Covid news 7/13/21 in News stories

From Washington Post

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Anthony S. Fauci, chief coronavirus medical adviser to the White House, argued over the weekend for additional coronavirus vaccine mandates. Though Fauci said the federal government will not issue a mandate, the doctor said he believed there should be more vaccine requirements at a local level. The pandemic remains a “life-and-death” situation, Fauci told CNN on Sunday. He added that vaccine hesitancy in “very highly ideological” communities, referring to comparatively low rates of immunization among Republicans, will cost lives.

The Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine has been linked to a rare side effect, the immune system disorder called Guillain-Barré syndrome. Of 12.8 million J&J doses administered in the United States, there have been about 100 cases of this, according to preliminary reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Food and Drug Administration plans to add a warning about Guillain-Barré to the J&J vaccine, four people familiar with the situation told The Washington Post.

Amid the pandemic the U.S. government spent at least $5.2 trillion on everything from stimulus checks to farmer payments to the Paycheck Protection Program. Reporter Andrew Van Dam addresses a looming question: After this massive stimulus, what’s next for the economy? Gross domestic product will be higher as a result of this aggressive response, he writes, but the Congressional Budget Office expects growth to slow dramatically after the post-pandemic boom.

When it comes to access to food, the coronavirus pandemic has made the world a less equal place. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates global hunger increased in 2020 by 118 million people, reaching a level higher than in at least 15 years. Those in the developing world fared much worse than those in North America and Europe.

“The developed world had the advantage of being formal economies, where if you do a lockdown, people have access to unemployment insurance or social aid,” said Máximo Torero Cullen, the U.N. food agency’s chief economist. “That did not happen in much of the developing world. You saw a middle class move into poverty and the poor move into severe food insecurity.”

An invisible population lives in Europe that’s not getting vaccinated at the same rates as other residents: Undocumented immigrants have some of the lowest vaccination rates on the continent, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Those immigrants are also at greater risk of infections than overall European populations. Administrative barriers and a history of hostile policies toward undocumented immigrants are a few of the hurdles between this population and coronavirus vaccines.

More than 600 Thai medical workers who were fully inoculated with the Sinovac vaccine were infected by the coronavirus, which is now raging through Southeast Asia.

The 618 cases were among the 677,348 medical staff who had received two doses of the Chinese-developed coronavirus vaccine between April to July, government data show. Among those infected are a nurse who died and a health-care worker in critical condition.

A Thai health official said Sunday that an expert panel has recommended administering a third dose to at-risk medical workers, adding that the booster shot would be either one from Oxford-AstraZeneca or a messenger RNA vaccine made by either Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna. The country is set to receive 1.5 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine from the United States this month.

Last updated July 13, 2021