Covid-19 cases are now so high that it makes little sense to wait for a digital milestone.
In the United States, the death toll is expected to exceed one million sooner or later – and six million worldwide – possibly even before the second anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
Although more than 10 billion vaccines were administered around the world on Valentine’s Day, not only are the death toll continuing to rise, but there are many parts of the world where people have not received any vaccines. This inequity is of great concern to leading Catholic professionals in the United States.
“It appears that we are facing a phantom pandemic of children who have caught this,” Leila Nimatallah, senior policy and legal specialist for Catholic Relief Services, the US bishops’ relief and development agency, told AFP. the stranger.
Vaccines have only recently been made available for children ages 5 to 11, and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in mid-February that it would be time-consuming and difficult to approve vaccines. vaccines for children younger than that.
The “winter surge” of the coronavirus, particularly the omicron variant, “shows how easily this is transmissible,” said Lucas Swanepoel, director of government relations for the Catholic Health Association, and the longer it takes to people get vaccinated, the more chance the virus has of mutating.
It’s the question of supply, it’s the question of manufacturing, it’s the question of distribution and the infrastructure needed to support the distribution
“Viruses want to mutate. … They will find new ways,” said Mary Beth Powers, president and CEO of the Catholic Medical Mission Board. “Coronavirus will continue to change unless we find a vaccine to protect against all variants.”
Scientists at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, await results from the first human tests of a “pan-SARS” vaccine.
CMMB, based in New York, works in five of the world’s poorest countries. Four are in Africa; the fifth is Haiti. In the wealthiest countries, Powers said, 63% have received at least one dose of the vaccine. In the poorest countries, she added, the rate is barely above 10%. Worldwide, the countries with the worst vaccination rates are in sub-Saharan Africa, along with a handful of Asian countries west of India.
“It’s the question of supply, it’s the question of manufacturing, it’s the question of distribution and the infrastructure to support distribution,” said Don McCrabb, executive director of the US Catholic Mission Association.
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McCrabb is also the organizer of the Catholic Cares Coalition, a consortium of more than 60 national Catholic organizations, one of whose goals is to “advocate for the equitable distribution of the vaccine in the United States and around the world.”
Catholic Cares has received two grants to strengthen equity in national access to vaccines. The first, a $100,000 grant from the Conrad Hilton Foundation, was divided into micro-grants. One of the recipients, McCrabb told the Catholic News Service, was the Diocese of El Paso, Texas, to vaccinate farmworkers.
The latest, a $250,000 grant from Kaiser Permanente, targets seven geographic areas in the United States, from the Washington-Baltimore corridor to Hawaii. Kaiser, McCrabb said, is “especially interested in reaching out to the Latino and African American community.” Micro-grants will again serve as a pivot to ensure greater equity in access to vaccines, he added.
Despite what is considered wide availability of Covid-19 vaccines in the United States, “the African-American community has had particular issues” in terms of history and racism, McCrabb said.
“Sometimes people in low-income settings or for work purposes are really reluctant to get vaccinated. If they work every day, who wants to take a day or two off to get vaccinated and maybe get in the face of everything that goes with it? he added. “Some people can’t afford that time. Or there are transportation issues.”
Even with 210 million Americans who consider themselves vaccinated, CRS’ Nimatallah said, hospitalization rates are sobering for the unvaccinated.
For all adults ages 18 and older, unvaccinated people are 16 times more likely to be hospitalized, she said; for 18-49 year olds, it is 12 times more likely; 50-64 years, 44 times more likely; and for people aged 65 and over, 49 times more likely.
“We’re an older population, so we’re more at risk than a younger population” in the United States, McCrabb said.
It’s shocking, but many hospitals and schools don’t have handwashing stations. This helps health workers and the public protect themselves as much as possible
If there is anything that comes close to saving grace in the midst of so much death and disease, it is that the average age of the population in poor countries is younger than in richer countries. That may be a fact, but that’s no excuse for Powers.
To achieve equity in vaccines, “their distribution becomes complicated,” she said. “It’s just more work. You need a ‘cold chain’ (some vaccines lose their potency if not kept cold) and you need a plan, and you need “educate people. We’ve had problems with misinformation about vaccines in every country in the world, and people are worried about vaccinations for a variety of reasons.”
Additionally, Powers said, “the recipe needs to be shared. There needs to be production in other parts of the world so the vaccine can come out fairly quickly.”
In the poorest countries, “the first question of fairness was to protect us”, she added. “It’s shocking, but many hospitals and schools don’t have handwashing stations. This helps health workers and the public protect themselves as much as possible.” But personal protective equipment is scarce.
“The next equity issue was how vaccines are distributed,” Powers said.
The CMMB, she estimates, has distributed 25-30% of all Covid-19 vaccines in Haiti, but that’s still a meager figure, and UNICEF is urging groups such as the CMMB to deploy to areas. campaigns. Then there is “the distribution of treatments. There are effective treatments now, but we don’t have them. … We also don’t have enough test kits in the world.”
“Successful health outcomes do not appear in a vacuum,” CHA’s Swanepoel said, noting that CHA had written to the federal CDC asking the agency to consider principles of Catholic social thought when distributing of vaccines.
The CHA has established guidelines for fair and just distribution of vaccines, according to Swanepoel: demonstrated safe and ethically tested; scientifically effective; respectful of human dignity; distributed equitably in priority to those most at risk; and the emphasis on the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity while involving local communities.
Current challenges he listed include mutations, Covid-19 fatigue, misinformation and divisions, the large number of Americans and others around the world who are still unvaccinated, a lack of vaccines sufficient in the world, the lack of health care capacity in the world and a greater need for local care. and community engagement.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Swanepoel said, but “we’ve done a lot of great work so far.”
