What just happened
- Thousands fled their homes in Athens and tourists had to be evacuated by boat from island beaches as wildfires burned across Greece.
- The UK government said fully vaccinated arrivals from France would no longer have to self-isolate from Sunday.
- Mexico sued US gun-makers including Glock, Colt, Beretta and Smith & Wesson in a Boston court in an effort to halt cross-border arms trafficking.
The World Health Organization wants a two-month moratorium on Covid booster shots in rich countries where vaccination levels are already high, so the doses can be diverted to poor ones where they’re dangerously low. The White House says a choice between boosters and vaccinating the world is a false choice. Its spokesperson says the world can do both and America can help.
Who’s right? A lot of people are getting jabs. Yesterday a record 60 million doses were administered worldwide. Enough have been given to vaccinate 55 per cent of the world’s population – if they were all first doses. But they weren’t. More than 1.2 billion were second doses.
It’s true the US has been stepping up donations to other countries: 110 million doses so far, with half a billion pledged to 100 low income countries from the end of this month. But the vast majority of vaccinations have been in rich countries. Roughly five billion more doses are needed for 60 per cent coverage by next year.
The poorest remain virtually unvaccinated, their populations defenceless against highly transmissible new variants. As Peter Sands of the Global Fund told Tortoise’s Arms Race campaign, we’re sending the virus to the gym.
By the numbers:
12 – months it took from January 2020 for the number of cases worldwide to reach 100 million
6 – months it took after that for the number to reach 200 million, which it did yesterday
50 – average number of vaccine doses per 100 people in high-income countries
1.5 – average number of vaccine doses per 100 people in low-income countries
1.3 – percentage of population fully vaccinated in Ghana
0.7 – percentage of population fully vaccinated in Nigeria
4 – factor by which Ghana’s Covid caseload is expected to increase by late October
7 – factor by which Nigeria’s Covid caseload is expected to increase before peaking in September
97 – percentage of those admitted to hospital in the US with severe Covid who are unvaccinated
All other things being equal it would be great to give everyone two doses and an autumn booster. A UCL study published last month showed that antibody levels can fall by half in ten weeks even in double-vaccinated people. But…
- These kinds of studies don’t mean the two-shot regime that currently counts as full vaccination ceases to be useful. On the contrary, double-vaccinated people remain at much lower risk of infection and serious disease than unvaccinated people, and the case for boosters is still based largely on the precautionary principle rather than solid science.
- In any case, all other things aren’t equal. 80 per cent of all vaccines have so far gone to rich countries.
Eleven countries are giving booster shots or planning to. They are the UAE, Israel, the UK, Germany, Cambodia, Thailand, France, Russia, Switzerland, Singapore and Indonesia. The UK alone has administered or ordered 367 million doses, excluding another 60 million ordered from Pfizer to start offering to teenagers from next month. That’s more than double the total delivered by Covax so far to 138 poorer countries.
“We should not accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected,” the World Health Organization’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said yesterday. Quite.
Only gold
Chinese athletes who don’t win gold at the Olympics are facing online abuse from ultra-nationalists who regard anything less as failure, and, worse, unpatriotic. When the mixed doubles table tennis team lost their final to Japan, they were accused on Weibo of having failed the nation, and duly apologised. The badminton doubles team was also targeted after losing their final to Taiwan. The criticism has mostly come from young internet users known as “little pinks” because of a play on Chinese characters that mean “fans of the red”. The state-run Xinhua news agency ran a commentary urging the ultras to reconcile themselves to the ignominy of silver: “I hope that all of us in front of the screen will establish a rational view of gold medals, and of victory and defeat, to enjoy… the Olympic spirit.” The ghost of de Coubertin still walks abroad.
Fast track
Are carbon insoles the new doping? Karsten Warholm, the 400 metres hurdles superstar, insists his Puma shoes – which have them – actually give his event credibility. He prefers to diss the bouncy Nikes worn by his arch-rival Rai Benjamin and others. And then there’s the Tokyo track, which the Times explained on Tuesday works a bit like a trampoline. No wonder world records are tumbling despite the heat. Where does this stop?
Anonymous shots
There’s anti-vaxx and vaccine-resistant, and a third category within communities that are under-vaccinated against Covid. These are people who want the jab but pray no one they know will know they’ve had it. In Missouri, for example, the NYT reports people are arriving at clinics disguising their appearance and begging healthcare workers to make sure word that they’re being vaccinated does not get out. The kernel of the story is a widely-circulated video in which a Dr Priscilla Frase of West Plains, near the Ozarks, describes patients pleading for anonymity and adds: “We should all be able to be free to do what we want to do, and that includes people who don’t want to get the vaccine as well as people who do want to get the vaccine… We’ve got to stop ridiculing people.” Amen to the no ridiculing. As to the freedom to go without, that is a trickier argument to sustain and one that very few Americans bothered with when the threat was polio.
Big compensation
File this one under “no harm in trying”. US Democrats in the lower House have drawn up a bill to charge America’s biggest carbon emitters $500 billion over the next ten years to help “clean up the mess that they knowingly cause”. In principle this ought to fly. Congress has after all endorsed the “polluter pays” principle before, in legislation for the Superfund that pays to clear up toxic industrial waste. In practice, expect Senate Republican opposition to be implacable and general Republican anger to be extreme if the Dems try to get this through using budget reconciliation – the only way they could with the one-vote majority they command. More optimistic scenarios include waiting for a Democratic sweep in the midterms and/or a wholesale personality transplant for conservative America. Both look unlikely.
Trucking pays
John Lewis is offering its lorry drivers a £5,000 pay rise plus a £1,000 signing bonus for new recruits. The logistics labour shortage in post-Brexit, maybe-kinda-post-Covid Britain is that acute. The raise works out at about £2 an hour and 900 drivers will benefit, City AM reports. Elsewhere in the JL partnership the news on wages is not so good. It was named and shamed by HM Revenue and Customs along with 190 other firms for breaching minimum wage laws between 2011 and 2018, although John Lewis says it’s being blamed for trying to help its workers by smoothing out their wages when hours worked vary from month to month. Perhaps this is the time to switch from shop floor to cab. There’s a UK-wide shortage of 60,000 lorry drivers, and every chance that once Covid finally fades, Brexit will turn out to have been a big part of the problem all along.
The canoe and kayak sprints are well underway at the Sea Forest Waterway in Tokyo Bay. For those who get confused between which is which: In a kayak, the paddler is seated, legs in front of them, and uses a double-bladed paddle, paddling on alternate sides. In a canoe, the paddler kneels and uses a single-bladed paddle to propel the boat forward. Sprint canoeing has been a medal event at the games since 1936 (1972 was the first time slalom events were featured). Going into Tokyo, Germany had won the most gold medals in the events – 32 in total.
And finally: the Taliban is retaking large parts of Afghanistan. As it does the threat of reprisals against interpreters who have helped western news organisations report on the conflict there for the past 20 years is becoming acute. Twenty-three outlets and news providers including Tortoise have signed an open letter to Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab urging them to issue visas to guarantee the safety of these interpreters and their families before it’s too late. Do read it.
Thanks for reading, and please share this around.
Giles Whittell
@GWhittell
Correction. Last week I implied that two non-British vessels joined a carrier strike group led by the HMS Queen Elizabeth en route to the Far East partly because of a turbine failure aboard a Royal Navy destroyer. A member got in touch to note that the US and Dutch ships’ involvement was in fact planned well in advance.