Ukraine crisis triggers concerns of health emergency
Plus, COVID-19 vaccines don't cause vaccine AIDS
Hello Health Deskers,
The world is watching Eastern Europe after Russia began an unprovoked military operation against neighboring nation Ukraine. There is significant global concern that the crisis is fueling new health emergencies, including Ukrainian refugees fleeing their homeland for safety in Poland, Romania, Moldova, Hungary and Slovakia. We expect that access to critical health supplies and medicines will be in jeopardy as a result of this conflict. The World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for "sustained and safe access for the delivery of humanitarian assistance" while reiterating the importance of ensuring the Ukrainian health system is able to continue delivering essential care to people. The WHO also released $3.5 million USD from its Contingency Fund for Emergencies to supply urgent medical supplies, and is urging the world to avoid targeting health facilities, workers, patients, transports, and supplies.
Meanwhile, the fallout of a complex pandemic continues to unfold. This week we’re focusing kids who lost their parents to COVID-19, and our scientists unpack recent rumors around vaccines and immunodeficiency. Don’t forget to subscribe to this newsletter and reach out to us at health@meedan.com for any of your questions about health and science.
And now, a look ahead…
COVID has another long-lasting impact: orphans
Recent data sheds light on a tragedy that will impact children for years to come. COVID-19 has caused 5.2 million children to lose a parent to the virus. In a 20-country study published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, researchers suggest that number might be an undercount. It appears that India is facing the largest burden of parental death from the pandemic, with 1.9 million children impacted. Study authors noted that Africa’s numbers are likely to be ten times higher than what current data suggests. The international impact of these losses will only truly be demonstrated in the future. For kids, losing a parent can mean future loss of schooling, earlier entry into the labor market, poorer health outcomes associated with poverty, and other parental loss issues. Unfortunately, we predict that the official number of children who lost parents to this disease will increase as the true toll of pandemic deaths becomes clearer.
Here’s what our scientists dug into for you last week…
COVID-19 vaccines don’t cause vaccine AIDS
False claims have been circulating that COVID-19 vaccines and boosters cause “VAIDS” or “vaccine-acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.” Not only is this information false but there is no known medical condition called VAIDS. This claim was first made for COVID-19 vaccines in general and is now being circulated for booster shots.
“Reduced effectiveness of a vaccine does not mean that it is causing immunodeficiency disorders. Millions of people have been vaccinated and the vaccines are continuously monitored for their effectiveness. So far, there is no evidence to prove this claim.”
Why is making an HIV vaccine harder than making one for COVID-19?
There are several reasons why the production of HIV vaccines are taking longer than ones for other viruses such as SARS-COV-2. Namely, HIV is a more difficult organism to make a vaccine against. These are some of the specifics around why it’s hard to make an HIV vaccine:
HIV infects people by integrating itself into existing cells in our bodies. Since it latches onto our own bodies, it’s invisible to our immune system. It’s hard to design a vaccine smart enough to target a virus disguised as our own cells.
The immune system reacts to one component of the COVID-19 virus: the spike protein. There is not a similar component of HIV that can be targeted the same way.
HIV also has way more variants and more capacity to mutate than SARS-COV-2, making it harder to target with a vaccine.
“The complexity of a virus like HIV makes developing a preventative vaccine extremely challenging. The diversity of the virus, early development of viral reservoirs, uncertainty about why some people have more immune protection against the virus than others, and viral evasion to the immune systems' defenses are part of the reasons for this difficulty, according to Dan H. Barouch, MD, PhD, and director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and William Bosworth Castle Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.”