Guess Who's Back? Sputnik Returns. Amerika Crashes and Burns.

 

A lot of eyebrows were raised when Russia announced it had a Covid vaccine, the first to be available publicly. Fittingly the Sons of Lenin named it "Sputnik," after the first man made vehicle launched into space that shook the West.

Now it looks like the Kremlin did it again.

Today the British medical journal, Lancet, reports that the Sputnik vaccine appears safe and effective with an efficacy between 91.6% and 95%. That's up there in Pfizer and Moderna orbit only Sputnik was there first.

Unlike the West which has scarfed up vaccine stocks, leaving the Third World to twist in the wind, Putin seems intent on capitalizing on our failures by getting Sputnik vaccine out to the poorest and most vulnerable countries. Maybe he could start sending some Sputnik our way.

Another study published in the Lancet finds that 40% of US Covid deaths (now nearing 470,000) could have been averted

The US could have averted 40% of the deaths from Covid-19, had the country’s death rates corresponded with the rates in other high-income G7 countries, according to a Lancet commission tasked with assessing Donald Trump’s health policy record.

Dr Mary T Bassett, a commission member and director of Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, told the Guardian: “The US has fared so badly with this pandemic, but the bungling can’t be attributed only to Mr Trump, it also has to do with these societal failures … That’s not going to be solved by a vaccine.”

In a wide-ranging assessment published on Thursday, the commission said Trump “brought misfortune to the USA and the planet” during his four years in office. The stinging critique not only blamed Trump, but also tied his actions to the historical conditions which made his presidency possible.

The study found America's failures aren't limited to Covid but extend to health care outcomes generally.

The commission condemned Trump’s response to Covid, but emphasized that the country entered the pandemic with a degraded public health infrastructure. Between 2002 and 2019, US public health spending fell from 3.21% to 2.45% – approximately half the share of spending in Canada and the UK.

To determine how many deaths from Covid the US could have avoided, the commission weighted the average death rate in the other G7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK – and compared it with the US death rate.

In another comparison, the commission found if US life expectancy was equivalent to the average in the other G7 countries, 461,000 fewer Americans would have died in 2018.