Dr. Peter Hotez says Joe Biden was going to say the pandemic is over and warns that the U. S. is going to be over. U. S. Vaccine Likely to Soon Face Another Deadly Wave of Coronavirus
Joe Biden was going to call for an end to the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, one of the country’s leading experts on the virus told The Guardian.
Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said the U. S. president of the U. S. has been working in the country. The U. S. Department of Justice in September that “the pandemic is over” was wrong and sent a bad message. to send to the American public.
“Well, it’s definitely not over,” Hotez said in an interview with The Guardian. “We are still at 200-300 deaths per day. [Covid-19] remains the third or fourth leading cause of death in the United States. That’s definitely the message we need to give, given that we’re desperately trying to convince other Americans to accept this [bivalent] reminder.
Hotez said getting the bivalent reminder is one of the most important things other people can do about covid. So far, only 14. 1% of the general U. S. population has been in the U. S. population. A U. S. citizen over the age of five has received the bivalent booster, according to the Centers for Disease. Control. ” For example, here in Texas, where I live, only 7 percent of Texans received their bivalent [booster]. “
Hotez, who is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize along with his colleague, Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi, for her paintings on the upcoming Corbevax, a vaccine against covid-19 that they refused to patent so that it can be replicated in low- and middle-income countries. He also issued a chilling warning about the long-term of this pandemic or any other.
“The next big coronavirus pandemic is coming, the fourth. I can’t tell you if it will be next year or five or 10 years from now, but it’s coming,” he warned.
In assessing the current position of the United States in relation to other countries, Hotez has not been offering smart news.
“I think EE. UU. no is doing well. I think we haven’t been in convincing a third of the country to get vaccinated, maybe a quarter. And of those who have won two doses, we only convince a third [of them] to get their booster,” Hotez said. “So the anti-vaxxers won this victory. We are still wasting too many lives.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, more than one million people have died from COVID-19 in the United States, the country with the 16th death rate compared to 100,000 other people. The existing weekly average of new cases in the U. S. UU. es of 65,067, a slight low of 2. 9% from the last weekly average of 67,034.
“I call it self-immolation in American history,” Hotez said. “It’s so tragic. “
But EE. UU. es the only one that has a poor rating of Covid reaction functionality.
“America remains vulnerable. Canada, less. Australia, less. Perhaps European countries, less so. But the U. S. , India and China, of course, are incredibly vulnerable, because China gets vaccines that don’t protect as well as variants, and the Chinese refuse effective boosters opposed to BA. 5, whether it’s our vaccine or the mRNA vaccine,” Hotez said.
China, in particular, has adopted a drastic approach in its reaction to the pandemic by implementing a zero-covid policy that has suffered from excessive lockdowns. A surge in infections has led to President Xi Jinping’s strict policy. A harrowing result of this policy is the deaths of 10 others from the remote western region of Xinjiang, who perished in a chimney that enveloped a high-rise residential construction from which they could not escape in time due to last month’s closures.
But unprecedented mass protests across the country, especially in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, the difficult end of the zero-covid policy, and Xi’s resignation, have sparked a shift in policy away from restrictive measures.
That relaxation is a smart sign, according to Hotez, who said harder doesn’t necessarily mean better when it comes to dealing with the virus.
“China has most commonly relied on competitive blockades and this is a strategy that has failed,” he said. Great increase. So I think they have the most vulnerability right now.
He added: “[China] has stuck to very rudimentary and primitive means. They didn’t take credit for the available generation.
So what does the pandemic hold for us? In the short term, the winter season is a playground for illnesses such as influenza, widespread respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and variants of Covid-19.
“Right now, we’re kind of waiting, not knowing what’s going on with those new variants,” Hotez said. “In the past, you know, we had that series of catastrophic waves of individual variants. In the latter part of 2021, we had the Delta wave, and then we had BA. 1, Omicron in early 2022, then BA. 212, then BA. 5.
“We’ve noticed those bumps in Europe and my prediction is we’re going to see one in the US. This winter. And maybe we’re seeing the beginning right now. How hard it will be to know. We are still seeing two hundred to 300 deaths per day, which is a serious and deadly disease. It’s still much worse than the flu. Maybe not as serious as it was. But the key is to get Americans to take two or three appropriate protective measures.
In addition to masking himself and proceeding to practice smart hygiene, Hotez encourages some other protective measure: getting rid of anti-scientific conspiracy theories.
“The globalization of anti-vaccine activists is a fatal force. Because of far-right members of Congress, CPAC [Conservative Political Action Coalition] and Fox News, and now it’s a globalizing force. Thus, anti-science activism and aggression are now killing, as social forces, more Americans than gun violence or global terrorism.
The wave of incorrect information about Covid-19 is ending on US soil. “Now everyone sees the same taste of anti-vaccine rhetoric in countries in sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia. . . This is a fatal force that we must not even have begun to scratch the surface of the struggle and struggle yet,” Hotez said.
“That’s why I’m so upset about all the false stories about the origin of Covid, because it takes my eyes off value, that we don’t do the mandatory tracking to determine when the next big thing will erupt. “
According to Hotez, the key to preventing the next big pandemic lies in one animal: bats, which can harbor a wide variety of viruses, from coronavirus to Ebola.
“We want to have full training in bat landscaping in Asia, especially in East Asia, from China to Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Japan, where those coronaviruses are found, as well as in the Middle East and even parts of Latin America,” he said. “The explanation for why we are seeing more and more is, in part, due to climate replacement and urbanization: human migrations invade the territories where bats are found. It is a mixture of climate substitution with other social determinants.
All hope is lost, for now. Getting ahead of the next pandemic, Hotez said it will also require a combination of the right technology and policy infrastructure.
“We have vaccine technologies at an unprecedented level. We have the generation to solve this problem. What we lack is the political will to empower low- and middle-income countries to investigate these epidemics well. The modern generation has outgrown our social and political infrastructure. . We have the technical support, but we are not willing to put it into effect,” he said.