Art Moore(WND NEWSCENTER) Amid “disruptions” to health services, malaria cases and deaths rose significantly in 2020 compared to the previous year, according to the World Health Organization’s latest world malaria report.
There were 241 million malaria cases and 627,000 malaria deaths worldwide in 2020, an increase of 14 million cases and 69,000 deaths compared to 2019.
The WHO attributed the significant rise – a “marked increase” – of malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africa “moderate disruptions” to “malaria services.”
“The 2021 edition of the report took a closer look at the impact of disruptions to malaria prevention, diagnosis and treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The latest data show that the worst-case scenario projected by WHO – a doubling of malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africa – did not come to pass. However, moderate disruptions to malaria services led to a marked increase in cases and deaths in 2020 over the previous year.”
Stanford Medical School professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who has spotlighted the unintended consequences of COVID lockdowns, commented on the WHO report.
“The lockdowners who championed the policies that caused the sharp increase in malaria deaths in 2020 will do their best to ignore this because they are blind to collateral harms from the lockdowns, especially if they befall the poor worldwide,” he said on Twitter.
Bhattacharya, with epidemiologists Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for protecting the vulnerable while allowing those with little risk to go about their business.
In an interview in October on the “Uncommon Knowledge” podcast with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution at Stanford he said the unintended consequences of the lockdowns are immense. They include the estimated 100 million people thrown into poverty, the missing treatments for cancer and other serious diseases, and the 1 in 4 young adults who reported to the CDC that they have considered suicide during the pandemic.
The lockdowns favored the rich, the “laptop class,” he said, who had one-third the death rate of the poor. Bhattacharya said it was “almost a reversed focus protection; we exposed the vulnerable and protected the well-to-do young.”
As WND recently reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning that measles has become a growing global threat because of disruptions to childhood vaccinations caused by the lockdowns in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published a study finding that more than 22 million infants missed their first dose of measles vaccine in 2020, 3 million more than in 2019, reported Joan Stephenson in an article for the JAMA Health Forum, an online publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The CDC and the World Health Organization, in a joint statement, said the increase in missed measles vaccinations was the largest in two decades, “creating dangerous conditions for outbreaks to occur.”
“Large numbers of unvaccinated children, outbreaks of measles, and disease detection and diagnostics diverted to support COVID-19 responses are factors that increase the likelihood of measles-related deaths and serious complications in children.”
