POLITICO NIGHTLY: The region with half the world's Covid deaths

BY SABRINA RODRIGUEZ

Presented by

With help from Myah Ward

BAD NEWS FOR LATIN AMERICA — Latin America, which is home to less than 10 percent of the world’s population, is now accounting for about half of coronavirus-related deaths in the world.

The largest numbers are in Brazil, but Mexico, the second most populous country in the region, is also in bad shape: It’s the country with the fifth-highest number of deaths — more than 32,000 — due to coronavirus and more than 275,000 confirmed cases. It’s on track to soon surpass Italy in the number of deaths from Covid.

Trump of South America — Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is a big fan of President Donald Trump and has long set out to emulate the U.S. leader. Like Trump, Bolsonaro is known for his nationalist rhetoric and open disdain for the news media.

But now he’s catching up to Trump in a less desirable way: Brazil is the No. 2 country in the world for confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths. There’s more than 1.7 million cases there, and 68,000 deaths.

And there seems to be no effort to slow the virus down in Brazil. Even after Bolsonaro tested positive for Covid-19 this week, he’s still dismissing the pandemic.

He doesn’t wear a mask, calling the coronavirus a “little flu.” Now, he’s being sued for taking off his mask when he told reporters about his coronavirus diagnosis.

He posted on Facebook earlier this week about how he’s taking hydroxychloroquine and recommended it as treatment for the virus. (Trump said in May he was taking the malaria drug. But the FDA last month revoked its emergency use authorization for the drug, saying the potential benefits do not outweigh the health risks.) On policy, the Brazilian leader vetoed chunks of a law this week aimed at increasing indigenous peoples’ access to more hospital beds and medical equipment to fight Covid-19.

It’s a regional problem — Chile, a more advanced economy with a more modern health care system, has the fourth-worst pandemic in the world, as measured by per capita infection rates, according to a STAT tracker. Peru is ninth-worst. Panama is 10th. Brazil is 11th. Peru and Chile have seen hundreds of thousands of cases — they are currently the fifth- and sixth-highest countries in terms of total number of confirmed cases, according to Johns Hopkins.

Mexico comes in at No. 54 in terms of per capita rate of infection, but its death toll is alarming public health experts. Right now, Mexico is No. 16 in highest per capita death rates of any country, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. The actual numbers are thought to be much higher. Multiple news outlets have reported that the number of deaths in Mexico City could be three times higher than what its federal government is reporting.

Today alone, two other countries had prominent politicians announce positives. Bolivia's interim President Jeanine Añez announced this afternoon that she has tested positive for the coronavirus. Añez, a religious conservative, said she was well and feeling strong. Bolivia has almost 43,000 confirmed cases and more than 1,500 deaths. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s second most powerful figure and socialist leader, Diosdado Cabello, announced this afternoon on Twitter that he has coronavirus.

Mexico’s president hides out in Washington — Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador flew on a commercial flight to D.C. this week to meet with Trump, a move that many former Mexican officials and political analysts said was to distract from his lack of Covid-19 response. (Democrats in the U.S. said the same thing about Trump.)

López Obrador has delegated most of the decision-making on the virus to his undersecretary of health, while he has shown off his amulets as a protective shield against the virus and continued to travel across the country without a mask. Meanwhile, Mexican governors have urged for stronger border restrictions to keep Americans out and warned that López Obrador’s move to start reopening the country last month could backfire as it has in many U.S. states.

Stay off the Inca Trail — While everyone gets angsty for a trip, don't expect to be on a beach in Ipanema or exploring Machu Picchu anytime soon — even if you're willing to wear a mask and take the health risk. Brazil is still banning the foreigners from entering the country and Peru hasn't set a date to reopen the historic site. Americans, however, are free to book a flight to lay on a beach in Cancún at their own risk.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Renu is out, but her inbox is still gladly accepting tips and notes. Reach out: rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.

A message from PhRMA:

America’s biopharmaceutical companies are sharing manufacturing capabilities with each other so that once a treatment or vaccine is ready, they can get it to millions of people fast. And there’s no slowing down. America’s biopharmaceutical companies will continue working day and night until they beat coronavirus. More.

FIRST IN NIGHTLY

REOPEN SCHOOLS, JUST NOT LIKE THIS — There’s a right way to reopen America’s schools. It requires a clear-eyed look at the data. It demands a balanced discussion of the benefits and costs — to students, parents and educators. And it looks very little like the path America is on, magazine digital editor Zack Stanton writes.

“We really run the risk of drowning out balance by having this be ‘the people who want to reopen’ vs. ‘the people who don’t want to reopen,’” says Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University. Oster, the author of two bestselling books taking a data-driven approach to parenting and pregnancy, worries that keeping schools closed will hurt kids’ education, hurt the economy, hurt parents — especially moms — and widen the inequities that the pandemic is already causing.

She tells Stanton: “Part of what makes this difficult — and part of why people find economists unpalatable in these discussions — is that ultimately all of those trade-offs are going to involve saying, ‘I’m willing to take this risk with someone’s health in order to have these other benefits.’ That is a viscerally uncomfortable thing to say — and I also find that uncomfortable. I’m a person in addition to being an economist. But one of the things I try to remind people is that we make those calculations all the time. We allow people to drive their cars and to have swimming pools and do all kinds of stuff we know to be risky, and which — in the case of driving cars — have risks to other people. As a society, we allow some of those tradeoffs, even though we might not be thinking about them in exactly this way.”

THE CRITICAL NEWS AND CONTEXT YOU NEED, IN 15 MINUTES OR LESS: Covid-19 cases are on the rise, protests to address racial injustice and police reform are ongoing, and a pivotal election is just a few short months away. Struggling to keep up with this never-ending news cycle? Keep up to speed with the day's essential news with POLITICO Dispatch, a short, daily podcast that cuts through the news clutter. SUBSCRIBE TODAY.

A view of a new emergency care facility that was erected to treat inmates infected with Covid-19 at San Quentin State Prison in California. More than 1,400 inmates and staff at the prison have become infected. Six inmates have died from the virus. | Getty Images

TALKING TO THE EXPERTS

Researchers are examining a century-old vaccine to see if it can offer limited protection against the coronavirus. Nightly’s Myah Ward talked to Jeffrey Cirillo , a professor of microbial pathogenesis and immunology at Texas A&M College of Medicine, about a U.S.-based trial he’s leading for the tuberculosis vaccine, also known as BCG. This conversation has been edited.

Why did you start researching the tuberculosis vaccine for Covid-19?

When the pandemic started, we were all looking at different strategies to develop new diagnostics and therapeutics and vaccines that could be used against a virus that was relatively new, in a rapid period of time.

And what we did know when we saw the clinical cases — we see this cytokine storm, or uncontrolled inflammation, and that suggested to us that maybe if we can tip the balance of the immune response in the other direction, we might be able to reduce illness. And that suggested that the vaccine that we’re talking about today — the BCG vaccine that’s used worldwide for tuberculosis. We use it in the U.S. to treat bladder cancer because what it does is it targets immune response to cells that are damaged.

So we went to the FDA and we said, ‘this is already FDA-approved for bladder cancer. Can we use it off-label, for a purpose that it is not normally used for, to try to treat Covid-19?’ And we did gain approval right away. It’s given to 500 million children worldwide. It’s given at birth to very very young children. Very few side effects, very safe. And so the question was, why not?

Tell me about the trial.

This is a randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled trial, so it’s the most rigorous trial there can be. At the end of the trial, we could potentially start a national vaccination program.

This vaccine is the only one in Phase 4 trials worldwide. So, basically, this is the last step before it can be used for people nationally.

We're also doing a cognitive study in parallel to evaluate the cognitive effects of Covid-19. So we're doing MRI and cognitive assessments at baseline, before vaccination. And at the end of the trial at six months, we're going to come back and evaluate the effects of the virus as well as the vaccine to reduce those effects at the end of the trial.

We probably have somewhere around 100 to 150 people vaccinated already. And over the next week or two, we'll probably go into the 200 to 300 range. The total trial is around 1,800.

Can you talk a little more about the cognitive effects of Covid-19 you’ve mentioned?

In the 1918 pandemic, we saw the same sort of thing, a spike in Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, about five to 10 years after the pandemic. And so with Covid-19, we're expecting the same sort of thing. But this vaccine has the ability to reduce that type of inflammatory response.

So is the goal for this to be paired with a Covid-19 vaccine, or is this just something to hold us over until we have an approved vaccine a year or so from now?

I think it’s kind of both. If it does reduce mortality, say we can cut the mortalities in half, then it just buys us time until we do have a specific vaccine. But the other thing we know — we saw this with polio and papillomavirus and flu — pairing this vaccine with a specific vaccine, the vaccine will have better efficacy.

What about the outliers that already use this vaccine? Brazil, for example, uses this widely but is facing a surge in Covid-19 cases.

The U.S. has never vaccinated with this vaccine. So we expect to see the biggest effect in the U.S. population. What we know, with this vaccine, is it lasts two to three years really well — the top efficacy, the highest level of immune response, is about two to three years. People normally see pretty good protection for about 10 years, but after that, it starts to wane. In Brazil, the vaccine is given at birth. So most of the people that are getting Covid-19, pretty much everywhere in the world, are in their 20s or 30s. So they’re at least 10 years out from the period of time where we’d expect to see the efficacy.

Prior to the virus getting into the U.S., very few children were shown to get Covid-19. But in the U.S., we saw this Kawasaki-like inflammatory syndrome. We think that they may very well be because we don't vaccinate in the U.S. Children in other countries have been protected from this inflammatory syndrome, whereas in the U.S., they're not.

If this vaccine is safe, why can’t we go ahead and start using it right now?

The main reason is we don’t really have the production and the production capacity to allow everybody to be vaccinated. And currently the vaccine is already saving lives in the U.S. for bladder cancer. So we don't want to take the resources that are already saving lives away, unless we are 100 percent certain that it’s going to make a significant difference.

 

ON THE HILL

SCHOOLHOUSE TALK — Congress’ push to deliver its next coronavirus relief package is facing a massive new hurdle: the national fight over reopening America’s schools. The terms for expansive funding for education are likely to be a central component of the next trillion dollar-plus package, along with soon-to-expire jobless benefits and additional stimulus checks, congressional reporters Sarah Ferris and Marianne LeVine write. While the federal government can’t set procedures for local school districts, Republicans and Democrats are eager to use the package to help shape how the nation reopens schools for millions of students.

FOUR SQUARE

THE ZOOM PANEL — Eugene Daniels, Tim Alberta, Elena Schneider and Laura Barrón-López discuss disparities and testing during Covid-19, and the ramifications of Thursday’s Supreme Court decisions, on the latest episode of Four Square.

ASK THE AUDIENCE

Nightly asks you: How do you think schools and day cares should reopen this fall, if at all? Let us know in our form, and we’ll include select answers in Friday’s edition.

BECOME A CHINA WATCHER: Need help navigating the diplomatic flare-ups between the Trump administration and the Chinese Communist Party? Get unique insight on this critical relationship that will shape the world for decades to come, and analysis on the power players driving the conversation. Become a China Watcher to see where the relationship between these world superpowers is heading before anyone else. SUBSCRIBE TODAY.

NIGHTLY NUMBER

28.5 percent The Arizona Covid-19 testing positivity rate today, according to state data. Arizona reported 4,057 new cases, out of 14,193 new tests, and 75 fatalities.

PARTING WORDS

VACATION TRIP-UPS — Nightly’s Tyler Weyant writes:

Washington, as we’ve come to understand more acutely in the past few weeks, is defined by its monuments: the imposing columns of the Lincoln Memorial, the dome that covers Thomas Jefferson, the obelisk commemorating the first president. But perhaps one monument is treasured by D.C.’s political class more than anything else: the month of August.

Yes, August, when the nation’s capital takes on the vibe of a French summer. On the banks of the Potomac, it may be Louisiana-basement damp and hot, but why care? The besuited hordes have left for their houses on the Eastern Shore, or the Cape or Mar-A-Lago. Whether you’re with them or left behind, with Wi-Fi and a phone, you’ll work as much as it takes for people not to realize you’re on your second gin and tonic at 3 p.m.

Over the past few weeks, I have gotten requests from friends and family, asking if I want to go on a little trip. They aren’t grand cruises or banned trips to Europe, just sojourns within three hours, a chance to unwind and look at a different set of walls in a different ZIP code. Any other summer, I’d go in a heartbeat.

But these days, without fail, every time someone asks, I spiral. Sure, I could use the time away. But what if I go to a place with more cases? What if the hotel or condo doesn’t use proper cleaning procedures? What if the other people staying near us aren’t stringent in their precautions? What if my friends are lax? Am I just another millennial snowflake who doesn’t know how to have fun? I usually start and end the conversation with, “I’m on the fence. I’ll let you know.”

The class of people who scatter from the swamp in August are realizing their typical August is on the fence as well. The closest folks may get to a beach might be the photo behind them on Zoom. But, like the country that sends most of these folks to D.C., we all need to make some sacrifices from our usual routines and comforts for the common good.

A message from PhRMA:

America’s biopharmaceutical companies are sharing their knowledge and resources more than ever before to speed up the development of new medicines to fight COVID-19. They’re working with doctors and hospitals on over 1,100 clinical trials.

And there’s no slowing down. America’s biopharmaceutical companies will continue working day and night until they beat coronavirus. Because science is how we get back to normal.

See how biopharmaceutical companies are working together to get people what they need during this pandemic.

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