Equilibrium/Sustainability — Deer populations may ‘host’ coronavirus

Today is Wednesday. Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. Subscribe here: digital-staging.thehill.com/newsletter-signup. 

At least three COVID-19 variants are circulating through wild populations of white-tailed deer across northeast Ohio, according to researchers from Ohio State University.

No one is quite sure how the deer are being infected — but humans are the prime candidate, biologist Suresh Kuchipudi told WGAL news in reference to an unrelated Penn State study that found COVID-19 in 80 percent of the deer they sampled.

This suggested deer might have become a “reservoir” for COVID-19, the Penn State team concluded — rather like the East Asian bats thought to have been host to the ancestors of COVID-19, according to Nature. 

If deer were becoming a new “maintenance host … we have a new potential source of SARS-CoV-2 coming in to humans,” said Ohio State senior author Andrew Bowman. That complicates attempts to control the virus, he said — and means that “beyond tracking what’s in people, we’ll need to know what’s in the deer, too.”

Today we continue our review of the year by looking at the risk posed by large, persistent COVID-19 reservoirs — the possibility that it will lead to the continual arrival of new strains like omicron, and possibly some that are vaccine resistant. Then we turn to a public health crisis that has killed four times as many people per year as the coronavirus.

For Equilibrium, we are Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Please send tips or comments to Saul at selbein@digital-staging.thehill.com or Sharon at sudasin@digital-staging.thehill.com. Follow us on Twitter: @saul_elbein and @sharonudasin. 

Let’s get to it.

Vaccine inequity may lead to jab-proof virus

This year, national and local governments across the developed world fought the evolving coronavirus pandemic with vaccination drives, testing campaigns and lockdowns — all part of an expanding vision of the state’s role in public health.

But as the recent surge of the omicron variant shows, it hasn’t been enough due to a combination of both the rise of vaccine hesitancy in the developed world and the failure of wealthy countries to share their vaccine stocks with the rest of the world.

First words: “As this pandemic drags on, it’s possible that new variants could evade our countermeasures and become fully resistant to current vaccines or past infection, necessitating vaccine adaptations,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters earlier this month, according to CNBC.

A problem of blowback: The current “tsunami of cases,” Tedros told reporters, was resulting from the combined circulation of the delta and omicron coronavirus variants — which he blamed on “misinformation and disinformation” by populists in wealthy countries, and on the failure of those countries to help get the rest of the world vaccinated, according to CNBC.

This policy, Tedros said, had “undermined equity and created the ideal conditions for the emergence of new variants.”

Missing the mark: Of the 194 countries in the World Health Organization, 92 missed the target to vaccinate 40 percent of their populations by years’ end, The Associated Press reported.

Spillover risk: That’s a danger for more than just those infected with coronavirus, Tedros noted: it also would put “immense pressure on exhausted health workers and health systems on the brink of collapse,” he said, according to the AP.

That’s been particularly dire in the developing world, where disruptions from coronavirus have led to the “severe disruption” of care for patients with cancer, tuberculosis and AIDs, as well as “upending” reproductive services for millions of women, according to a U.N. report.

Two grim statistics: In South Asia alone, disruptions that COVID-19 caused to essential services may have led to 239,000 additional child and maternal deaths in South Asia alone — and the likelihood that 4.5 million of the 420 million children currently out of school there might never return.

WHERE ARE THE VACCINES?

Early in the pandemic, the WHO worked with several other vaccine access organizations to set up COVAX, which was supposed to pool donations from wealthy countries to buy COVID-19 vaccines at competitive rates to provide to poorer countries, BuzzFeed explained.

The idea was to buy the drugs new, so as to avoid becoming a dumping ground for expiring doses, the AP reported.

But vaccine manufacturers wouldn’t sell: Just 13 percent of the vaccines COVAX has contracted for have actually been delivered, the AP reported.

“We’ve seen manufacturers delay their shipments to Covax, while we know that they are supplying other buyers, countries,” said Soumya Swaminathan, WHO’s chief scientist, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Of the 800 million doses it has shipped out — less than half of its goal — more than 400 million were shots donated by wealthy countries, according to the Journal. Johnson & Johnson, for example, has delivered only 6.2 million of a contracted 200 million doses.

Boosters may be counterproductive: The WHO says the stockpiling of 80 percent of the vaccine supply by wealthy countries like the U.S. — which are now fighting the new variants with booster campaigns — is “prolonging the pandemic by diverting supply to countries that already have high levels of vaccination coverage, giving the virus more opportunity to spread and mutate,” said Tedros, according to the U.N.

But now many don’t want them: Many parts of Africa and South Asia now have more vaccines than people who want to take them, according to a Nature study which found that reluctance to get the vaccine has soared in countries like Nepal and South Africa, even countries with high acceptance of vaccines more generally.

The slow rollout might be to blame: People have seen “how we’re distributing vaccines to the global south. It’s sort of like — here’s our leftovers, they expire in a week,” Rupali Limaye of Johns Hopkins told Nature.

And the long delays themselves may have discouraged people from getting vaccinated, said Tanzanian doctor and researcher Kushik Ramalya, noting that “people start to wonder if they even need to be vaccinated if they have so far avoided becoming infected,” according to Nature.

2022 Takeaway: Despite all this,Tedros is pushing WHO members for a “new years resolution” to vaccinate 70 percent of their populations by July, saying he was optimistic that “the acute phase” of the pandemic would end in 2022, CNBC reported.

Pandemic peril pales next to pollution 

Behind the acute spikes of the coronavirus pandemic looms another cluster of public health crises: the growing, complex and multifaceted danger of toxic chemicals in our air, water and food supply.

And as we reported this year, the toll of air, water and food pollution — which dwarf the coronavirus pandemic in terms of lives lost — has disturbing links to our reliance on fossil fuels both for plastics and power.

First words: “In February 2020, the world began to panic about the novel coronavirus, which killed 2714 people that month. This made the news,” climate reporter David Wallace Wells wrote in the London Review of Books this month. 

But something else happened that month, and most months since, that didn’t make the news, he wrote: “Around 800,000 people died from the effects of air pollution.”

A staggering discrepancy: About 5.4 million people have died of COVID-19 since January 2020, according to Our World in Data.

Meanwhile, about 10.2 million die prematurely every year from continually breathing in the microscopic particles cast into the air by fossil fuel combustion, according to a study in Environmental Research — a death rate about four times that of the coronavirus pandemic.

Cutting life expectancies: The average person is exposed to more than three times the level of air pollution judged acceptable by the WHO, leading to an average of two years of life expectancy lost per person, as we reported in September.

To put that another way, the Environmental Research paper found that China cut 2.5 million premature deaths between 2012 and 2018 by means of a 43 percent reduction in fossil fuel emissions.

Threatening and sperm counts. Contamination from fossil fuels could be behind something researchers have observed but struggled to explain: the near straight-line decline in both sperm counts and the human fertility rate, as we reported earlier this month, based on a study in Nature.

ARE PLASTICS PART OF THE PROBLEM?

The authors of the Nature study on fertility and fossil fuels ended with a hypotheses, not a conclusion. They asked whether there might be some unknown link between the decline in many aspects of human reproductive ability  — like, say, the ability of 40-year-old women to carry a pregnancy to term — and the near-universal presence of fossil fuel products, many of which are known to disrupt human hormones.

Dangerous packaging: One key risk vector are the clingy plastics used to wrap food, which are still allowed to include the plastic component phthalates, as we reported this month. A lawsuit from Environmental Defense Fund and others charges that these are “linked to birth effects, infertility, miscarriage, learning disabilities and neurological  disorders in children.” 

People with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) also have more microplastics in their feces than healthy people, as we reported last week.

A coming production boom: Fossil fuel manufacturers are hoping to increase the production of plastics over the 2020s to compensate for declines in the role of oil in power generation and transportation — with the result that, in addition to the possible health impacts of plastics, they will belch out the equivalent emissions to 116 new coal plants.

Forever chemicals: This year also brought a growing awareness of the threat posed by the family of toxic chemicals known as PFAS, which are linked to kidney, liver, immune and reproductive problems, and which are found in a wide array of household products, from makeup and children’s toys to nonstick pans and to-go containers.

California banned them in packaging and childrens’ toys, but they remain legal for most uses in most packaging in the United States.

Takeaway: The crime, accidents and epidemics most often featured on the news may turn out to pale in comparison to the death and damage doled out by the environment we have created for ourselves.

Wellness Wednesday 

Public health trends from 2021 that are likely to last well into the New Year.

 

That’s it for today. Please visit The Hill’s sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you Thursday.