Many countries have no COVID vaccines at all... Vaccine deserts: Some countries have no COVID-19 shots at all https://www.stripes.com/vaccine-deserts-some-countries-have-no-covid-19-shots-at-all-1.672836 N'DJAMENA, Chad — At the small hospital where Dr. Oumaima Djarma works in Chad's capital, there are no debates over which coronavirus vaccine is the best. There are simply no vaccines at all. Not even for the doctors and nurses like her, who care for COVID-19 patients in Chad, one of the least-developed nations in the world where about one third of the country is engulfed by the Sahara Desert. "I find it unfair and unjust, and it is something that saddens me," the 33-year-old infectious diseases doctor says. "I don't even have that choice. The first vaccine that comes along that has authorization, I will take it." While wealthier nations have stockpiled vaccines for their citizens, many poorer countries are still scrambling to secure doses. A few, like Chad, have yet to receive any. The World Health Organization says nearly a dozen countries — many of them in Africa — are still waiting to get vaccines. Those last in line on the continent along with Chad are Burkina Faso, Burundi, Eritrea and Tanzania. "Delays and shortages of vaccine supplies are driving African countries to slip further behind the rest of the world in the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and the continent now accounts for only 1% of the vaccines administered worldwide," WHO warned Thursday. And in places where there are no vaccines, there's also the chance that new and concerning variants could emerge, said Gian Gandhi, UNICEF's COVAX coordinator for Supply Division. "So we should all be concerned about any lack of coverage anywhere in the world," Gandhi said, urging higher-income countries to donate doses to the nations that are still waiting. While the total of confirmed COVID-19 cases among them is relatively low compared with the world's hot spots, health officials say that figure is likely a vast undercount: The countries in Africa still waiting for vaccines are among those least equipped to track infections because of their fragile health care systems. Chad has confirmed only 170 deaths since the pandemic began, but efforts to stop the virus entirely here have been elusive. Although the capital's international airport was closed briefly last year, its first case came via someone who crossed one of Chad's porous land borders illegally. Regular flights from Paris and elsewhere have resumed, heightening the chance of increasing the 4,835 already confirmed cases. The Farcha provincial hospital in N'Djamena is a gleaming new campus in an outlying neighborhood, where camels nibble from acacia trees nearby. Doctors Without Borders has helped supply oxygen for COVID-19 patients, and the hospital has 13 ventilators. The physicians also have plenty of Chinese-made KN95 masks and hand sanitizer. Still, not a single employee has been vaccinated and none has been told when that might be possible. That was easier to accept at the beginning of the pandemic, Djarma said, because doctors all around the world lacked vaccines. That has changed dramatically after the development of shots in the West and by China and Russia that have gone to other poor African countries. "When I hear, for example, in some countries that they've finished with medical staff and the elderly and are now moving on to other categories, honestly, it saddens me," Djarma said. "I ask them if they can provide us with these vaccines to at least protect the health workers. "Everyone dies from this disease, rich or poor," she says. "Everyone must have the opportunity, the chance to be vaccinated, especially those who are most exposed." COVAX, the U.N.-backed program to ship COVID-19 vaccines worldwide, is aimed at helping low- and middle-income countries get access. A few of the countries, though, including Chad, have expressed concerns about receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine through COVAX for fear it might not protect as well against a variant first seen in South Africa. Chad is expected to get some Pfizer doses next month if it can put in place the cold storage facilities needed to keep that vaccine safe in a country where temperatures soar each day to 43.5 degrees Celsius (110 degrees Fahrenheit). Some of the last countries also took more time to meet the requirements for receiving doses, including signing indemnity waivers with manufacturers and having distribution plans in place. Those delays, though, now mean an even longer wait for places like Burkina Faso, since a key vaccine manufacturer in India scaled back its global supply because of the catastrophic virus surge there. "Now with global vaccine supply shortages, stemming in particular from the surge of cases in India and subsequently the Indian government's sequestration of doses from manufacturers there, Burkina Faso risks even longer delays in receiving the doses it was slated to get," said Donald Brooks, CEO of a U.S. aid group engaged in the COVID-19 response there known as Initiative: Eau. Front-line health workers in Burkina Faso say they're not sure why the government hasn't secured vaccines. "We would have liked to have had it like other colleagues around the world," says Chivanot Afavi, a supervising nurse who worked on the front lines of the response until recently. "No one really knows what this disease will do to us in the future." In Haiti, not a single vaccine has been administered to the more than 11 million people who live in the most impoverished country of the Western hemisphere. Haiti was slated to receive 756,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine via COVAX, but government officials said they didn't have the infrastructure needed to conserve them and worried about having to throw them away. Haitian officials also expressed concerns over potential side effects and said they preferred a single-dose vaccine. Several small island nations in the Pacific also have yet to receive any vaccine, although the lack of outbreaks in some of those places has meant there is less urgency with inoculation campaigns. Vanuatu, with a population of 300,000, is waiting to receive its first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine later this month, but it has recorded only three cases of coronavirus, all of them in quarantine. At the Farcha hospital in Chad, nine health care workers have gotten the virus, including Dr. Mahamat Yaya Kichine, a cardiologist. The hospital now has set up pods of health care worker teams to minimize the risk of exposure for the entire staff. "It took almost 14 days for me to be cured," Kichine says. "There were a lot of caregivers that were infected, so I think that if there is a possibility to make a vaccine available, it will really ease us in our work."
Yes, vaccinated people will get Covid infections. That’s a given. I think you’re right that getting the message out that infection in the vaccinated population can and will occur and the importance of the vaccine, or at least the good ones, is the protection against severe illness.
Related... CDC Limits Review of Vaccinated but Infected; Draws Concern https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-of-vaccinated-but-infected-spurring-concerns Little is known about tiny number of Covid breakthrough cases CDC shifts strategy in May to focus only on hospitalized, dead Federal health officials this month decided to limit how they monitor vaccinated people who have been infected with Covid-19, drawing concern from some scientists who say that may mean missing needed data showing why and how it happens. At the end of April, more than 9,000 Americans were reported to be infected after being vaccinated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While that’s a tiny percentage of the 95 million people fully inoculated at the time, researchers still want to find out what specific mechanisms may be spurring the infections. Rare breakthrough cases are expected since no vaccines are 100% effective. But tracking and sequencing the cases helps in figuring out who may be more at risk, whether new variants evade the vaccines and when protection from the shots begins to wane. At the same time, those infected -- some of whom are suffering widespread medical issues, even if they’re not hospitalized -- say they feel lost as a result of the lack of information. “We shouldn’t be narrowing the focus, we should be broadening and develop a systematic plan,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla. At the start of May, the CDC shifted from monitoring all reported breakthroughs to only those that result in hospitalization or death, Tom Clark, head of the vaccine evaluation unit for the CDC’s vaccine task force, said in an interview. The goal of the new strategy, according to the agency: maximize the quality of data collected on cases. Total number of breakthrough infections reported to CDC 9,245 Females 5,827 (63%) People aged 60 and older 4,245 (45%) Asymptomatic infections 2,525 (27%) Hospitalizations 835 (9%) Deaths 132 (1%) The CDC says its numbers are probably an undercount, since their surveillance system is passive and relies on voluntary reporting from state health departments that may not be complete. The agency shifted its strategy because there’s few worrying patterns in the data collected so far, suggesting the focus should be on the most severe cases, Clark said. He added that the agency has planned other vaccine studies, including one with a network of health centers, to compare disease severity and frequency of variant infections between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. “I don’t think we’re missing out on this data,” Clark said. “It’s just sort of a package of how we’re looking at these questions.” Michael Kinch, a former drug developer who’s now associate vice chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis, says as much information as possible should be recorded on breakthroughs. Cases that don’t rise to hospitalization are still important to track, he said, since symptoms that aren’t as severe for someone could eventually lead to hospitalizations. Non-life-threatening symptoms can impact someone’s life greatly, and evolve over time, Kinch said. “It’s essential that we stay on top of this,” he added. “If we let our guard our down, we will pay the price.” Huge Price In late March, several days after she began feeling headaches and light-headedness, Melissa Muldoon, a 35-year-old resident of Buffalo, New York, went on a run and lost consciousness. Muldoon was taken to an emergency room, where she took a Covid-19 test, she said in an interview. The next day, it came back positive more than a month after she had been fully vaccinated. A week later, she began developing new symptoms, she said, including a loss of smell for certain foods, a racing heart and muscle twitches. She said some health professionals questioned how much of a role Covid played, given she was inoculated. But Muldoon wonders how it could be anything else given the quick onset and combination of symptoms. “I’m anxious about what happens if there’s no answer,” she said, “and it just keeps up with random problems or strange things happening with my body that I haven’t experienced before.” What’s Known What’s known so far about breakthroughs is encouraging for the vaccination effort, scientists say, with current research indicating that people in breakthrough cases tend to be either asymptomatic or to have only mild symptoms. There is some evidence as well that vaccination may make illness less severe, according to the CDC, and scientists have also detected infectees that don’t spread Covid to others. But little else is known. Clinical trials weren’t designed to study how the vaccines perform in specific subgroups and people with certain medical conditions weren’t included, said Lee Harrison, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. At a more granular level, the specific mechanisms that explain how breakthroughs occur should be further investigated, said Alex Greninger, assistant director of the clinical virology laboratories at the University of Washington Medical Center. The conventional thinking is that those who mount less of a response to vaccines would be more susceptible to getting breakthroughs infections, he said. But Greninger said he’s seen a few cases where people developed strong immune responses to the vaccines, yet still got infected. Link to Variants Scientists are also trying to figure out whether a disproportionate number of breakthroughs are linked to variants. However, studying all this is difficult given that number of cases is small and some may not be detected at all since many are asymptomatic or have only mild symptoms, said Stefan Green, co-principal investigator at the Regional Innovative Public Health Laboratory at Rush University. Green said he’s also seen in a few cases that viral loads are too low to conduct whole genome sequencing on, similar to what some other researchers have found. Breana Landon, a 23-year-old Utah resident, has also been experiencing ongoing symptoms. Landon tested positive for Covid in late March after being fully vaccinated, she said. It was her second time testing positive, and her second shot came six days later than is recommended. She was told, though, that missing the deadline didn’t matter. The first time she was infected came last fall, before she got vaccinated. She had respiratory problems then that developed into pneumonia. This time, she experienced a whole new set of symptoms, including persisting heart palpitations and pain. ‘Dead End’ “I feel a little lost, almost, kind of at a dead end,” Landon said in an interview. She recognized it’s possible she never fully recovered from the first round of Covid, but she had gotten multiple negative tests before she tested positive again. When she called with her local health department, they told her she probably got infected with a variant but didn’t ask further, she said. “They didn’t want to do a PCR test, do any sequencing on it or research it further, which made me feel even more at a dead end,” Landon said. “I mean, isn’t this something we want to look into? We’re in the middle of a pandemic, and don’t we want to research this and find out what’s going on?” Utah Department of Health, said the agency encourages people to get the appropriate PCR testing within 48 hours of a positive rapid test. Tracking down samples for sequencing is challenging since they’re taken from PCR tests, which is up to the individual to take, she said. Treading Carefully Those who experience breakthroughs also feel like they must tread carefully even when talking about their experiences. Muldoon posted about her situation on Facebook because she wanted to hear from others with similar symptoms. But she said, “I felt conflicted talking about it because I don’t want it to seem like I’m encouraging people not to get vaccinated.” Peyton Azar felt similarly about her breakthrough experience. The 21-year-old is on immunosuppressants for a kidney transplant and has had to go to the emergency room for the common cold before, she said. Yet when she got Covid after vaccination in early April, she felt only mild cold-like symptoms. She’s always appreciated vaccines in general, she said. “I think getting Covid with the vaccine and seeing how mild it was, I appreciate it even more.” Even then, “I’ve been scared that someone will take this information and be like, ‘oh well I heard of a girl who got Covid even after she got vaccinated, so the vaccines don’t work.’ ”
Yet another Twitter account promoted by Tsing Tao pushing an endless stream of anti-vaxxer nonsense -- including trying to tie vaccines to autism. Plus nonsense that the COVID vaccine causes the creation of variants. Basically the entire Twitter account is an endless stream of bullshiat.
Notice all of the neurological symptoms the people in this article reported: twitching, loss of taste and smell, feeling lost. Then the heart symptoms: palpitations and racing heart. And these are women in their 20s and 30s who run.
So you attack the source of the tweet, but not the study the tweet mentioned? Let's try it this way: Cell.com shows how mRNA infiltrates cells outside of muscle tissue, and how fast it does. Preclinical and Clinical Demonstration of Immunogenicity by mRNA Vaccines against H10N8 and H7N9 Influenza Viruses
Yet the Tweet from your antivaxxer is making claims about it impacting "fetal brain development" -- which is pure bullshiat.
Ok, so post the counter to that claim. Also, is the study acceptable or is "Cell.com" a Covid Denier?
A antivaxxer tweets a link to a study that makes no claims that mRNA vaccines have anything to do with "fetal brain development" issues -- yet you are somehow trying to claim "prove this claim is false" by using your "refute the study" nonsense. Are you thick? The antivaxxer promoted a claim that mRNA vaccines cause "fetal brain development" issues while pushing a study that makes no reference to this. This would be like me Tweeting a study on animal husbandry and promoting it as evidence that Tsing Tao f@rks goats.