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The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic saw more Americans drinking heavily or using illicit drugs — but apparently not smoking.

U.S. cigarette smoking dropped to a new all-time low in 2020, with 1 in 8 adults saying they were current smokers, according to survey data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Adult e-cigarette use also dropped, the CDC reported.

CDC officials credited public health campaigns and policies for the decline, but outside experts said tobacco company price hikes and pandemic lifestyle changes likely played roles.

“People who were mainly social smokers just didn’t have that going on any more,” said Megan Roberts, an Ohio State University researcher focused on tobacco product use among young adults and adolescents.

What’s more, parents who suddenly were home with their kids full-time may have cut back. And some people may have quit following reports that smokers were more likely to develop severe illness after a coronavirus infection, Roberts added.

The CDC report, based on a survey of more than 31,000 U.S. adults, found that 19% of Americans used at least one tobacco product in 2020, down from about 21% in 2019.

Use of cigars, smokeless tobacco and pipes was flat. Current use of electronic cigarettes dropped to 3.7%, down from 4.5% the year before.

Cigarettes were the most commonly used tobacco product, with 12.5% of adults using them, down from 14%.

Health officials have long considered cigarette smoking — a risk factor for lung cancer, heart disease and stroke — to be the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.

In 1965, 42% of U.S. adults were smokers.

The rate has been gradually dropping for decades for a number of reasons, including taxes and smoking bans in workplaces and restaurants. But a big part of the recent decline has to be recent price hikes, some experts said.

For example, British American Tobacco — the company that makes brands including Camel, Lucky Strike and Newport — increased prices four times in 2020, by a total of about 50 cents a pack.

Interestingly, the number of cigarettes sold in the U.S. actually went up in 2020 — the first such increase in two decades, the Federal Trade Commission reported last year.

It’s possible that fewer people smoked, but those who did were consuming more cigarettes.

“That’s a viable hypothesis — that you had people with more smoking opportunities because they weren’t going to work,” said University of Ottawa’s David Sweanor, a global tobacco policy expert at the University of Ottawa.

It’s also possible that the CDC survey underestimated how many people are smoking, either because some respondents weren’t honest or because the survey missed too many smokers, he said.

Other surveys have suggested that for many people, alcohol consumption and illicit drug use increased in the first year of the pandemic.
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The Biden administration is in danger of cutting short its efforts to help vaccinate the world because U.S. lawmakers had slashed global pandemic response funds from the omnibus spending bill that President Joe Biden signed into law earlier this week.

The $1.5 trillion spending bill did not include $15.6 billion requested for COVID-19 response, of which $5 billion had been marked by the White House to fight the coronavirus around the world.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told VOA during a briefing Friday that the administration did not have an alternative plan for delivering the 700 million doses of vaccines remaining from the 1.2 billion doses it had pledged.

“We need additional funding to continue to be the arsenal of vaccines,” she said. “There is not a secret fund that we have not told you about to continue to provide the type of free programs we have in the United States or to provide the level of international assistance that we would like to continue to provide.”

A White House official confirmed that the 1.2 billion doses of vaccines had been purchased. The lack of funding, however, will devastate America’s ability to ensure recipient countries can effectively deploy them, and to provide tests, therapeutics, oxygen and humanitarian aid to countries still struggling to manage the pandemic.

The pandemic response fund was stripped following Republican lawmakers’ refusal to add new coronavirus spending unless it was offset by spending cuts elsewhere.

In early March, 36 Republican senators sent a letter (( )) to Biden saying that before they would consider additional COVID-19 requests, they wanted an accounting of how the federal government had allocated taxpayer funds to combat the pandemic. “Congress must receive a full accounting of how the government has already spent the first $6 trillion,” the letter said.

House Democrats have introduced a standalone COVID-19 relief bill, but it does not yet have the votes to pass both chambers of Congress.

Strategy pivot curtailed

Just last month, the administration said it would adjust its global pandemic response strategy, pivoting away from boosting vaccine supply and toward increasing delivery capacity. But now it can no longer finance Global Vax, its international initiative launched in December.

“Without additional funding to support getting shots into arms, USAID will have to curtail our growing efforts to turn vaccines into vaccinations — just as countries are finally gaining access to the vaccine supplies needed to protect their citizens,” said Samantha Power, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in a statement.

Humanitarian organizations criticized the removal of COVID-19 funding from the omnibus bill.

The U.S. will not be able to “keep up the fight against COVID at home and around the world — a serious concern given the rising surges in Asia and Europe,” said Tom Hart, president of the ONE Campaign, in a statement to VOA.

Hart said that if large parts of the world remain vulnerable to the virus and its variants, Americans’ own health and economic recovery are at risk. “What should be a no-brainer after two years of a pandemic has proven impossible for world leaders and lawmakers to grasp: We will not end the pandemic anywhere until we end it everywhere. Congress can and must fix this,” Hart said.

Only 14.1% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose, according to Our World in Data.

While the U.S. remains the biggest vaccine donor (( )) by far, public health officials called the lack of global pandemic response funding “self-defeating.”

“American leadership for a robust and effective global response is the best pathway to end the pandemic, build resilient health systems, and be better prepared for future health security threats,” said Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.

“We can’t fully protect the health and economic prosperity of Americans without doing more around the world,” Udayakumar told VOA.

The cut to pandemic response funding came as lawmakers agreed to $13.6 billion in assistance for Ukraine, including $6.5 billion to supply Kyiv with weapons as it battles Russia’s invasion and $6.7 billion for economic and humanitarian aid for the country.  
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The world is at a ‘dangerous moment’ in the fight against diseases like polio, a senior World Health Organization official said, as efforts begin to immunize 23 million children across five African countries after an outbreak in Malawi.

In February, Malawi declared its first case of wild poliovirus in 30 years, when a 3-year old girl in the Lilongwe district was paralyzed as a result of her infection.

The case raised alarm because Africa was declared free of wild polio in 2020 and there are only two countries in the world where it is endemic: Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan marked a year without cases in January 2022.

“This is a dangerous moment,” Modjirom Ndoutabe, polio coordinator for WHO Africa, told Reuters in a phone interview from Brazzaville, the Republic of Congo.

“Even if there is one country in the world with polio, all the other countries are in big trouble.”

Ndoutabe said the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns had slowed efforts to vaccinate children against other diseases such as polio, and also hit surveillance.

According to the Gavi vaccine alliance, childhood immunization services in the 68 countries it supports dropped by 4% in 2020, representing 3.1 million more “zero-dose” children likely unprotected from childhood diseases like polio, diphtheria and measles, and 3 million more under-immunized children than in 2019.

“This is a tragedy,” Seth Berkley, chief executive of Gavi, said in an interview with Reuters. “The challenge is getting that back up.”

In Malawi, where polio vaccine coverage is high – above 90% in most districts – rates during the pandemic fell by 2%, according to Janet Kayita, WHO Malawi head. She said the child who was paralyzed had one dose of the polio vaccine at birth, but not the other doses needed for full protection.

Kayita said surveillance had been more significantly impacted. The case is linked to a strain circulating in Pakistan’s Sindh province in 2019, which means it does not impact Africa’s polio-free status. But teams are now scrambling to answer how it arrived in Malawi, and how long it spread undetected.

Polio, a highly infectious disease spread mainly through contamination by fecal matter, used to kill and paralyze thousands of children annually. There is no cure, but vaccination brought the world close to ending the wild form of the disease.

Mass rollout

In a bid to prevent renewed spread in Africa, almost 70,000 vaccinators will go door-to-door in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, to give all children under 5 the oral polio vaccine in a $15.7 million campaign funded by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, the WHO said in a statement on Friday.

The first round, beginning Monday, will target more than 9 million children, followed by three further rounds aiming to reach all under-5-year-olds, regardless of their vaccination status, to boost immunity, Kayita said.

Efforts have also been stepped up to track any cases linked to the Malawi outbreak and to monitor transmission in wastewater. So far, no other linked cases have been found.

Vaccine-derived polio, a form of the disease stemming from incomplete vaccination coverage, is more widespread globally, and recent outbreaks have sparked concerns about how the coronavirus pandemic may have hit vaccination coverage.

Israel is battling an outbreak of vaccine-derived polio, its first since the 1980s, after a case was discovered in Jerusalem last week. Almost 12,000 children have since been vaccinated.

Ukraine reported its first vaccine-derived polio case in five years last year, but urgent efforts to curb the outbreak were halted after the Russian invasion on Feb. 24.

Complete vaccination protects against both forms of the disease, and a focus on that will halt both the outbreak in Malawi in months and all forms of polio in Africa by 2023, said Ndoutabe, who described his sorrow when he first heard of the Malawi case setback.

“But we did not stay in this sadness. We had to act quickly,” he said.
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A trio of Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, the first new faces in space since the start of the Russian war in Ukraine.

Russian space corporation Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev and Sergey Korsakov blasted off successfully from the Russia-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan in their Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft at 8:55 p.m. Friday (11:55 a.m. EDT). They smoothly docked at the station just over three hours later, joining two Russians, four Americans and a German on the orbiting outpost.

The blastoff marked the first space crew launch since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

The war has resulted in canceled spacecraft launches and broken contracts. Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin has warned that the U.S. would have to use “broomsticks” to fly into space after Russia said it would stop supplying rocket engines to U.S. companies. Many worry, however, that Rogozin is putting decades of a peaceful off-planet partnership at risk, most notably at the International Space Station.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson played down Rogozin’s comments, telling The Associated Press: “That’s just Dmitry Rogozin. He spouts off every now and then. But at the end of the day, he’s worked with us,”

“The other people that work in the Russian civilian space program, they’re professional,” Nelson told the AP on Friday. “They don’t miss a beat with us, American astronauts and American mission control. Despite all of that, up in space, we can have a cooperation with our Russian friends, our colleagues.”

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei — who on Tuesday broke the U.S. single spaceflight record of 340 days — is due to leave the International Space Station with two Russians aboard a Soyuz capsule for a touchdown in Kazakhstan on March 30.

In April, another three NASA and one Italian astronaut are set to blast off for the space station.

 
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