Six times more booster shots are being given around the world daily than first doses in low-income countries, a situation WHO calls "a scandal that must stop now." It seems that 92 countries, none of which classify as low-income, have approved boosters. I should note that there are boosters and there are additional doses, and the two are not the same. A booster is designed to bolster a recipient's immunity. An additional dose is one given to someone who needs more vaccine than the first shots provided, for example, someone who is immunocompromised. The standard one or two doses don't given them enough immunity; they need more, and that is where the additional dose comes in. I could not help but think, as I read about the disparity between higher- and lower-income countries, if the thought going through some minds is that once we take care of things here or in the other higher-income countries, we can turn our attention to controlling the virus in the low-income countries. I'm too cynical to think that we would do that. If we get the virus under control here, we may no longer care about it in other countries, forgetting that none of us is safe until all of us are safe.
AstraZeneca has been selling its vaccine at not-for-profit prices, something that is about to end. The company will begin pricing their vaccine to make a "modest" profit. Their plan is to progressively transition to a "for-profit" approach while ensuring "the vaccine is affordable for low and middle-income countries." They gave no details as to how they plan or hope to accomplish this.
A week ago, Austria announced new restrictions on unvaccinated people, barring them from cafes, restaurants, pubs, theaters, gyms, and hairdressers. Guess what. More people are getting vaccinated. The day after the official announcement, almost 40,000 people got vaccinated, twice as many as a week before. Austria has one of the lowest vaccination rates in western Europe with 65 percent of residents fully vaccinated. That may be about to change.
Los Angeles is putting in one of the strictest vaccine rules in the US, one that sounds a bit like what Austria is doing. Full vaccination will be required for restaurants, theaters, gyms, and other public spaces. The hope is that they can avoid last winter's situation, where one person was dying of covid every 20 minutes. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to work as well here as it seems to be across the pond.
Finally, the Oklahoma National Guard has a new commander thanks to the state's governor. The now former commander was a vocal backer of covid vaccination; he was fired and replaced with a vocal opponent of vaccine mandates. The new commander's first act was to order "that no Guardsmen be required to take the Covid-19 vaccine, not withstanding any other federal requirement ... no negative administrative or legal action will be taken against Guardsmen who refuse the Covid-19 vaccine."
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