Friday, August 20, 2021

Cases still increasing: I had a conversation today with the Minister of Health of Gabon – Dr. Guy Patrick Obiang Ndong. The purpose of the meeting was for me to give him an idea of how we handle COVID in the United states and to answer some of his questions particularly around the area of misinformation and disinformation that has led to vaccine hesitancy which as it turns out is a major problem in southern Africa including his own country. We had a good conversation moderated by Ms. Anne Soy, a journalist from BBC. The MOH did not mention it but I'm sure there is this feeling of concern that we are planning to give out third shot boosts at the same time that Africa has very very little vaccine. I have explained on several of the TV shows and imprint that the USA has already given more doses to LMICs then the entire rest of the world combined (see above). In addition, we plan to give hundreds of millions more and they are also working with Peter Staley and the activists to provide major increases of doses to the rest of the world (see below ). There is still ongoing controversy among some people regarding whether the idea about giving a boost was justified by the data. I had a good conversation with Paul Offit who fields that we may have jumped the gun. Vincent Racaniello has written in his blog that he does not think that the boosters are justified. They are all waiting to see data regarding an increase in hospitalization as a result of delta and waning immunity. I still believe given the Israel data that boosters in their country are already showing a significant decreases in the number of breakthrough infections that we did the right thing in making our decision. In addition, those who object seemed to forget about the fact that short of hospitalizations a lot of people get seriously ill with symptoms and signs of long COVID that can be very troublesome. The boosters are safe and to put it in plain terms it can help, and it certainly cannot hurt.