Coronavirus Weekend News Brief – June 2: Fauci to Face Congress, Role of Truthful Yet Misleading Facebook Posts on Vaccine Hesitancy

A statue of Ben Franklin in the center of Penn’s campus
Good afternoon. This is Jonathan Spira, director of research at the Center for Long Covid Research, reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on its 1,544th day.
In news we cover today , researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that truthful yet misleading Facebook posts had more of an adverse impact on vaccine hesitancy than did posts labeled as false, Dr. Anthony Fauci will appear before congressional investigators in the coming week, and a new look at the NIH “RECOVER” Long Covid initiative shows a program that was designed to fail.
TODAY IN THE FIRST YEAR OF COVID HISTORY
On June 2, 2020, the World Health Organization said that there were 133 potential Covid-19 vaccines in development around the world. Ten of the potential vaccines were in clinical trials in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China.
One day earlier, the director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he hoped that President Trump would not follow through with his decision to end the relationship between the United States and WHO, which he had threatened several days earlier.
From the Café de la Paix to La Maison Rose to Les Deux Magots, cafés in Paris reopened Tuesday, albeit only with outdoor seating, and excited Parisians flocked to them, even though tables were now spaced 3’ apart, while, in Belgium, Prince Joachim publicly apologized for having attended an illegal lockdown party in Córdoba, after which he tested positive for the virus.  “I would like to apologize for travelling and not having respected the quarantine measures,” he said. “I did not intend to offend or disrespect anyone in these very difficult times and deeply regret my actions and accept the consequences.”
Meanwhile, in Italy, the country’s Transport Ministry introduced mandatory temperature checks for rail passengers. Traveler with a temperature of 99.5° F (37.5° C) or higher were not be permitted board a train.
In Wuhan, the city where the novel coronavirus first emerged, health officials said they had tested almost 9.9 million residents over the course of a few weeks.  The push to test so many people had been unparalleled, as was its cost, 900 million renminbi ($126 million).
Finally, over 6.3 million reported cases of SARS-CoV-2 had been confirmed as of this date. The death toll stood at at least 379,000, according to figures compiled by the Coronavirus Morning News Brief. In the United States, over 1.8 million cases had been recorded and the death toll there stood at 106,000.
LONG COVID
RECOVER, the three-year-old National Institutes of Health program to address Long Covid, has reportedly not met its early goals.
A new report published in the online publication Stat, which covers health, medicine, and scientific discovery and is backed by the Boston Globe, said that experts who reviewed the contracts and project documents made available via the Freedom of Information Act relating to budgets and project management believe that the agency set itself up for failure because it did not include scientists who were experienced in earlier post-infectious chronic diseases on the team of researchers.
RECOVER stands for “Researching Covid to Enhance Recovery.”
UNITED STATES
A new study published in the journal Science found that truthful yet misleading Facebook posts did more to drive vaccine hesitation than outright fabrication.
The study, entitled “Quantifying the Impact of Misinformation and Vaccine-Skeptical Content on Facebook,” looked at factually accurate yet deceptive content and its impact on the vaccine decision-making process.
While content that was flagged by fact-checkers received only 8.7 million views in the period covered by the study, some 0.3% of vaccine-related content, while stories that were not flagged but still implied that vaccines were harmful such as the story of a young, healthy individual who died after receiving the vaccine – many from credible news sources – were viewed hundreds of millions of times.
The researchers at the University of Pennsylvania  and Massachusetts Institute of Technology flagged vaccine-skeptical content reduced vaccination intention by 2.28 percentage points per Facebook user, compared with −0.05 percentage points for flagged content—a 46-fold difference.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s foremost authority on infectious disease for over four decades, said that he will testify in the coming week about whether he was honest about government involvement in risky virus experiments.
The testimony will be Fauci’s first public appearance on Capitol Hill since he left government at the end of 2022. It at a time when many Americans are reassessing how the government handled the pandemic in its first several years.
In Los Angeles, city officials are recommending that the city council end the vaccination mandate that has been in place for city employees for three years. The change could take place as early as the coming week.
In a memorandum to the city council, City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo wrote that other local government agencies including the cities of Long Beach and San Diego and Los Angeles County had long since stopped requiring coronavirus vaccination as a condition of employment. Szabo added that  L.A. employee groups had not voiced any opposition to the change.
A new report shows that concentrations of the virus responsible for Covid-19 are on the rise in 29 wastewater treatment facilities in the state of Washington.
In Washington, D.C., the House subcommittee investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic is asking for access to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s personal email and mobile records. The move comes after his former adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases gave testimony last week saying that the two had had “secret back channel” communications.
OTHER HEALTHCARE NEWS
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna’s vaccine for RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus. The new vaccine will be the company’s second product after its coronavirus vaccine. A CDC advisory panel will vote later this month on recommendations for the use and intended population of Moderna’s jab, which will join similar shots by Pfizer and GSK on the market.
The U.S. government is also close to funding a late-stage trial of Moderna’s mRNA bird flu vaccine, it is understood. Moderna did not reply to a request for comment at press time, however, to confirm the funding.
PANDEMIC STATISTICS
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending May 25, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on May 31 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 4.2%, and the trend in test positivity is +0.8% in the most recent week. Meanwhile, the percentage of emergency department visits that were diagnosed as SARS-CoV-2 was 0.4%, and the trend in emergency department visits is +5.1%.
The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 was no longer being reported as of the end of May. Meanwhile, the percentage of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 was 0.6%, a figure that remains unchanged over the past two weeks.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
Some 70.6% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine at press time, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information.  So far, 13.58 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 5,128 doses are now administered each day.
Meanwhile, only 32.8% of people in low-income countries have received one dose, while in countries such as Canada, China, Denmark, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, at least 75% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine.
Only a handful of the world’s poorest countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia and Nepal – have reached the 70% mark in vaccinations. Many countries, however, are under 20% and, in countries such as Haiti, Senegal, and Tanzania, for example, vaccination rates remain at or below 10%.
In addition, with the beginning of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, 2023, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines in any significant number
Finally, as of April 14, 2024, only Turkmenistan in Central Asia is only state that has not reported any cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections whatsoever, although it is strongly suspected that the virus is present there. Meanwhile, the last territory in the world to have its first ever SARS-CoV-2 infection was Tokelau, a dependency of New Zealand that reported its first five cases on December 21, 2022.
Where Has All the Data Gone?
We regret to inform that, as of April 15, 2024, the Global Daily Statistics data in the Coronavirus Daily News Brief are no longer being updated. Over the past 15 months, as more politicians and governments sought to place SARS-CoV-2 in the rear-view mirror, pandemic data reporting sputtered out and we are now at the point where it is simply not feasible to provide statistically valid case data on a global scale.
We are developing potential new and authoritative sources that we will present once they have been properly vetted, so stay tuned to this space. In the meantime, our Long Covid and pandemic coverage will remain much the same.
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Paul Riegler contributed reporting to this issue.
The Coronavirus Daily News Brief is a publication of the Center for Long Covid Research. www.longcov.org
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