Coronavirus

Do Americans need a third booster shot of the Pfizer vaccine? The question is the subject of a remarkable row between the drugs company and the government — the former of which is putting together an application for emergency use authorization for a third dose and the latter of which has so far proved unwilling to sanction it. The Department of Health and Human Services issued a statement after a meeting on Monday saying: ‘At this time fully-vaccinated Americans do not need a booster shot.’ For its own part, Pfizer cites evidence from Israel which, thanks to a deal with Pfizer, was able to get ahead in its vaccination program in return for the country effectively being used as a giant human laboratory.

There are some wondrous revelations in Dr Anthony Fauci's over-3,200-page email trove acquired by BuzzFeed and the Washington Post through the Freedom of Information Act. A number of people — particularly Republican politicians — are fixating on the several emails from other experts mentioning the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have been engineered at and emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They are right to do so — but there are some other gems in there too. A tipster pointed Cockburn to a February 2020 email from then-New York Times science writer Donald G. McNeil Jr, in which he describes how Americans 'tend to act like selfish pigs'. In contrast, McNeil tells Fauci that 'a lot of average Chinese behaved incredibly heroically'.

In a Department of Homeland Security Senate hearing in April 2012 on ‘Biological Security: The Risk of Dual-Use Research’, Dr Anthony Fauci admitted that the National Institute of Health partnered with the Department of Defense on controversial dual-use research projects. Dual-use research, of which gain-of-function research is a kind, can involve examining the ability to manipulate natural viruses to become more transmissible or possibly even a bioweapon. Gain-of-function research has found its way into the pandemic lexicon due to the resurgence of questions regarding the origins of COVID-19.

Good news everybody — you can finally post what you always thought about how the pandemic started on Facebook without being muzzled. The Silicon Valley giant, which has around 2.85 billion users, had been banning posts that claimed COVID-19 was man-made. But now, according to a company spokesperson, ‘In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps.’ The ‘lab-leak’ theory — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — has gradually gained mainstream acceptance in the months since Trump lost the election. Nicholson Baker horrified New York magazine readers in January by bringing up the hypothesis.

Since the early days of COVID-19, public health experts have been frequently wrong and unreliable. 'Trust the science' now sounds like a sarcastic joke. People want to know how long lockdowns and various mask requirements will last. When, or even if, they will get a vaccine. What about vaccine passports? The science doesn’t seem to know. So we listen to politicians. President Joe Biden recently shed some light by announcing that fully vaccinated people no longer have to wear masks indoors and outdoors, in most settings. Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis had previously weighed in with an executive order lifting all COVID-related restrictions statewide until a new law begins in July allowing him to overrule local governments.

Biden’s new-found support for a temporary waiver of COVID vaccine patents raises another fascinating set of questions. World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus makes the case for a waiver in terms of overwhelming priorities and the inequitable distribution of doses to date — 80 percent to the richest countries. Economic pragmatists add that the faster the whole world is vaccinated, the sooner global trade, including demand for exports from the rich West, will also recover.