Volume 6 Issue 2, February 2022

Ethical principles dictate that limited, life-saving resources should be allocated fairly. Keymanthri Moodley affirms that achieving global distributive justice is one of the greatest challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, and current distribution strategies are ethically indefensible.

Although the Global North is grappling with whether COVID-19 will turn endemic, in Mali and other resource-poor countries ‘living with COVID-19’ would be devastating, warns Samba Sow.

Global inequities in access to COVID-19 vaccines stem from pre-existing disparities. The Global South and Global North must cooperate to address them, argues Ayoade Alakija.

Global vaccine inequity reflects deeper issues within our market-driven global health system that fixates on innovation, intellectual property and the individual good as the solution, argues Tahir Amin. To end COVID-19 and achieve real progress, we need to incentivize the collective good instead of clinging to the current system, which only fuels divisions.

Global crises require tight international cooperation. Unilateral measures such as travel bans are often not rooted in science; instead of fostering cooperation, they impede communication, discourage transparency and hinder evidence-based decision-making, writes Philani Mthembu.

COVAX emerged as a key mechanism to advance COVID-19 vaccine equity. To fully succeed, it needs support that extends beyond vaccine donations, argues Anuradha Gupta.

Breaking pharmaceutical monopolies helped to address the HIV crisis. The same could be done to end the COVID-19 pandemic, but we must act decisively, writes Winnie Byanyima.

It is seemingly in the interest of high-income countries to prioritize vaccinating their own population against COVID-19, despite it being immoral. However, mathematical modelling by Ye et al.¹ shows that this approach offers only limited, short-term benefits, whereas equitable vaccine distribution would substantially curb the emergence and spread of new variants.

To interact safely with our environment, we must be able to judge our confidence in what we perceive. But what cues do we use to compute perceptual confidence? Geurts et al.¹ decode brain activity and show that perceptual confidence is based on the distribution of sensory uncertainty, combining uncertainty driven by the input and the visual system.

The probability of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine-resistant variants depends on the number of daily infections permitted by society, and the rate and penetrance of vaccination. Rapidly vaccinating all eligible people while maintaining strict physical distancing measures can prevent the evolution of vaccine resistance.

The finding of tobacco seeds in a Pleistocene-age fire hearth suggests people learned of this plant’s intoxicant value shortly after their arrival in the Americas, initiating a long heritage of use with global societal impact.

Lobinska et al. explore the evolutionary dynamics of COVID-19. Their results suggest that even with fast vaccination, social distancing (or contact reduction) must be maintained to minimize the risk of selecting for vaccine-resistant variants.

Using data-driven mathematical modelling that combines viral evolution with epidemiological dynamics, Ye et al. show that COVID-19 vaccine inequity leads to the emergence of new variants and new waves of the pandemic, while equitable allocation of vaccine doses reduces case counts and fatalities in all countries.

Adolescents in Norway reported more depressive symptoms and less optimism during the COVID-19 pandemic, while alcohol and cannabis use decreased. Girls, younger individuals and those from low socio-economic backgrounds showed more adverse changes.

A randomized trial showed that first-language instruction—which treated the language and culture of the children as an asset—improved their school engagement in the short run and their reading skills in the majority language in the longer run.

Experiments in the United States, Great Britain and Canada show that fact-checks can reduce belief in misperceptions about COVID-19, especially among the groups who are most vulnerable to these claims. However, these effects do not persist over time.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, medical equipment shortages reached critical levels. Crabtree, Holbein and Monson use conjoint experiments and find that during this time, individual biases impacted health-care providers’ allocation of life-saving care.

In a randomized controlled trial, Schleider et al. show that single-session online interventions are able to reduce depression symptoms up to three months later in adolescents.

Using a speed dating paradigm, Prochazkova et al. show that attraction was predicted by physiological synchrony in heart rate and skin conductance between two individuals.

Xu et al. show that satellite-measured urbanicity (living in a densely populated area) is correlated with brain volume, cortical surface area and brain network connectivity in a sample of 3,867 people from China and Europe.

What neural computations underlie the human sense of confidence? Geurts et al. show that subjective confidence is based on a probability distribution represented in cortical activity.