| | | | |  | | By Daniel Payne | | | | | 
Free Covid-19 testing by LabWorq is offered on the sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday, March 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) | WAITING FOR THE NEXT WAVE — The wave of the Omicron subvariant BA.2 is crashing into countries around the world, leading to renewed masking and high hospital case counts in some regions. Many countries worry they're next. To date, the new cases have been mild in the United States and other countries. More BA.2 is being detected in parts of the U.S. but without the dramatic surge in total infections that the subvariant brought to parts of Europe. Still, the White House is worried about what could come of BA.2, discussing how to react if the country follows Europe's trajectory — as it has done throughout the pandemic. "We're less protected than European countries that were hit hard," Eric Topol, a molecular medicine professor and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told Global Pulse. "We were and are highly vulnerable to a BA.2 wave, and it isn't clear if we somehow sidestepped it." Topol said it's too early to tell whether the U.S. really has gotten a pass or it's just early in the wave of cases, but some parts of the country sequencing 70 percent of cases as BA.2 without huge upticks in infections or hospitalizations is an encouraging sign. Still, the subvariant is more contagious than BA.1, leading health experts across the board to urge more preparation to handle future surges. The U.S. could be spared a severe BA.2 wave because it was hit so hard by the original Omicron wave — or it could be that the version of BA.1 that was dominant in the U.S., BA.1.1, may offer more immediate immunity against BA.2 compared to Europe, some experts have hypothesized. But others aren't convinced that the U.S. will handle BA.2 more easily than Europe. And most agree that some increase in cases is likely. Kent Sepkowitz, an infectious disease specialist at Sloan Kettering, said that "it will get pretty bumpy in the weeks ahead" in an op-ed published just one day after the U.S. surgeon general said there was no need to panic about the spike in Europe — while still advocating for more preparation. "The problem with all of this is that everybody's kind of making these declarations of why and how — and they're all explanations post-hoc," David Agus, a physician who has advised the U.S. government during the pandemic and CEO of the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, told Global Pulse. "We really cannot predict: What are the upticks going to be? What are the illnesses going to be? We just have to learn." One thing that is becoming clear , though: BA.2 is dominant worldwide. It makes up about 86 percent of global sequences from the last four weeks, according to the WHO. "What we are starting to see in some regions of the world, in some countries, [is] an uptick in cases again," Maria Van Kerkhove, Covid-19 technical lead for the WHO, said at a press conference Wednesday. "This is in the context of Omicron ... but also in the context of lifting public health and social measures."
| | | WELCOME BACK TO GLOBAL PULSE. We want to know what BA.2 looks like where you live. Reach out to us at dpayne@politico.com.
Global Pulse is a team effort. Thanks to editors Eli Reyes and Barbara Van Tine. Follow us on Twitter: @ErinBancoand @_daniel_payne.
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| THE NEWEST RACE TO GET SHOTS IN ARMS — An 80 million-dose vaccination campaign is underway in five countries in southern Africa after a polio outbreak was reported in Malawi last month. The effort , which started this week and is slated to continue into the summer, aims to reach 23 million children across Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. "When the Covid-19 pandemic occurred in 2020, we really were about to improve the immunization against polio," said Modjirom Ndoutabe, polio coordinator in the WHO Regional Office for Africa. He told Global Pulse that a partnership to end polio was coming together just before the pandemic — a push that could have significantly improved the population's immunity. "We stopped all activities to obey the guidance coming from the global level to stop the spread of Covid-19," he said. It's one example of public health progress that has been lost — and the impacts of those losses that are just now being realized. It's an issue that has affected countries with polio outbreaks, whether in Europe, Africa or the Middle East. Polio is endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and outbreaks have been recorded in at least 28 other countries. Seven other countries have been marked by the WHO as at-risk. At least six polio cases have been confirmed around the world so far this year. Preliminary data shows 26 confirmed cases in 2021. Those numbers may seem small compared to Covid outbreaks, but Ndoutabe said polio outbreaks were a major concern and posed big risks to countries in the region. Fewer children were vaccinated in the region through the pandemic, making the surrounding populations more susceptible as well. Ndoutabe said nearby countries should prepare for outbreaks, too — even as vaccination campaigns ramp up in them. The program in Malawi partially resumed in 2021, but it wasn't enough to stop the outbreak. Still, Ndoutabe is confident. "We are well prepared to handle this outbreak," he said. "We acted very very quickly."
| | | | SUBSCRIBE TO NATIONAL SECURITY DAILY : Keep up with the latest critical developments from Ukraine and across Europe in our daily newsletter, National Security Daily. The Russian invasion of Ukraine could disrupt the established world order and result in a refugee crisis, increased cyberattacks, rising energy costs and additional disruption to global supply chains. Go inside the top national security and foreign-policymaking shops for insight on the global threats faced by the U.S. and its allies and what actions world leaders are taking to address them. Subscribe today. | | | | | | | | | | €3.4 billion The amount of money — about $3.7 billion in U.S. dollars — the EU is releasing to help the continent absorb refugees from Ukraine. | | | | | 'A new pandemic sweeping the world' — That's how Peter Sands, director of the Global Fund, and Atul Gawande, assistant administrator for Global Health at USAID, want you to think about tuberculosis, according to a draft of an op-ed they plan to publish. In a draft of the op-ed, shared with Global Pulse, Gawande and Sands argue that the pandemic and conflicts could lead to an increase in the disease's impacts, calling that scenario a "global tragedy" — but a preventable one. Covovax approved for teens in India — Novavax announced Tuesday that its protein-based Covid-19 vaccine, Covavax, was approved by the Drugs Controller General of India for those 12 and up. It's another tool in the effort to vaccinate one of the world's largest youth populations. Austria reintroduces a mask mandate — Austria, with rising case numbers from a recent wave of infections, is reintroducing its mask mandate, POLITICO Europe's Louise Guillot reports . The country's health minister said restrictions were eased too quickly, and facing another surge in cases, it's the first nation in the EU to reintroduce safety measures. 4 million pills — Pfizer announced it would donate 4 million courses of Paxlovid, its promising antiviral Covid treatment, to low- and lower-middle-income countries. It follows last week's announcement about 35 companies around the world would be authorized to produce generic versions of the drug. Pfizer's donations will help fill the global demand while generic manufacturing gets up and running — a process that could take until early next year.
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