandemic Pastimes: Armchair Epidemiology 101 – Curiouser and Curiouser

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Medical history, Popular Culture, Public health,, Science and society, Sport

BC48FDE2-4DF8-4771-9E1B-C1F7C0F2963CFor most of us the coronavirus crisis is, if not all-consuming, at the front and centre of just about everything at the moment. This pandemic, this pandemocracy, is all over social media, and one of the most curious by-products is how the emergence of this novel virus has spawned a novel social media and sociological phenomena called the armchair epidemiologist… instant experts with their own special take on how COVID-19 should be handled, what it’s all really about, the whole thing de-mystified and unravelled in a nutshell. As you will see below, it is unfortunate at this pivotal moment that the practice of responsible social distancing hasn’t always been matched by the practice of responsible social media distancing.

29CD1A1A-6CD9-403A-B9C0-DA10957DA4D9Why is armchair epidemiology a burgeoning sub-industry at the moment? One general explanation lies in the character of the pandemic itself. It’s a troubling time right across the globe, people are naturally anxious about the disease—especially if you are unlucky enough to be living in a country that is one of the major hotspots at the moment—so talking about it can be a calming mechanism of sorts, working it all out in your head so it makes sense. As Noah Feldman neatly puts it, “one way for humans to cope with anxiety is to seek rational mastery over observable phenomena”. This becomes doubly the case in this situation because of the nature of this particular ‘beast’. The lack of “concrete empirical data” on the disease, the shortcomings in the science as it stands now, means that even amongst the genuine experts, uncertainty reigns (‘Will the Armchair Coronavirus Experts Please Sit Down’, Noah Feldman, Bloomberg: Opinion, 25-Mar-2020).  The experts have disagreed over which is the correct strategy to follow in the fight to contain the virus, what works, what doesn’t, full lockdowns, “let it rip” herd immunity, whether or not to use face masks, etc✱. Add to this the questionable way some countries have handled their outbreaks—eg, the slowness of for instance Italy, the US and Britain to take decisive steps in the early phase of the pandemic—the result, a critical failure to get on top of COVID-19 before the curve took off on it’s rapid skyward trajectory. Into this void the amateur epidemiologists have been only too happy to step.

BBFEF828-0542-42ED-992E-8C9D7E26485FOf course another reason for the house-bound commentariat directing it’s focus and energies towards the COVID-19 debate, could be sheer boredom. There’s only so much time on any given ‘Groundhog’ day you can spend bingeing on modish, ”must see” television series before you start to suffer mental fatigue and withdrawal symptoms.

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(Image: www.rfclipart.com)

Another explanation of Feldman’s that I am taken with is armchair epidemiology expert as a substitute for armchair sport expert. The suburban “Weekend Norms” of the world ritually delight in analysing the games of football and other sports they watch on the ‘box’ and on Fox,  but courtesy of the pandemic the sporting calendar is denuded, the presence of live sport on our screens is already a fading memory. The average punter, Feldman suggests, may simply, by necessity, have switched from analysing sport to analysing the coronavirus phenomena (the only game in town!).

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(Image: www.geneticliteracyproject.org)

Some observers of the armchair epidemiology contagion have noted an element of the Dunning-Kruger Effect at work here – “a cognitive bias in which people overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific domain” (‘Psychology Today’)◇. This contends that someone’s legitimate expertise in another field “gives them a false sense that their speculation and predictive powers are more informed” than the general person…and thus in this time of global upheaval, they don’t hold back in telling everyone  (‘Elon Musk is the Ultimate Armchair Epidemiologist’, Alex Lauer, Inside Hook, 01-May-2020, www.insidehook.com). Tim Requarth’s example are certain Silicon Valley “data wonks” who have produced “superficially convincing but flawed epidemiological analyses” and “sweeping predictions” of the pandemic to arrive at a conclusion that the emergency restrictions are an overreaction, contradicting the advice of public health experts. The criticism of much of the amateur epidemiology indulged in by non-public health professionals is that they tend to throw data round randomly, get the basic principles skew-whiff and make faulty assumptions. Spare us from the “good intentions” of a plague of DK-19 experts!  (‘Please, Let’s Stop the Epidemic of Armchair Epidemiology’, Tim Requarth, Slate, 26-Mar-2020, www.slate.com).

 

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⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗⥗

✱  or perhaps, like President Trump, they just don’t trust experts, medical or otherwise
◇ described by one cynic as “people lacking the ability to understand their lack of ability”

 

Not Missing the Human Touch: Robots Stepping Up in the Time of COVID-19

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Medical history, Public health,, Science and society

 

Intelligent design, AI, artificial humanoids, bionic life, androids, cyborgs, have all moved outside of the cloistered environment of the lab and the science fiction genre and are all embracing the day-to-day functions of human existence. Well, perhaps not all of these products of imagination and creativity – but with the restrictions placed on human communication in the all–enveloping cloud of the coronavirus crisis, automatons are the new “white knights” coming to the rescue (or relief) of humans.

The sudden emergence of the pandemic has propelled Medtech companies into the war on COVID-19. Drones as well as robots are being enlisted in the fight, taking the load off medical professionals and health care systems. Delivery robots are used as a way of circumventing the danger of human-to-human contagion. UVD robots are employed to kill viruses and bacteria in rooms to avoid the need for human involvement [‘Robots And Drones Are Now Used To Fight COVID-19’, (Bernard Marr), Forbes, 18-Mar-2020, www.forbes.com].

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‘Xenex’ Germ-zapping robots (CBS News)

As healthcare experts and governments search for the optimum strategy to contain and suppress the coronavirus outbreak, other intelligent humans are finding new applications and roles for intelligent non-humans in the health emergency crisis. It starts, appropriately enough for a public health disaster, at the medical coal face, in the ICU wards where doctors and nurses have been overwhelmed, physically and emotionally, with the skyrocketing workload of coronavirus-affected patients. In Lombardy in northern Italy, one of the first hotspots of the pandemic outside of China, six robot nurses have been fast-tracked into hospital service in Varese where they help lighten the human nurses’ face-to-face load and reduce their risk of personal infection. The robots man the wards, monitor the medical equipment and communicate remotely with doctors. Similarly in India, at a hospital in Chennai, ‘Zafi’ the robot does the rounds, transporting food and medicine to virus patients to lessen the risk to hospital medical staff [‘Tommy the robot nurse helps keep Italian doctors safe from coronavirus’, (Flavio LoScalzo), Reuters, 02-Apr-2020, www.reuters.com].

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Pepper the robot  (Photo: Reuters)

Japan is using humanoid robots as reception staff at hotels to greet patients with mild coronavirus symptoms. Robots like ‘Pepper’ at Kyogoku in Tokyo greet arriving patients and instruct them how to check-in while reassuring them with warm and positive messages [‘Pepper the robot set to greet COVID-19 patients checking in Tokyo hotels’, Hindustan Times, 01-May-2020, www.hidustantimes.com].

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With the need for pristine clean surfaces in public spaces to prevent the spread of the virus outbreak, a number of countries now employ robots as cleaners. At Hong Kong International Airport autonomous cleaning robots known as “Intelligent Sterilisation Robots” use UV light and air sterilisers to routinely clean and disinfect key operational areas of the airport [‘Clean me up, Scotty: Hong Kong airport debuts cleaning robots, disinfection booth in fight against COVID-19’, Coconuts, 30-Apr-2020, www.msn.com].

Such medical uses of robots have been replicated across a range of countries hit by the pandemic. With people confined to their homes under quarantine orders and required to maintain a distance of at least 150 cm from other humans, robots on wheels are being increasingly used to deliver products to them, or to deliver food to overworked NHS workers (Britain).

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(Photo: www.uk.news.yahoo.com)

Singapore has brought into service a robot with the decidedly unsexy name of “O-R3”, whose job it is to patrol the city’s parks and monitor the behaviour of joggers. This ever vigilant robot spots transgressors and warns them about the need to practice social distancing in public [‘Robot in Singapore tells joggers to stay home’, SBS, 28-Apr-2020, www.sbs.com.au]. Joggers and walkers in Singapore need to ultra-alert around the parks as the city has a second social distancing-monitor robot, Boston-built Spot the robotic dog (Robocop?)…if O-R3 doesn’t nap the violators, Spot (below) might.

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(Photo: CNA)

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Tunisia’s ‘Robocop’ looks more like a military style armoured vehicle  (Photo: AFP)

Tunisian authorities have had a similar idea to curtail the incidence of virus infection in the capital Tunis. The police have been using a robot (a ‘Robocop’) who ‘walks’ the city beats, stopping and questioning people who it suspects should not be on the streets during lockdown. The Robocop asks people to produce their IDs which can be scanned by the robot’s in-built computer [‘Coronavirus: Tunisia deploys police robot on lockdown patrol’, (Rana Jawad), BBC News, (03-Apr-2020), www.bbcnews.com].

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Robot Cop (Source: The Hindu)

Chennai Police (southern India) are on the same wavelength as Tunis’, deploying it’s new “Robot Cop LD v5.0” equipped with a two-way intercom to surveil citizens in coronavirus hotspots in the city during containment. The Robot Cop is un-humanoid in appearance and has been described as “an oversized box on wheels” [‘Chennai Police Deploys “Robot Cop” in COVID-19 Hotspot’, (Kishalaya Kundu), Beebom, 01-May-2020, www.beebom.com].

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(Photo: BBT University)

Robotic engineers in Japan have produced avatar robots who can stand in for university graduands in virtual graduation ceremonies. BBT University in Tokyo uses ‘newme’ robots dressed in black graduation gowns and caps with mobile screens showing the student’s face attached to a motherboard. The robot proxies line up to be officially presented with a testamur by the university president while the actual graduate watches via Zoom from a safe distance at home [‘BBT University in Japan has graduates attend ceremonies via robots in light of Covid-19’, (Guan Zhen Tan), Mothership, 02-Apr-2020, www.mothership.sg].

Revisiting the Coronavirus Origin Theories

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Medical history, Natural Environment, Public health,, Regional History, Science and society

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(Image: KPBS)

China notified the World Health Organisation on 31 December 2019 of a series of “pneumonia-like” cases popping up in Wuhan, however it took some time for peripheral parts of the country to get wind of the burgeoning health crisis. Information from the government, when it did come, was pretty sketchy in the early stages of the outbreak. Soon after Chinese migrant workers began returning home from Wuhan, rumours of what might have caused the virus started to circulate in the regions.

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Zoonotic source
As the infection rates in Wuhan and Hubei province started to steeple in early February, there was lots of speculations about animal transmission to coronavirus’ “Patient Zero”. Civets, snakes, seafood, wolf cubs, rats—all live wildlife sold at the Wuhan ‘wet’ markets—got mentions as possible candidates for transmission. The story most heard and retold at the time was that it was bats that had transmitted the pathogen to humans at the Hua’nan markets⌧  (‘How It All Started: China’s Early Coronavirus Missteps’, (J Page, WX Fan & N Khan), WSJ, 06-Mar-2020), www.wsj.com). The Rhinolophus bat (Horseshoe bat) has been identified as the specific type of bat likely to have carried the infection (‘Coronavirus animal origin’, Crikey, 16-Apr-2020, www.crickey.com.au). A few weeks later there was a new prime suspect – the pangolin, the world’s most trafficked mammal. Chinese virologists⚘ had traced the virus to pangolins being sold at those same seafood markets in Wuhan (‘Mystery deepens over animal source of coronavirus’, (David Cyrenoski), Nature, 26-Feb-2020, www.nature.com).

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 (Image: Frans Lanting / National Geographic)

The inevitable conspiracy theories: Genetically-engineered virus
Since February China and the US have exchanged accusations that Covid-19 was deliberately created as a biological weapon—all without foundation (‘No, COVID-19 Coronavirus Was Not Bioengineered. Here’s The Research That Debunks That Idea’,  (Bruce Y Lee), Forbes, 17-Mar-2020, www.forbes.com). Chinese officials have also made the wild claim that the US Army brought the virus to Wuhan when it participated in the Military Games in the city in October last year. 

B041C7DB-C8DE-46DD-9276-AA94462605CD🔺 Wuhan markets (Photo: NOEL CELIS /AFP via Getty Images)

Over the last couple of months, another story disseminated by southern Republicans has been doing the rounds of the conservative media in America. It espouses the view that coronavirus originated not from a wet market but from a biosafety lab in Wuhan (Wuhan Institute of Virology), from an accidental leakage. Again this view is bereft of any hard evidence to support it but this hasn’t stopped President Trump and his allies at Fox from seizing on it!✱ (“’Biological Chernobyl’: How China’s secrecy fueled coronavirus suspicions”, (Q Forgey, D Lippmann, N Bertrand & L Morello), Politico, 17-Apr-2020, www.politico.com).

While Covid-19 continues to wreak its trail of carnage worldwide, media and social media platforms will no doubt continue to throw up theories about the causes but until China releases the clinical and epidemiological data on the Wuhan outbreak,  the pandemic’s precise origin cannot be scientifically determined (Politico).3747AFE1-BAC3-4B1C-8F33-BF283C622CD2

🔺 Exporting America’s homegrown “Gates-gate”conspiracy – ‘Covidiocy‘ to Melbourne
(Photo: AAP/Ricky Barbour)

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⌧ bats are major reservoirs of many viruses, and prevalent in both the SARS and MERS outbreaks
⚘ scientific evidence for the pangolin as the culprit is based on a high match of its genome sequencing with that of SARS-CoV-2, however the research remains unpublished and therefore unreviewed; it is thought that pangolins may have been intermediate hosts for the disease …
bat ⇝ pangolin ⇝ human
✱ these are only the less implausible theories, a raft of other ludicrous and wacky conspiratorial notions have been floated purporting to explain the epidemic’s genesis – ranging from Bill Gates having manufactured the virus to establish  himself as the ‘Czar’ of US health care, to Covid-19 being caused by the installation of the 5G cellphone network (‘Coronavirus spawns conspiracy theories’, (David Knowles), Yahoo!news, 18-Apr-2020, www.yahoonews.com)