By Amber Dance

Asian Americans blamed for COVID, now more than ever

More than one in five Americans wrongly believes Asian Americans are responsible for the pandemic, according to a study by Leading Asian Americans United for Change and The Asian American Foundation.

That’s up from 11% in 2021.

“It does stem from the perpetual foreigner myth that Asians and Asian Americans, no matter if you’re born here or not, you’re always seen as just from your country of origin,” Eric Toda, a board member of both groups that produced the study, told NBC News.

NBC reporter Tat Bellamy-Walker notes that other studies bear out similar patterns. For example, one released earlier this year found that hate crimes against the Asian American community more than tripled between 2020 and 2021.

About one-third of Asian Americans have altered their daily routines for safety reasons, according to new Pew Research data.

Asian Americans who took Pew’s survey listed COVID-19 and pandemic scapegoating as key factors in the increasing violence against them.

Many also said local officials were not adequately addressing the problem.

U.S. hits milestone of 1 million dead

President Joe Biden marked the death of 1 million Americans due to COVID on Thursday.

The coronavirus has now killed more Americans “than almost anything else,” writes Robert Hart, attempting to put some context on the number in Forbes: 1 million is more than the number of people who’ve died of HIV in 40 years; almost twice as many Americans as killed in both World Wars; nearly double the population of Wyoming.

For the moment, only heart disease and cancer are bigger killers in the U.S.

Many reporters have noted the tragedy has been unevenly distributed, with seniors, low-income, Black, Latino, and unvaccinated people bearing a higher cost.

There are probably about 9 million Americans who are grieving close family members lost to COVID, according to The Washington Post.

Globally, the World Health Organization now estimates that nearly 15 million people died in 2020 and 2021 due to the virus itself or because of its wider effects on society.

The U.S. has a higher COVID death rate than any other industrialized nation, notes The Post.

Yet, journalists reported, many Americans have become numb to the tragic tallies.

“This has been a kind of a gradual burn over two years,” epidemiologist Dr. David Dowdy told ABC News’ Arielle Mitropoulos. “That sense of horror and devastation has been lost.”

One factor in the loss of compassion is that once vaccines became available, Americans began to blame victims for their own deaths, reports Mary Kekatos at ABC News.

Officials’ repetition of the line “pandemic of the unvaccinated” didn’t help, Kekatos suggests.

Other Americans may be ignoring the numbers in an attempt to forget the tragedy of the past couple of years.

Washington Post contributing columnist Dr. Leana S. Wen suggests that the 1 million milestone should serve as a call to action to keep up with effective interventions: vaccinations and boosters; treatments such as Paxlovid; and free, widely available rapid testing.

“After 1 million lives lost, I’d like to say that we’ve learned about the lifesaving work of public health,” Wen writes. “But I’m more worried that the politicization of COVID-19 is bleeding into other crucial prevention efforts.”

Specifically, she cites new laws that limit health officials’ ability to impose quarantines and mask mandates; falling rates of non-COVID childhood vaccinations; and fewer cancer screenings.

Biden still begging for new COVID relief funds

The White House warns that the U.S. could see 100 million new COVID-19 cases in the fall and winter of 2022.

Officials say that prediction rests on certain assumptions: For one, that omicron and its various subvariants remain the predominant strains. For another, that Congress fails to provide additional funding for vaccines, tests and treatments.

Some of those predicted cases would be reinfections.

The South is also expected to see a summer surge as people retreat indoors, together, during hot weather.

Outside experts say the White House projection makes sense.

“It’s always hard to predict the future when it comes to COVID,” epidemiologist Justin Lessler told The Washington Post, but “what they’re saying seems reasonable.”

The administration wants Congress to release funds requested in March. Biden’s budget of $22.5 billion, since cut to a $10 billion bill, remains stalled over immigration politics.

Meanwhile, in the wake of tax season, the government reported a record $308 billion budget surplus for the month of April.

The administration has already had to cancel plans to buy more antibody treatments that can stave off severe COVID in high-risk individuals.

If the U.S. aims to provide boosters this fall, the government would need to start negotiating those deals within weeks, but it lacks the funds to do so, notes Shannon Pettypiece at NBC News.

One official said, “Without additional funding, there is no chance that we’re going to have vaccines for all Americans.”

The situation has forced the White House to develop alternative plans, reports Sheryl Gay Stolberg at The New York Times.

One option is to pull money from testing and treatment programs to pay for boosters in only the most vulnerable Americans: seniors and people with compromised immune systems.

Reviving a mask mandate is also a possibility but would likely face strong opposition.

Millions stand to lose Medicaid as soon as July

More than 14 million people could lose Medicaid coverage once the COVID-19 public health emergency declaration, in place for more than two years, comes to an end.

That’s the result of an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which projected that anywhere between 5.3 million and 14.2 million people could lose Medicaid.

During the emergency, states receive extra Medicaid funding in return for not taking anyone off the Medicaid rolls for the time being.

The emergency status has been regularly renewed since 2020 and is currently slated to end on July 15, though the Medicaid disenrollment freeze would last until the end of the month.

President Biden has promised to provide 60 days’ notice before letting it expire, so an extension or expiration date should be announced soon.

Once the emergency ends, states will start the process of figuring out if enrollees still qualify for their coverage and processing renewals. There will be “a significant amount of upheaval,” writes Peter Sullivan at The Hill.

It’s not clear how many people will wind up uninsured as a result. Some people who lose coverage may not realize they have other options, such as the Affordable Care Act market.

Moderna publishes data on vaccinating children ages 6–11

Vaccine-maker Moderna reported in the New England Journal of Medicine last week that its vaccine, in a two-dose series, gave kids between 6 and 11 an antibody response comparable to young adults.

The paper adds details to the positive results Moderna first shared last October.

Moderna has requested FDA authorization for its vaccine for children as young as six months.

“That authorization, if granted, is unlikely to bump up the low immunization rates among young children by much,” notes Apoorva Mandavilli at The New York Times.

Fewer than 30% of children ages 5 through 11 have completed the two-dose course of Pfizer’s vaccine, which has been authorized for that age group since the fall of 2021. 

The FDA’s vaccine advisory committee is expected to convene several times in June to discuss these applications, as well as a potential one from Pfizer for a vaccine in under-5s, though no meetings have been posted to the agency’s official calendar yet.

The agency will also have to consider changing the vaccines, for all ages, in the fall to target the prevailing variants. Moderna and Pfizer are both developing omicron-specific vaccines as potential boosters.

Because the decision must be made months in advance, it’s “inevitably going to be a gamble and a guess,” writes Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic.

Moderna’s newly published data show the vaccine’s efficacy against delta; how it stacks up against omicron is still in question.

Other nations have already authorized Moderna’s vaccine for children as young as 6.

While it has been traditional to test vaccines in adults first, then move to younger and younger groups in a series of trials, experts told Mandavilli that should change.

“We really can’t do it this way in the future,” said Dr. Sallie Permar of Weill Cornell Medicine. “We can’t leave children to the very last.”

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By Amber Dance

Pandemic response neglected poor Americans

Communities in lower-income U.S. counties suffered twice the COVID-19 death rate of wealthier American counties according to a new Poor People’s Pandemic Report, writes Ed Pilkington at The Guardian. 

The gap was even worse during major surges, rising to a three-fold difference in deaths between the poorest and richest 10% of counties during the omicron winter wave.

Because CDC has not been tracking income distribution alongside death rates, the report fills an important hole in the national pandemic picture, writes Pilkington. The Poor People’s Pandemic data, from more than 3,000 U.S. counties, are accessible online.

Vaccination rates didn’t explain the disparities, the authors found, but the large number of people in poor counties who don’t have health insurance was a likely contributor.

“The findings of this report reveal neglect and sometimes intentional decisions not to focus on the poor,” said Bishop William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, which produced the report in collaboration with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Counties with high death rates included those largely comprising communities of color (such as Hancock, Georgia) as well as some with primarily white populations (Robertson, Kentucky).

New report outlines COVID’s impact on ‘Black America’

Race continues to be a major factor in pandemic impact. A new report from the Black Coalition Against COVID notes that hospitalization rates for Black people was much higher than other populations during the omicron surge, Usha Lee McFarling reports for STAT.

“The juxtaposition — that for some, the pandemic is over, yet the hospitalization rate for Black people is higher than it’s ever been — is stark,” said Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale University’s School of Medicine.

The report also details higher rates of children being orphaned, children missing time in the classroom, food insecurity, and pandemic-linked anxiety, depression, and substance use disorders among Black people, compared to white Americans.

All of this is a “predictable result of structural and social realities,” the report says, rather than any biological or genetic factors related to race.

Researchers are also studying how media reports of racial disparities influenced attitudes during the early pandemic, and a recent study in the journal Social Science & Medicine reached a “disturbing conclusion,” writes Ed Pilkington at The Guardian.

The study found that when white U.S. residents were made aware of racial disparities through media reports, they were less afraid of the virus, felt less empathetic towards vulnerable populations, and were less supportive of safety precautions.

That leads the study’s authors to the unsettling suggestion that publicizing racial disparities could, paradoxically, contribute to a “vicious cycle wherein raising awareness reduces support for the very policies that could protect public health and reduce disparities.”

COVID boosters could become annual affair

The FDA’s vaccine advisory committee met last week to discuss a path forward for COVID-19 booster shots, leading to a new FDA plan to seek annual vaccines with at least 80% efficacy against severe disease and death, reports Poynter’s Al Tompkins in his Covering COVID-19 newsletter.

The challenge is to design a booster by spring to defend against the most likely prevailing variant in the coming fall. Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center told the panel that a dangerous new variant like omicron could emerge as often as every 18 months, or as rarely as once a decade.

Ultimately, the committee found there was no existing framework in place to choose when to offer a COVID-19 booster, and which variant to target, writes Andrew Joseph in STAT’s play-by-play of the meeting.

“We’re in uncharted territory,” said acting committee chair Dr. Arnold Monto of the University of Michigan.

Pfizer and Moderna are both trialing omicron-specific vaccine formulas, the effects of which could inform future decisions. The committee will likely convene again in May or June to make more specific plans for fall boosters, reports Scott Hensley at NPR.

Committee members also questioned the FDA’s recent move, made without their input, to authorize second booster shots for Americans 50 and older now. That decision has sown considerable confusion, as Yasmeen Abutaleb and Lena H. Sun report at The Washington Post, because the agency didn’t go so far as to recommend older adults get the shots.

That call was based in part on data from Israel, where second boosters were made available to elderly individuals and health care workers months ago. Two studies from Israel indicated that a fourth dose, compared to three shots, increased protection against severe disease by 73% and death by 78%, reports Yaron Kelner at Haaretz.

However, in one of the studies, fewer than 1% of people in either the three-dose or four-dose group experienced severe symptoms. And the added protection against infection from the additional dose quickly fizzled, dropping to just 29% within 10 weeks.

The European Medicine Agency, relying on the same Israeli data, decided against authorizing a fourth dose, Tompkins notes.

The FDA’s Dr. Peter Marks clarified that the recently authorized additional booster was intended as a stopgap to protect vulnerable groups, and not a signal of an ongoing booster strategy.

Marks also said that once the FDA makes the switch to vaccines targeting a new variant, all vaccines would be changed, including those for the initial series of shots. That means Americans won’t be forced to deliberate the merits of protection from different variants when choosing a booster shot.

According to a STAT-Harris Poll, 60% of U.S. adults would get a second booster if it was recommended, and an additional 22% would do so if there were a new variant or surge in their area.

COVID spending bill hits another snag

Early last week, the Senate appeared poised to approve $10 billion in funds for COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics and research, only to hit another roadblock over the Biden administration’s plan to relax pandemic-era immigration restrictions.

The bipartisan deal was already for much less than the $22.5 billion the White House had requested. It cut $5 billion in funding for global aid, which many experts say is crucial to block development of new variants that could impact U.S. citizens. The deal also eliminated support for tests, vaccination and treatment of uninsured people.

The $10 billion left in the bill would send $9.25 billion to the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, including at least $5 billion to purchase therapeutics. This budget would also be used to purchase tests and vaccines.

The remaining $750 million was earmarked for the Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund to cover research, development, and manufacturing of new vaccines.

The purse was based entirely on unspent funds from previous measures, including unused money originally funneled towards grants for shuttered entertainment venues, small business loans, and other sources. Katie Lobosco and Tami Luhby at CNN have all the details.

The Senate initially planned to pass the bill quickly, which would require unanimous agreement to proceed to a vote.

But the Biden administration announced on April 1 that it planned to lift border restrictions known as Title 42 that, for the past two years, have allowed border agents to expel migrants to prevent COVID-19 spread.

Several Democrats had pushed the White House to make the change, especially in light of the rollback of travel restrictions, write Caroline Simon and Suzanne Monyak at Roll Call.

The reduced restrictions, expected to take place in late May, are expected to lead to a large influx of migrants and asylum-seekers.

Some Democrats as well as Republicans were displeased with the announcement. Several GOP senators said on April 5 that they wouldn’t vote to proceed on the COVID relief funds without progress toward a vote on border restrictions as well.

Lawmakers cited “mixed messages from the Biden administration as it seeks to remove a pandemic mitigation measure while simultaneously demanding billions of dollars to address the continuing spread of the virus,” report Mike DeBonis and Rachel Roubein at The Washington Post.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said, “There will have to be an amendment on Title 42 in order to move the bill.”

COVID-19 plus diabetes hits harder

People with diabetes are very vulnerable to the coronavirus but haven’t received much attention during the pandemic, writes reporter Andrew Jacobs at The New York Times.

Jacobs cites studies suggesting that 30% to 40% of COVID deaths in the U.S. were among people with diabetes, but this “sobering figure has been subsumed by other grim data from a public health disaster that is on track to claim a million American lives sometime this month.”

More than 37 million people in the U.S. have diabetes, according to the CDC, with 20% of those unaware they have it.

Diabetes impairs both the immune system and the cardiovascular system, putting people at higher risk for COVID complications.

“It’s hard to overstate just how devastating the pandemic has been for Americans with diabetes,” said Dr. Giuseppina Imperatore of the CDC.

The disease also contributes to COVID’s racial disparities. Uncontrolled diabetes, which seems to create the greatest danger, is more prevalent among people of color, Jacobs notes.

Researchers and clinicians hope the pandemic’s toll will bring more attention to the disease.

Sadly, the pandemic may also swell the ranks of people with diabetes, writes Clare Watson at Nature.

A study of more than 180,000 U.S. veterans who survived COVID found that their risk of developing type 2 diabetes within the year following infection went up by 40%.

Post-COVID diabetes occurred even in people with no other risk factors for the disease and a mild case of COVID, though more severe COVID-19 amplified the diabetes risk.

It’s not clear how COVID-19 influences diabetes risk. Some researchers have suggested that the virus could damage the pancreas, leading to impaired insulin production. But a lab study failed to substantiate that idea, writes Watson.

The veterans in the study were mainly older, white men, so it’s not certain the results will apply to other populations. It’s also not yet known if the diabetes risk continues beyond one year.

From the Center for Health Journalism

4/20 Webinar: Making Mental Health Care More Equitable: What Works?

We’ll hear from a leading international researcher of mental health access about challenges for immigrants and communities of color. Dr. Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola of the University of California, Davis, will share a model of innovative community-based approaches to make it easier for Latino, Filipino and LGBTQ+ clients to benefit from mental health care.

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