WASHINGTON -- About 900,000 kids ages 5-11 will have received their first doses of the covid-19 vaccine in their first week of eligibility, the White House said Wednesday, providing the first glimpse at the pace of the school-aged vaccination campaign.
Final clearance for the shots was granted by federal regulators Nov. 2, with the first doses to kids beginning in some locations the next day. Now nearly 20,000 pharmacies, clinics and physicians' offices are administering the doses, and the Biden administration estimated that by the end of Wednesday more than 900,000 of the kid doses would have been administered. Additionally about 700,000 first-shot appointments are also scheduled for the coming days.
About 28 million 5- to 11-year-olds are now eligible for the Pfizer vaccine at a dose that's a third of the amount given to teens and adults.
Kids who begin the two-dose regimen by the end of next week will have full protection from the vaccines by Christmas.
The administration is encouraging schools to host vaccination clinics on-site to make it even easier for kids to get shots. The White House is also asking schools to share information from "trusted messengers" like doctors and public health officials to combat misinformation around the vaccines.
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The Biden administration plans to announce that it will invest an additional $785 million into efforts to stymie the spread of the coronavirus in communities that have been hardest hit and are at highest risk of death and disease -- people of color, people with disabilities, those living in rural areas and low-income communities.
NARROWING GAPS
This new infusion of money builds on billions of dollars invested in equity-focused programs, such as expanding access to vaccines at community health centers and supporting health workers, that have helped decrease disparities in death rates and closed racial and ethnic gaps in vaccination rates among adults.
The pandemic hit with an unequal impact, making Black, Hispanic and American Indian people twice as likely to die of the coronavirus as White people. But a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that at different points in time, including this current phase of the delta wave, disparities in deaths and infections have narrowed for Black and Hispanic people compared with white people.
That was not the case for American Indian and Alaska Native peoples during this most recent wave of the pandemic, said Samantha Artiga, vice president and director of the racial equity and health policy program at Kaiser Family Foundation.
"For American Indian and Alaska Native people, that disparity widened again and has not come back down the way we've seen" for other groups, Artiga said, adding that more research is needed to better understand why.
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A federal task force issued its final report to the White House Office on Covid-19 Response on Wednesday, and the additional funding is a direct response to its recommendations to help eradicate health disparities and support underserved communities.
Missing race and ethnicity data, mistrust of a medical establishment that has a legacy of mistreatment, and practical barriers such as a lack of pharmacies, hospitals, providers and transportation have all hindered the pandemic response and helped fuel the disparities that have become a hallmark of the American health-care system.
The task force, over the past 10 months, has tackled the issues in hundreds of interim recommendations that focused on equitable access to vaccines, personal protective equipment, testing, therapies and treatments. The proposals have considered what the pandemic will leave behind, ensuring people of color have access to resources to combat long-haul covid, mental and behavioral health needs, as well as discrimination and xenophobia in health care.
More than 80% of the interim recommendations have been fulfilled, according to the administration, and the final report groups the remaining recommendations into five priorities that include strengthening the data ecosystem, increased accountability and access, and ensuring the health care workforce looks like the communities it serves.
"There's more work to do. We're still in a pandemic," said Marcella Nunez-Smith, chairwoman of President Joe Biden's Covid-19 Health Equity Task Force and associate dean for health equity research at Yale University. "I fear complacency. Things can change so quickly, and they have before."
Dramatic drops in caseloads in the Deep South, including the high-population states of Florida and Texas, have been offset by increases in the Mountain West and the northern tier of the country.
FIFTH-WAVE LOOKOUT
Twenty-three states have seen at least a 5% increase in cases over the past two weeks, with Illinois, Minnesota and Vermont reporting 50% more cases on average.
The aggregate national caseload, having eased for two months, began ticking up after hitting a low of about 69,000 new cases a day in late October. On Wednesday. that average topped 76,000.
The looming question is whether this is the start of what would be the fifth national wave of infections since the start of the pandemic -- and if so, what the amplitude of that wave might be.
No one can reliably predict the answer. Some pandemic modelers have stopped forecasting cases more than a week into the future because they've been wrong so many times.
Infectious-disease experts say a winter surge is very unlikely to be as severe as last year's, which at one point in January was killing more than 4,000 people a day.
Most people are now vaccinated, school-age kids are getting shots for the first time and the waning of immunity can be offset through newly authorized boosters. Doctors will likely have new drugs at their disposal to prevent most cases of covid-19 from becoming severe or even fatal.
But the disease burden has never been evenly distributed across the country. The places hardest hit recently tend to have low vaccination rates, and include much of rural America.
A year ago, news that two vaccines were remarkably effective against the coronavirus seemed like a light at the end of the tunnel. But the picture that has emerged since is more complex.
A sizable chunk of the population is ardently opposed to getting vaccinated. And the vaccines, though extremely effective, cannot provide a perfect shield against infection.
Antibodies wane naturally over time, a fact driving the government's push for boosters among the most vulnerable populations -- and the potential expansion of eligibility to every adult. The highly transmissible delta variant has shown its power, fueling rapid surges that burn out quickly, but also outbreaks that grow more gradually, like the pattern seen in Colorado.
The good news is that hospitalizations and deaths still appear to be declining nationally. Progress in vaccinations and improved clinical care have made the virus less lethal. Still, the virus is taking more than 1,200 lives every day on average.
If a major winter wave of infections does materialize -- something disease modelers say is not a certainty -- it will arrive in tandem with the seasonal flu. Influenza was virtually unknown last year, a fact experts attribute to masking, social distancing and other precautions against infection.
"I think we've all learned to respect this virus and how rapidly circumstances can change," said James Musser, chairman of the Department of Pathology and Genomic Medicine at Houston Methodist Hospital. The flu has barely registered there so far this fall, and the number of patients hospitalized with covid-19 has dropped from 800 in September to 125 now, he said.
The World Health Organization reported Wednesday that coronavirus deaths rose by 10% in Europe in the past week, making it the only world region where both covid-19 cases and deaths are steadily increasing. It was the sixth consecutive week that the virus has risen across the continent.
3.1 MILLION NEW CASES
In its weekly report on the pandemic, the U.N. health agency said there were about 3.1 million new cases globally, about a 1% increase from the previous week. Nearly two-thirds of the coronavirus infections -- 1.9 million -- were in Europe, where cases rose by 7%.
The countries with the highest numbers of new cases worldwide were the United States, Russia, Britain, Turkey and Germany. The number of weekly covid-19 deaths fell by about 4% worldwide and declined in every region except Europe.
Out of the 61 countries WHO includes in its European region, which includes Russia and stretches to Central Asia, 42% reported a jump in cases of at least 10% over the past week.
In the Americas, WHO said that new weekly cases fell by 5% and deaths declined by 14%, with the highest numbers reported from the United States.
On Tuesday, pharmaceutical company Pfizer asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to authorize booster shots of coronavirus vaccines for all adults. WHO has pleaded with countries not to administer more boosters until at least the end of the year; about 60 countries are actively rolling them out.
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In Southeast Asia and Africa, covid-19 deaths declined by about a third, despite the lack of vaccines in those regions.
WHO's Europe director, Dr. Hans Kluge, said last week that Europe was once again "back at the epicenter of the pandemic." He warned that if more actions weren't taken to stop covid-19, the region could see another 500,000 deaths by February.
Information for this article was contributed by Zeke Miller of The Associated Press and by Akilah Johnson, Carolyn Y. Johnson, Joel Achenbach and Jacqueline Dupree of The Washington Post.
