Catch-up mustered: Europe’s vaccination drive

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In Bangladesh, the government's relationship with Islamist groups is complicated. The prime minister leads a notionally secular party, and as she grows more authoritarian, One formerly chummy Islamist faction is being brought to heel. And some of the world's most pervasive diseases are carried by mosquitoes. But efforts to control mosquito populations haven't met with much success. We look into a new approach that could easily shrink their numbers without risking further harms. But first— A COVID passport scheme launched this week could soon allow vaccinated travelers to roam freely throughout the European Union.

The free movement of people is a great European achievement.

7 countries are already issuing digital certificates, and all EU member states could be using them by July. As restrictions lift, vaccination numbers rise, and outdoor dining returns, it appears that the bloc has a firm hand on the pandemic. But even just a few months ago, that wasn't at all the case.

The EU has a ways to go in its vaccination drive. Less than a quarter of adults are now fully vaccinated compared to about half in America or Britain.

Stanley Pignol writes for The Economist from Paris.

The good news is that supply bottlenecks in Europe have finally eased and national inoculation drives are really starting to take shape.

Which is to say the EU is catching up with Britain, America, other vaccine leaders.

Yeah, and catching up pretty fast. Europe wants 70% of its adult population fully vaccinated by the end of the summer. If it manages that, it would actually be on par or even beyond the US where vaccination rates are steadily falling. That goal seemed implausible a few weeks ago. Now it might just get there. Getting doses, getting actual vaccine was the biggest problem. But now they're coming in thick and fast. Just to give you an idea, In the 3 months ending on June 30th, the EU expects member states for whom it's been buying these vaccines to receive over 400 million jabs. That's nearly 1 per citizen in the EU, and it's 4 times the figure for the first 3 months of the year. By the end of 2021, according to European Commission estimates, the EU could be making 3 billion vaccines a year.

So how did they turn this around so much?

Well, it's more a question of how do they mess it up at the beginning. Initially, the doses that the EU ordered arrived much more slowly than in America and in Britain, and we've covered the reasons for that at length, but one big reason was that America and Britain invested more aggressively alongside pharmaceutical companies to get early jabs, and the EU didn't get itself organized to do that. Then on top of that, in January, there were unexpected shortfalls and deliveries by AstraZeneca, which which makes a cheap vaccine that was very popular. And that led Europe to control exports and generally see how it could get doses much faster. And the result of that is starting to come through now.

[Speaker:GREG] And part of the EU's justification for how it went about its procurement was to make sure that when they were there, they went around equally to all the member states. Is that happening?

[Speaker:GHION.AI] Not quite. Even within the bloc, some countries have done better than others. So at the top of the class is Malta, which has like near Israeli world-beating levels of inoculation. At the other end is Bulgaria, which is the EU's poorest member state, which has put 24 needles in arms per 100 adults. That's about a third of the EU average. What you see is that most of the laggards are in the poorer east of the bloc. And that's a problem because an uneven rollout is exactly what the EU wanted to avoid. The whole idea was that you would have joint procurement of vaccine as a sort of symbol of unity as a time of crisis. And it also meant that If everybody was roughly on the same page, you could keep borders open for everything from goods to holidaymakers.

So why aren't they on the same page? Why does it seem that poorer EU countries are falling behind?

Well, there are two problems. One of them is that countries aren't getting exactly the same number of doses. Poorer countries, so especially the ones in Eastern Europe, tended to request more AstraZeneca doses from the EU, primarily because they were cheaper, but also because they were easier to store than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. And then AstraZeneca jabs didn't arrive in January, so that hit some countries a lot more than others. Now, to make matters worse, not everyone is keen on the AstraZeneca jab. We've seen health concerns, very rare blood clots that are potentially fatal. So in some countries, it's restricted to some ages. And so what you have is these growing stockpiles of unused AstraZeneca doses in the bloc's fridges. And then finally, another factor is that some national governments are just more adept than others at getting doses into arms. Health systems in some countries were struggling before the pandemic, and they've struggled to reach everyone.

But the one factor you haven't mentioned here is vaccine hesitancy, and there was some real concern about that early on.

Fortunately, I don't think that's been as much of an issue as once feared. Europeans in opinion polls often say that they don't want to get vaccinated, but then they do. And we've seen them get vaccinated at far higher rates than they have been telling pollsters. That's the good news. The less good news is Europe is just now reaching vaccination levels, which America reached before its own injection campaigns, really started to plateau. And we may even be seeing some early evidence that European injection rates aren't going up as fast as they used to. But for priority groups such as the elderly, which really matter because that's how you reduce the number of deaths, they've broadly shown up to the vaccination centers. So that's the really encouraging news.

So it's a markedly rosier picture now, but it certainly wasn't at the outset. Do you think any real damage was done with the sort of early bungling and slow moving of the rollout?

So I think people are unlikely to forget the additional days or weeks of lockdown that they had because of the slow vaccine rollout, but things really have improved quite a lot now. Restaurants are open for outdoor dining pretty much across Europe, and they're about to reopen for indoor dining. The focus now is on the summer tourism, obviously a huge industry in some European countries like Greece and Spain and Portugal. The EU is putting together a vaccine passport, which should allow Europeans and even foreigners to get to those places more easily with less testing, especially if they can prove that they've been vaccinated. So the mood is really positive and I'd say it's really shifted noticeably in the last kind of 2, 3 weeks. So the political fallout that some might have expected at the European level, the potential for that seems to have passed.

Stanley, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

In Muslim-majority Bangladesh, values that were once on the far right of politics have, in the past 10 years or so, been brought into the mainstream. The shift has been powered in large part by an alliance between the country's ruling party and a puritanical Islamist group called Hefezat-e-Islam. That alliance, though, has recently started to fray.

At the end of March, Bangladesh celebrated its 50th anniversary since the country came into being. And to celebrate this, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

Susannah Savage writes about Bangladesh for The Economist.

The mood was supposed to be joyous and jubilant, but instead his visit was met with protests led by an Islamist group called Hefezat-e-Islam. Authorities since then have rounded up hundreds of members of the group and their supporters. And this is a really big turning point in the government's policy towards Hefezat, because for the last decade they've been pandering to the group, and the group's had significant influence on the policy and rhetoric of the government.

How did that come to be then, that Hefezat had such a big role in Bangladesh's government?

So to look at how Hefezat came to have such a big role in Bangladesh's government, we need to go back to 2009 when Sheikh Hasina was elected for a second term. One of her big campaign promises was to set up a war crimes tribunal to try the alleged war criminals who had collaborated with the Pakistani army during the 1971 war that led to Bangladesh's independence. And in order to do this, she went after leaders of the country's largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami. This created a vacuum in terms of who was defending Islam in the political space. So this is really where Hefezat comes from. It formed from the leaders and members of one of the largest networks of Islamic schools or madrasas in Bangladesh.

So Hefezat arose essentially to take Jamaat's place as a champion of Islamist ideals, but that still doesn't explain how they ended up so integral to Bangladesh's government.

Yes, so for a long time, Even though these madrassas had significant influence in rural Bangladesh, they tried to stay out of politics. But then the real moment when they were forced into politics was 2013. And this is when one of these war criminals, a Jama'ati leader, was not given the death penalty. And there was a huge protest in response to that among people who thought he should have been given the death penalty. [APPLAUSE] And many of these were staged by students and young people, among whom were several atheist bloggers. And a rumor sort of spread around that some of these bloggers were offending Islam on their blogs, and they were putting up pictures of the Prophet Muhammad. And Hefezat reacted to this, and it mobilized hundreds of thousands of its supporters and members and marched on Dhaka. And this is when it really came to the fore. Sheikh Hasina had a dilemma. Either she needed to crack down on this huge protest or she needed to placate them. And I think she also saw in aligning with them an opportunity.

In what way was that an opportunity?

Sheikh Hasina is very religious, but in some ways she has a very secular background. She's the leader of the Awami League Party, which was created by her father, and in origin it's secular. And so she needed to gain Islamic credibility, and aligning herself with Hevazat was one way to do this, as well as to undermine the threat that they may pose through their ability to mobilize. So she started to pander to them both in rhetoric and in policy. She did this firstly by arresting some of the writers that the group had accused of offending Islam, and she also set up a panel to police commentary on Islam.

And then this has gone further over the last decade, in the sense that what Hafizat might be aiming for has kind of just become Bangladeshi policy.

Yes, to quite a large extent. So the government adopted some of Hafizat's rhetoric and granted a lot of its demands. For example, school textbooks were revised to remove poems and stories that were seen as promoting secularism. Degrees handed out in the, the Kwame Islamic Schools that forms part of the network run by Hefezat's members and leaders were made equivalent to master's from public universities, which gives those graduates access to government jobs. So that's quite a big move. And more broadly, as these changes have taken place, there's been a sense that Bangladeshi society has been Islamised to a greater extent than was previously seen.

But you say that that kind of alignment with Hefezat has shifted after those protests in March.

So in March, when Hefezat organized protests against Modi's visit, which was because of what they perceive as Modi's treatment of Muslims in India, this was because of this sense of Hefezat feeling emboldened and feeling like they were indispensable to the government. And that seems to have been a bit of a miscalculation. Modi's a very close ally of Sheikh Hasina. And she saw their protests, which were very embarrassing to her, as a step too far. So I think this clampdown was a bit of a sign to Hevazat that they need to stay in line. And they've recognized that. Instead of encouraging supporters to protest against the arrests of its members, Hevazat's chief has merely called on the government to release all those in custody. And his response has been relatively mild.

So how do you see this rift then playing out that's opened up with Sheikh Hasina, given the trends you describe about Islamism more generally?

I think that it's important to say that the type of Islam and type of Islamic rule called for by Hefezat does not represent how many people in Bangladesh feel. But equally, this trend towards Islamization is quite widespread and ongoing, and Hefezat has had a huge role in furthering that. And I don't think that even after this incident and the arrests, that the ethos it has created is going to go anywhere.

Susannah, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks very much, Jason.

At last, it's the first signs of impending summer here in Britain. So last night we had a little barbecue. But just like every year, we had to share the back garden with some unwelcome winged visitors. Mosquitoes are more than just a nuisance. In much of the world, they're also deadly.

Every year around the world, hundreds of millions of people catch various mosquito-borne diseases like malaria or dengue fever, and hundreds of thousands of them die.

Tim Cross covers science and technology for The Economist.

And those diseases have proved very difficult to treat as well. So drug treatments do exist for them, but they're not 100% effective. Vaccines have proven even harder to get right. So given that drugs and vaccines have proven really hard to get right, a lot of scientists have spent their time instead wondering if a better idea might be to attack the mosquitoes that spread the diseases rather than the diseases themselves.

So how to go about doing that?

Well, so one technique that's existed for many decades is something called the sterile insect technique. You basically get a load of male insects, you sterilize them, and then you release them into the wild. And the idea is that female insects that mate with the males end up producing no offspring. So the next generation of mosquitoes is smaller than it would otherwise be. And if you do this, you know, again and again, you do it often enough and you release enough males, you can end up quite dramatically reducing various insect populations. So it's been used in North America, for instance, to pretty much get rid of something called the screwworm fly, which is an agricultural pest that attacks cattle and things like that. And it's also been used against various species of fruit flies that attack crops that people care about. But again, a bit like with the vaccines and the drugs, it hasn't really worked so well, at least thus far, when people have tried to do it to mosquitoes.

And why is that?

Well, it seems to be to do with the side effects of the procedure. So to do this, you have to raise, you know, large numbers of male mosquitoes, sterilize them somehow, and then release them. And typically the way you sterilize them is you either zap them with radiation or you expose them to various toxic chemicals. And that does sterilize them, but it's kind of a scattergun approach, right? It damages them in all kinds of other ways. And so what you can end up with, it seems, is sort of like sickly mosquitoes that aren't very vigorous and that struggle to compete in the mating game with their wild male counterparts.

So the hunt is on for a kinder, gentler sterilization procedure?

Pretty much. And this is what a team of researchers led by Craig Montell, who's at the University of California in Santa Barbara, That's what they think they found, and it uses CRISPR-Cas9, which regular listeners may remember us talking about several times before. It's this new and very sort of powerful genetic engineering process that won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry last year. So they found a gene that, when silenced or interfered with, reliably makes fruit flies sterile. And then they went looking to see if they could find another version of this gene in a specific mosquito called Aedes aegypti, which is a vector of many common diseases. And even though the two species are quite distant in evolutionary terms, they found that when they disabled this gene in the mosquitoes, just like with the fruit flies, it left the males infertile.

But not lesser competitors in the mosquito mating market.

Yeah, so it's much more targeted. You're kind of like laser-focusing in on one gene that affects one part of the male reproductive system, getting rid of that. And as far as we can tell, it has pretty much no other big effect on the animals. So the scientists looked at all kinds of measures of mosquito healthiness, which apparently include things like wingspan and body size and so on. And on every measure they looked at, the tweaked males, as it were, performed pretty much just as well as their wild counterparts. So, you know, when it comes to attracting a mate, you know, even though they were infertile, they would suffer from kind of no other drawbacks. And when they tested this in the laboratory, you know, that intuition was basically confirmed the female mosquitoes were happy to mate with the modified males. And the thing that makes this all work is that once the female mosquitoes have done that, or done that enough times anyway, they seem to become less receptive to mating again with other unmodified mosquitoes that would otherwise, you know, give rise to little mosquito babies. So the population ought to fall.

And whenever there's discussion of genetically modifying mosquitoes to tackle this very problem, there's always these concerns about unintended consequences and playing God and so on. Doesn't this fit into that discussion?

Well, so this, at least the researchers hope, is one advantage of this technique. So, for instance, there's a trial going on in Florida at the moment by a firm called Oxitec, who have developed a different kind of genetically modified mosquito where there's a modified gene there that's fatal to females but not to males. And that was really controversial because you're basically tinkering with an organism, you're releasing it into the environment, that genetic change kind of carries on down the generations. And, you know, we know from ecology and from all kinds of experiments that have gone wrong in the past that it's kind of hard to predict exactly what the consequences of these things might be. So it makes people very nervous. One of the advantages to this technique is because the males are infertile, they can't, by definition, pass on the genetic changes that have been created inside them, right? They're not gonna have any offspring. So the technique only works if you keep modifying males, keep releasing them, but you could look at that as an advantage. So, you know, with this method, yes, you're releasing modified organisms, but they die off by themselves, they can't have any offspring, and so the genetic changes don't actually persist in the wild population. All that happens is that population gets smaller and smaller and smaller. So I think it's, you know, it's early days with this. They've got some exciting lab results, but if it works, you know, this could be one way to help save tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives each year.

Tim, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. See you back here tomorrow.