Dr. Anthony Fauci — the nation’s top infectious disease expert — has said his departure from the federal government does not mean he’s retiring.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert who became a household name — and the subject of partisan attacks — during the COVID-19 pandemic, announced Monday he will depart the federal government in December after more than five decades of service.
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Fauci, who serves as President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation. He was a leader in the federal response to HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases even before the coronavirus hit.
“I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career,” Fauci said in a statement, calling those roles “the honor of a lifetime.”
President Biden praised Fauci in a statement, saying, “Whether you’ve met him personally or not, he has touched all Americans’ lives with his work. I extend my deepest thanks for his public service. The United States of America is stronger, more resilient, and healthier because of him.”
One is a toddler in California and the other an infant who is not a U.S. resident but was tested while in Washington, D.C., according to the CDC.
Two children have been diagnosed with monkeypox in the U.S., health officials said Friday.
One is a toddler in California and the other an infant who is not a U.S. resident but was tested while in Washington, D.C., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The children were described as being in good health and receiving treatment. How they caught the disease is being investigated, but officials think it was through household transmission.
Other details weren’t immediately disclosed.
Monkeypox is endemic in parts of Africa, but this year more than 15,000 cases have been reported in countries that historically don’t see the disease. In the U.S. and Europe, the vast majority of infections have happened in men who have sex with men, though health officials have stressed that anyone can catch the virus.
In addition to the two pediatric cases, health officials said they were aware of at least eight women among the more than 2,800 U.S. cases reported so far.
While the virus has mostly been spreading among men who have sex with men, “I don’t think it’s surprising that we are occasionally going to see cases” outside that social network, the CDC’s Jennifer McQuiston told reporters Friday.
Officials have said the virus can spread through close personal contact, and via towels and bedding. That means it can happen in homes, likely through prolonged or intensive contact, said Dr. James Lawler, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
“People don’t crawl on each other’s beds unless they are living in the same house or family,” he said.
In Europe, there have been at least six monkeypox cases among kids 17 years old and younger.
This week, doctors in the Netherlands published a report of a boy who was seen at an Amsterdam hospital with about 20 red-brown bumps scattered across his body. It was monkeypox, and doctors said they could not determine how he got it.
In Africa, monkeypox infections in children have been more common, and doctors have noted higher proportions of severe cases and deaths in young children.
One reason may be that many older adults were vaccinated against smallpox as kids, likely giving them some protection against the related monkeypox virus, Lawler said. Smallpox vaccinations were discontinued when the disease was eradicated about 40 years ago.
Monkeypox is spreading in the U.S., with a lack of tests and a disorganized testing system adding to criticism of the country’s response.
A new disease outbreak has been detected on another continent. It has spread to the U.S., where growth has been exponential, especially in New York City. While it’s been two months since the disease was first spotted, the U.S. is struggling to muster the tools it needs to contain the outbreak.
It sounds like where the country was with COVID in March of 2020, but now we’re seeing something similar with monkeypox.
The latest outbreak of the disease has spread to most U.S. states and dozens of countries worldwide.
The U.S. has at least 2,000 confirmed monkeypox cases nationwide, with the official case rate rising more than tenfold in the past month. With a testing shortage, it’s likely that the actual case count is higher.
Though they sound the same, the diseases are a bit different.
COVID currently spreads more easily than monkeypox, as it primarily infects people through airborne transmission. Monkeypox spreads through close physical contact and exchanging of fluids, transmitting and often presenting in ways that can resemble sexually-transmitted illnesses.
And, monkeypox only can spread once a person has symptoms, unlike COVID’s asymptomatic, or pre-symptomatic transmission. Also, unlike with COVID, there is an approved vaccine ready that prevents monkeypox transmission; an existing smallpox vaccine was found to work against monkeypox as well.
There’s also help on the way. The CDC announced last week that it has the capacity for 70,000 monkeypox tests per week and that at least 300,000 shots have been made available to states, with nearly 800,000 more expected to be ready for distribution by the end of this month, according to Health and Human Services.
But the jump from having the tools needed to stop an outbreak to actually using them has proven difficult. Vaccine rollout has been a bit of a mixed bag.
Federal health officials have been working on getting vaccines out to cities and states. But with demand outstripping supply in epicenters like New York City, it’s not a guarantee that everyone who wants, or needs, a monkeypox vaccine can get one.
“We’ll certainly need much more vaccine and quickly to meet the burden of disease here in New York City, the epicenter of the monkeypox epidemic in the United States,” Ashwin Vasan, commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said. “We share our New Yorkers frustrations with about waiting to make appointments or long lines. Please hear us when we say every action we’ve taken to date has been with one goal in mind: to get vaccine to the city and to get shots in arms as quickly as possible.”
It’s a misstep that has come as the U.S. has had more than two years of experience combatting an existing outbreak and after a year and a half of experience distributing vaccines to slow an outbreak.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s top medical adviser, has acknowledged the response hasn’t been perfect.
“It would have been good to have had a lot more vaccines available early on, but right now we have accelerated that extensively,” Dr. Fauci said. “Could we have done better? Always. You never say we did perfectly.”
In New York, health officials say they will now focus on delivering the vaccine to people who have not received the first dose. But, this puts into question if those who already got the first shot will be at risk of not getting the second dose at all. The second dose of the vaccine is meant to be administered 28 days after the first to be fully effective.
Authorities in New York City are doing this despite advice from the FDA and CDC.
Monkeypox has been entrenched for decades in Africa. It’s circulated in Europe, North America and beyond since May among gay and bisexual men.
As the World Health Organization’s emergency committee convenes Thursday to consider for the second time within weeks whether to declare monkeypox a global crisis, some scientists say the striking differences between the outbreaks in Africa and in developed countries will complicate any coordinated response.
African officials say they are already treating the continent’s epidemic as an emergency. But experts elsewhere say the mild version of monkeypox in Europe, North America and beyond makes an emergency declaration unnecessary even if the virus can’t be stopped. British officials recently downgraded their assessment of the disease, given its lack of severity.
Monkeypox has been entrenched for decades in parts of central and western Africa, where diseased wild animals occasionally infect people in rural areas in relatively contained epidemics. The disease in Europe, North America and beyond has circulated since at least May among gay and bisexual men. The epidemic in rich countries was likely triggered by sex at two raves in Spain and Belgium.
Some experts worry these and other differences could possibly deepen existing medical inequities between poor and wealthy nations.
There are now more than 15,000 monkeypox cases worldwide. While the United States, Britain, Canada and other countries have bought millions of vaccines, none have gone to Africa, where a more severe version of monkeypox has already killed more than 70 people. Rich countries haven’t yet reported any monkeypox deaths.
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“What’s happening in Africa is almost entirely separate from the outbreak in Europe and North America,” said Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia who previously advised WHO on infectious diseases.
The U.N. health agency said this week that outside of Africa, 99% of all reported monkeypox cases are in men and of those, 98% are in men who have sex with other men. Still, the disease can infect anyone in close, physical contact with a monkeypox patient, regardless of their sexual orientation.
“In these very active gay sexual networks, you have men who really, really don’t want people to know what they’re doing and may not themselves always know who they are having sex with,” Hunter said.
Some of those men may be married to women or have families unaware of their sexual activity, which “makes contact tracing extremely difficult and even things like asking people to come forward for testing,” Hunter said, explaining why vaccination may be the most effective way to shut down the outbreak.
That’s probably not the case in Africa, where limited data suggests monkeypox is mainly jumping into people from infected animals. Although African experts acknowledge they could be missing cases among gay and bisexual men, given limited surveillance and stigmatization against LGBTQ people, authorities have relied on standard measures like isolation and education to control the disease.
Dr. Placide Mbala, a virologist who directs the global health department at Congo’s Institute of National Biomedical Research, said there are also noticeable differences between patients in Africa and the West.
“We see here (in Congo) very quickly, after three to four days, visible lesions in people exposed to monkeypox,” Mbala said, adding that someone with so many visible lesions is unlikely to go out in public, thus preventing further transmission.
But in countries including Britain and the U.S., doctors have observed some infected people with only one or two lesions, often in their genitals.
“You wouldn’t notice that if you’re just with that person in a taxi or a bar,” Mbala said. “So in the West, people without these visible lesions may be silently spreading the disease.”
He said different approaches in different countries will likely be needed to stop the global outbreak, making it challenging to adopt a single response strategy worldwide, like those for Ebola and COVID-19.
Dr. Dimie Ogoina, a professor of medicine at Nigeria’s Niger Delta University, said he feared the world’s limited vaccine supplies would result in a repeat of the problems that arose in the coronavirus pandemic, when poorer countries were left empty-handed after rich countries hoarded most of the doses.
“It does not make sense to just control the outbreak in Europe and America, because you will then still have the (animal) source of the outbreak in Africa,” said Ogoina, who sits on WHO’s monkeypox emergency committee.
This week, U.S. officials said more than 100,000 monkeypox vaccine doses were being sent to states in the next few days, with several million more on order for the months ahead. The U.S. has reported more than 2,000 cases so far, with hundreds more added every day.
Some U.S. public health experts have begun to wonder if the outbreak is becoming widespread enough that monkeypox will become a new sexually transmitted disease.
Declaring monkeypox to be a global emergency could also inadvertently worsen the rush for vaccines, despite the mildness of the disease being seen in most countries.
Dr. Hugh Adler, who treats monkeypox patients in Britain, said there aren’t many serious cases or infections beyond gay and bisexual men. Still, he said it was frustrating that more vaccines weren’t available, since the outbreak was doubling about every two weeks in the U.K..
“If reclassifying monkeypox as a global emergency will make (vaccines available), then maybe that’s what needs to be done,” he said. “But in an ideal world, we should be able to make the necessary interventions without the emergency declaration.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci said he doesn’t plan to retire after stepping down from his current role as the government’s top infectious disease expert.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said Tuesday he doesn’t plan to retire after stepping down from his role by the end of President Joe Biden’s current term.
In an interview with NPR, Fauci said he still plans to pursue other directions in his professional career after leaving his current role by January 2025.
Related StoryFauci Expects To Retire By End Of President Biden’s Current Term
Fauci, 81, was appointed director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984, and has led research in HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections, Ebola, Zika and the coronavirus. He has advised seven presidents and is President Biden’s chief medical adviser.
While he hasn’t given an exact date of when he plans to step down, he said when that time comes he will make a “formal announcement.”
81-year-old Dr. Fauci said he plans to retire as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases by January 2025.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said Monday he plans to retire by the end of President Joe Biden’s term in January 2025.
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Fauci, 81, was appointed director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984, and has led research in HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections, Ebola, Zika and the coronavirus. He has advised seven presidents and is Biden’s chief medical adviser.
In an interview with Politico, Fauci said he hoped to “leave behind an institution where I have picked the best people in the country, if not the world, who will continue my vision.”
Asked Monday on CNN when he planned to retire, Fauci said he does not have a specific retirement date in mind and hasn’t started the process. He said he expects to leave government before the end of Biden’s current term, which ends in January 2025.
“By the time we get to the end of Biden’s first term, I will very likely (retire),” Fauci said. He added: “it is extremely unlikely — in fact, for sure — that I am not going to be here beyond January 2025.”
Fauci, long a prominent figure of the government’s response to infectious disease, was thrust even more into the spotlight at the height of the coronavirus pandemic under then-President Donald Trump. As the pandemic response became politicized, with Trump suggesting the pandemic would “fade away,” promoting unproven treatment methods and vilifying scientists who countered him, Fauci had to get security protection when he and his family received death threats and harassment.
Fauci testified repeatedly to Congress about the virus, and he and some Republicans, including Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, engaged in heated exchanges over the origins of the virus.
Fauci said Monday his decision to eventually leave his role was unrelated to politics.
“It has nothing to do with pressures, nothing to do with all of the other nonsense that you hear about, all the barbs, the slings and the arrows. That has no influence on me,” he said.
“And almost without exception, these influencers feel that they have been wronged by mainstream society in some way,” Mr. Brooking added.
Dr. Malone earned a medical degree from Northwestern University in 1991, and for the next decade taught pathology at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Maryland. He then turned to biotech start-ups and consulting. His résumé says he was “instrumental” in securing early-stage approval for research on the Ebola vaccine by the pharmaceutical company Merck in the mid-2010s. He also worked on repurposing drugs to treat Zika.
In extended interviews at his home over two days, Dr. Malone said he was repeatedly not recognized for his contributions over the course of his career, his voice low and grave as he recounted perceived slights by the institutions he had worked for. His wife, Dr. Jill Glasspool Malone, paced the room and pulled up articles on her laptop that she said supported his complaints.
The example he points to more frequently is from his time at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. While there, he performed experiments that showed how human cells could absorb an mRNA cocktail and produce proteins from it. Those experiments, he says, make him the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology.
“I was there,” Dr. Malone said. “I wrote all the invention.”
What the mainstream media did instead, he said, was give credit for the mRNA vaccines to the scientists Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, because there “is a concerted campaign to get them the Nobel Prize” by Pfizer and BioNTech, where Dr. Kariko is a senior vice president, as well as the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Weissman leads a laboratory researching vaccines and infectious diseases.
But at the time he was conducting those experiments, it was not known how to protect the fragile RNA from the immune system’s attack, scientists say. Former colleagues said they had watched in astonishment as Dr. Malone began posting on social media about why he deserved to win the Nobel Prize.
The idea that he is the inventor of mRNA vaccines is “a totally false claim,” said Dr. Gyula Acsadi, a pediatrician in Connecticut who along with Dr. Malone and five others wrote a widely cited paper in 1990 showing that injecting RNA into muscle could produce proteins. (The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work by injecting RNA into arm muscles that produce copies of the “spike protein” found on the outside of the coronavirus. The human immune system identifies that protein, attacks it and then remembers how to defeat it.)
In delivering vaccines, pharmaceutical companies aided by monumental government investments have given humanity a miraculous shot at liberation from the worst pandemic in a century.
But wealthy countries have captured an overwhelming share of the benefit. Only 0.3 percent of the vaccine doses administered globally have been given in the 29 poorest countries, home to about 9 percent of the world’s population.
Vaccine manufacturers assert that a fix is already at hand as they aggressively expand production lines and contract with counterparts around the world to yield billions of additional doses. Each month, 400 million to 500 million doses of the vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson are now being produced, according to an American official with knowledge of global supply.
But the world is nowhere close to having enough. About 11 billion shots are needed to vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population, the rough threshold needed for herd immunity, researchers at Duke University estimate. Yet, so far, only a small fraction of that has been produced. While global production is difficult to measure, the analytics firm Airfinity estimates the total so far at 1.7 billion doses.
dangerous new variants emerge, requiring booster shots and reformulated vaccines, demand could dramatically increase, intensifying the imperative for every country to lock up supply for its own people.
The only way around the zero-sum competition for doses is to greatly expand the global supply of vaccines. On that point, nearly everyone agrees.
But what is the fastest way to make that happen? On that question, divisions remain stark, undermining collective efforts to end the pandemic.
Some health experts argue that the only way to avert catastrophe is to force drug giants to relax their grip on their secrets and enlist many more manufacturers in making vaccines. In place of the existing arrangement — in which drug companies set up partnerships on their terms, while setting the prices of their vaccines — world leaders could compel or persuade the industry to cooperate with more companies to yield additional doses at rates affordable to poor countries.
Those advocating such intervention have focused on two primary approaches: waiving patents to allow many more manufacturers to copy existing vaccines, and requiring the pharmaceutical companies to transfer their technology — that is, help other manufacturers learn to replicate their products.
more than 100 countries in asking the W.T.O. to partially set aside vaccine patents.
But the European Union has signaled its intent to oppose waivers and support only voluntary tech transfers, essentially taking the same position as the pharmaceutical industry, whose aggressive lobbying has heavily shaped the rules in its favor.
Some experts warn that revoking intellectual property rules could disrupt the industry, slowing its efforts to deliver vaccines — like reorganizing the fire department amid an inferno.
“We need them to scale up and deliver,” said Simon J. Evenett, an expert on trade and economic development at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. “We have this huge production ramp up. Nothing should get in the way to threaten it.”
Others counter that trusting the pharmaceutical industry to provide the world with vaccines helped create the current chasm between vaccine haves and have-nots.
The world should not put poorer countries “in this position of essentially having to go begging, or waiting for donations of small amounts of vaccine,” said Dr. Chris Beyrer, senior scientific liaison to the Covid-19 Prevention Network. “The model of charity is, I think, an unacceptable model.”
halting vaccine exports a month ago. Now, as a wave of death ravages the largely unvaccinated Indian population, the government is drawing fire at home for having let go of doses.
poses universal risks by allowing variants to take hold, forcing the world into an endless cycle of pharmaceutical catch-up.
“It needs to be global leaders functioning as a unit, to say that vaccine is a form of global security,” said Dr. Rebecca Weintraub, a global health expert at Harvard Medical School. She suggested that the G7, the group of leading economies, could lead such a campaign and finance it when the members convene in England next month.
Pfizer expects to sell $26 billion worth of Covid vaccines this year; Moderna forecasts that its sales of Covid vaccines will exceed $19 billion for 2021.
History also challenges industry claims that blanket global patent rights are a requirement for the creation of new medicines. Until the mid-1990s, drug makers could patent their products only in the wealthiest markets, while negotiating licenses that allowed companies in other parts of the world to make generic versions.
Even in that era, drug companies continued to innovate. And they continued to prosper even with the later waivers on H.I.V. drugs.
“At the time, it rattled a lot of people, like ‘How could you do that? It’s going to destroy the pharmaceutical industry,’” recalled Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for the pandemic. “It didn’t destroy them at all. They continue to make billions of dollars.”
Leaders in the wealthiest Western nations have endorsed more equitable distribution of vaccines for this latest scourge. But the imperative to ensure ample supplies for their own nations has won out as the virus killed hundreds of thousands of their own people, devastated economies, and sowed despair.
The drug companies have also promised more support for poorer nations. AstraZeneca’s vaccine has been the primary supply for Covax, and the company says it has sold its doses at a nonprofit price.
stumbled, falling short of production targets. And producing the new class of mRNA vaccines, like those from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, is complicated.
Where pharmaceutical companies have struck deals with partners, the pace of production has frequently disappointed.
“Even with voluntary licensing and technology transfer, it’s not easy to make complex vaccines,” said Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.
Much of the global capacity for vaccine manufacturing is already being used to produce other lifesaving inoculations, he added.
But other health experts accuse major pharmaceutical companies of exaggerating the manufacturing challenges to protect their monopoly power, and implying that developing countries lack the acumen to master sophisticated techniques is “an offensive and a racist notion,” said Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Global Health Policy and Politics Initiative at Georgetown University.
With no clear path forward, Ms. Okonjo-Iweala, the W.T.O. director-general, expressed hope that the Indian and South African patent-waiver proposal can be a starting point for dialogue.
“I believe we can come to a pragmatic outcome,” she said. “The disparity is just too much.”
Peter S. Goodman reported from London, Apoorva Mandavilli from New York, Rebecca Robbins from Bellingham, Wash., and Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels. Noah Weiland contributed reporting from New York.
“We in the laboratory are preparing for another big boom in testing,” said Dr. Baird, whose team has run more than two million coronavirus tests since the beginning of the pandemic. “Even if people are vaccinated, they’re going to wonder, ‘Am I the breakthrough case?’”
In addition to Cepheid, other companies have developed tests that look for influenza and the coronavirus at the same time, including Roche, which has received emergency use authorization for a test that looks for the coronavirus, influenza A and influenza B at once.
In recent years various hospitals have developed in-house versions of these combination tests as well, some of which look for more than a dozen different respiratory pathogens simultaneously using P.C.R. technology. Those “multiplex” tests are especially helpful in diagnosing illnesses in people with weak immune systems because they allow doctors to swiftly discern what pathogen is making a person sick before it is too late to start the right treatments.
A French company, bioMérieux, sells a P.C.R. test that looks for the coronavirus as well as 21 other viruses and bacteria simultaneously. And Roche recently bought a company that sells a machine that can screen for more than 20 pathogens in one go.
Testing for multiple pathogens does not always lead to a simple treatment, however. Co-infections, in which a person is infected with multiple viruses simultaneously, are more common than doctors expected, and sometimes the multiplex tests might detect a viral infection but miss a bacterial one, said Dr. Daniel Griffin, chief of infectious diseases at ProHealth New York. A patient could carry the influenza virus but also test positive for a bacterium such as pneumococcus, for example.
“We initially thought that every time we identified a virus, we would just be able stop all antibiotics and just treat the virus if effective antiviral therapy was available,” Dr. Griffin said. “We now know that we often need to continue antibiotics,” he explained, because sometimes the multiplex tests are not sensitive enough to rule out a bacterial culprit.
Doctors and test developers are still grappling with how many pathogens to test patients for in different settings. “A burning question at every company is what panel is best — is it one, two, four, 20?” said Dr. Mark Miller, chief medical officer at bioMérieux. Relatively young and healthy adults might just need a quad test to know if they should start on Tamiflu for influenza, for example, but patients with underlying chronic diseases who are very sick might benefit from receiving the test for 22 different pathogens so that doctors can decide whether they need to be admitted to a hospital.
New York City health officials estimate that nearly a quarter of adult New Yorkers were infected with the coronavirus during the catastrophic wave of last spring, and that the toll was even higher among Black and Hispanic residents.
The estimates, based on antibody test results for more than 45,000 city residents last year, suggest that Black and Hispanic New Yorkers were twice as likely as white New Yorkers to have had antibodies to the coronavirus — evidence of prior infection.
Hispanic New Yorkers had the highest rate, with about 35 percent testing positive for antibodies, according to the study, whose authors include officials and researchers at the city Health Department and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Among Black New Yorkers, 33.5 percent had antibodies. Among Asian New Yorkers, the rate was about 20 percent. For white New Yorkers, the rate was 16 percent.
Antibody surveys of segments of the population have become a useful way to gauge what percentage of people were infected and what groups were most at risk, especially since there was limited testing for the virus during the first wave.
The new paper, which has been accepted by the Journal of Infectious Diseases, has substantial limitations: Of the 45,000 New Yorkers in the study, fewer than 3,500 were Black, a major underrepresentation. And the participants were recruited partly through advertisements online, which the study’s authors acknowledge may have attracted people who believed they had been exposed to Covid-19.
But the study adds to experts’ understanding of the disproportionate toll that the pandemic has taken on Black and Latino people.
Its findings also come amid a push to vaccinate more people in the United States. A recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the number of Americans, particularly Black adults, who want to get vaccinated has continued to increase. According to an analysis last month by The New York Times, Black people were still being inoculated at half the rate of white people. The disparities are especially alarming as Black and Latino people and Native Americans have been dying at twice the rate of white people.
In New York City, about 44 percent of white adults have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, while 26 percent of Black adults and 31 percent of Latino adults have, according to city data.
Experts and community leaders across the country say that over all, the lower vaccination rates are linked to technological and linguistic barriers and disparities in access to vaccination sites. Other factors include social media misinformation and a hesitancy to be vaccinated. Hesitancy among African-Americans, experts say, can be tied to a longstanding mistrust of medical institutions that have long mistreated Black people.
have comparatively fewer white workers.
“These were the people who did not have the luxury of being able to work virtually,” she said.
Dr. Kitaw Demissie, who is dean of the School of Public Health at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and was not involved in the study, noted that household crowding may have also contributed to differing infection rates. Some predominately Latino neighborhoods which were particularly hard hit in the first wave had high rates of household crowding.
More than 32,000 people in New York City have died from Covid-19 in total, according to a New York Times database.