Early in the pandemic, before anyone knew we'd have multiple highly effective vaccines against the novel coronavirus within a year, experts were sure of one thing: when and if a vaccine existed, it would need to be made accessible to all countries, regardless of their ability to pay. Poor countries have been left with inadequate vaccine supplies during global health crises time and time again, most recently during the 2009 swine flu pandemic.
To help ensure equitable global access to COVID-19 shots, 192 world governments joined forces with the World Health Organization (WHO) and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, last April to launch the COVAX vaccine initiative, which secures doses for developing countries. But COVAX isn't having the intended impact, writes Gavi CEO Seth Berkley in TIME. While roughly a third of people in the richest countries have now been at least partially vaccinated, that's true for less than 1% of people in lower-income countries.
A big part of the problem is that wealthier countries aren't sharing their extra doses with nations in need, Berkley writes. "We continue to see action taken by individual governments at the domestic level such as export bans and dose hoarding that are hindering efforts to end the pandemic at the global level," he writes.
But as Berkley argues, it's in everybody's interest to hasten global access. "The longer it takes to protect people most at risk, such as health and social care workers and vulnerable people, the longer the virus will continue to circulate and the greater the risk that new and potentially more dangerous variants will emerge," he writes. Plus, travel, trade and tourism will all continue to suffer as long as COVID-19 continues to spread around the world.
What can be done? In his column, Berkley offers four concrete steps governments and companies can take right now: making doses and vaccine ingredients easier to access by ending export bans; immediately sharing surplus vaccine doses with COVAX; helping COVAX buy more doses; and helping vaccine manufacturers scale up production.
Only by taking these steps, Berkley argues, can the world get back to normal for everyone.
About 337 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to various U.S. states as of May 12, of which 264.6 million doses have been administered thus far, according to TIME's vaccine tracker. About 35.4% of Americans have been completely vaccinated.
A panel of experts that advises the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) voted today 14-0 to endorse the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for adolescents ages 12 to 15. The CDC is expected to adopt the recommendations immediately. In the clinical trial of the Pfizer shot in this age group, no vaccinated child developed COVID-19 symptoms, suggesting the vaccine is highly effective. Making a vaccine available to the roughly 17 million Americans in this age range is likely to boost declining vaccination rates in the U.S., and should make it easier for schools and summer camps to safely reopen.
TODAY'S CORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK
The Global Situation
More than 159.6 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 1 a.m. E.T. today, and more than 3.3 million people have died. On May 11, there were 738,473 new cases and 13,629 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here is every country with over 2.5 million confirmed cases:
A coronavirus variant tearing through India may be especially contagious, according to a WHO report published yesterday. Due to a lack of genetic sequencing, there's no telling how widespread the variant is in India, but it's been seen in more than 28% of samples from positive tests there. The mutation, called B.1.617, is the fourth variant of concern the WHO has identified.
The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response—a recently formed international group of 13 former heads of government, health care experts and more—published a new report today after spending eight months reviewing countries' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and analyzing what went wrong. The panel, which was convened by the WHO, found "weak links at every point in the chain of preparedness and response." It also offers suggestions to prevent another pandemic, such as prioritizing public health preparedness at the highest levels of government and strengthening the WHO's independence and financing.
In his first face-to-face audience since last November, Pope Francis spoke before a crowd of 300 masked people at the Vatican today, CNN reports. He shook hands with and signed autographs for those in attendance, who had their temperatures checked beforehand. "It's not nice to speak to an empty room, in front of a camera," the Pope said, referring to his pandemic-era live-streamed homilies.
The Situation in the U.S.
The U.S. had recorded more than 32.7 million coronavirus cases as of 1 a.m. E.T. today. More than 582,800 people have died. On May 11, there were 33,651 new cases and 684 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
As vaccination rates slow in the U.S., much of the focus is on vaccine hesitancy. But about 30 million Americans aren't necessarily opposed to getting the shot—they just haven't gotten around to it yet, the New York Times reports (by contrast, 28 million say they will probably or definitely not get vaccinated). Many Americans who haven't been vaccinated yet find it difficult to make the time to get their shots. "What might help this situation is if it was like Domino's Pizza and you could call someone and say, 'Can I get my shot?' And they come give it to you," one such American told the Times.
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of May 12, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
Let's All Go to the Lobby
After such a dark pandemic year, will people even want to go to the movies? My colleague Stephanie Zacharek responds with a resounding yes. Moviegoing, a communal activity celebrating huge displays of human emotion, offers exactly what we've all been missing, she says. Read more here.
How to Tell If You Have COVID-19 Or the Flu
New laboratory tools can test a nasal swab sample for multiple viruses at once, which will surely come in handy when flu season returns in the fall, Roxanne Khamsi writes for the New York Times. Read more here.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Mandy Oaklander and edited by Alex Fitzpatrick.
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