Year: 2021

The World Health Organization says low-income countries still do not have enough COVID-19 vaccines and is urging wealthier nations to deliver more doses. VOA’s Mariama Diallo has this report. Producer: Kim Weeks …

New U.S. studies released Friday show that COVID-19 vaccines provide strong protection against hospitalizations and death, even in cases involving the highly contagious delta variant.One study, which followed 600,000 people from April through mid-July, found that people who were not vaccinated were more than 10 times more likely to be hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die than those who were fully vaccinated.The unvaccinated were 4.5 times more likely to get infected, according to the study released Friday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The CDC also released two other studies that show vaccine protection appearing to wane in older populations, particularly those 75 and older.The studies also show an increase in milder COVID-19 infections among fully vaccinated people.Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, said during a White House COVID-19 briefing Friday that the data showed “vaccination works and will protect us from the severe complications of COVID-19.”The release of the studies comes a day after U.S. President Joe Biden announced a new vaccine mandate requiring big companies to ensure their workers are vaccinated. The order could affect as many as 100 million Americans.Republican officials in several states joined Republican calls to fight the new mandate in court.Mississippi’s Governor Tate Reeves, a Republican, said Friday that Biden’s federal vaccine requirements were “clearly unconstitutional” and that Mississippi would join other states in filing a lawsuit.Montana’s attorney general, Austin Knudsen, also promised Friday to fight the new federal vaccine mandate in court as soon as the full guidelines are …

The U.S. space agency on Friday will brief the media on the initial analysis of the first sample of a Martian rock collected by its Perseverance rover earlier this week. NASA confirmed the rover had collected the rock, releasing a picture of the sample inside a collection tube. The rover made a first attempt to collect a sample in early August, but the rock crumbled during the drilling and coring process. The rover moved to a different location earlier this month where the team selected a rock that held up better. Over the past week, scientists have been using Perseverance’s instruments to analyze the sample and they are expected to reveal what they have discovered at Friday’s briefing.  Former NASA research director Scott Hubbard — now a professor at Stanford University — told the Associated Press the collection “is a huge step forward in what the science community has wanted for more than 50 years, which is to bring samples back from the Red Planet.”  He said the sample appears to be one that could be dated, a main goal of collecting such rocks, along with looking for evidence of past or present biological life. A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The plan is for subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with the European Space Agency, to send spacecraft to Mars to collect Perseverance’s sealed samples from the surface and bring them to Earth for in-depth analysis. Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater February …

With no masks in sight, buzzing offices and concerts drawing tens of thousands, Denmark on Friday ditches vaccine passports in nightclubs, ending its last COVID-19 curb.The vaccine passports were introduced in March 2021 when Copenhagen slowly started easing restrictions.They were abolished at all venues on Sept. 1, except in nightclubs, where they will be no longer necessary from Friday.”We are definitely at the forefront in Denmark as we have no restrictions, and we are now on the other side of the pandemic thanks to the vaccination rollout,” Ulrik Orum-Petersen, a promoter at event organizer Live Nation, told AFP.On Saturday, a sold-out concert in Copenhagen will welcome 50,000 people, a first in Europe.Already on Sept. 4, Live Nation organized a first open-air festival, aptly named “Back to Live,” which gathered 15,000 people in Copenhagen.”Being in the crowd, singing like before, it almost made me forget COVID and everything we’ve been through these past months,” said Emilie Bendix, 26, a concertgoer.Denmark’s vaccination campaign has gone swiftly, with 73% of the 5.8 million population fully vaccinated, and 96% of those 65 and older.’Aiming for free movement’”We’re aiming for free movement… What will happen now is that the virus will circulate, and it will find the ones who are not vaccinated,” epidemiologist Lone Simonsen told AFP.”Now the virus is no longer a societal threat, thanks to the vaccine,” said Simonsen, who works at the University of Roskilde.According to the World Health Organization, the Scandinavian country has benefitted from public compliance with government guidelines and …

As the United States continues to deal with the spread of the highly transmissible delta variant, President Joe Biden announced new sweeping vaccine mandates as part of a multipronged push to end the pandemic. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report. Producer: Mary Cieslak  …

Africa is slated to receive 25% fewer COVID-19 vaccines by the end of the year than it was expecting, the director of the World Health Organization’s regional office for Africa said Thursday.The African continent, already struggling with a thin supply of vaccines while many wealthy nations initiate booster shot programs, has fully vaccinated just more than 3% of its residents.The global vaccine sharing initiative COVAX announced Wednesday that it expects to receive about 1.4 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of the year, as opposed to the projection of 1.9 billion doses it received in June.”Yesterday, #COVAX shipment forecasts for the rest of the year were revised downwards by 25%, in part because of the prioritization of bilateral deals over international solidarity.” – Dr @MoetiTshidi— WHO African Region (@WHOAFRO) September 9, 2021Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s Africa director, said during a press conference Thursday that the United States has thrown away three times as many vaccine doses as COVAX has delivered to African countries since March.COVAX delivered more than 5 million doses to Africa in the past week, but the U.S. Centers for Disease and Prevention said that as of September 1, U.S. pharmacies have thrown away more than 15 million doses since March.The United States and other wealthy nations have been under increasing pressure to donate their surplus of COVID-19 vaccines to poorer countries as the pandemic wreaks havoc across the globe with the emergence of new and more contagious variants of the coronavirus, which causes COVID-19.Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the …

The U.S. government sued the southwestern state of Texas on Thursday to try to block its new law that bans abortions in the state after about six weeks of pregnancy, the most restrictive anti-abortion statute in the country. Attorney General Merrick Garland, at a Washington news conference, said the Texas law “is clearly unconstitutional under long-term Supreme Court precedents” granting women in the U.S. the constitutional right to have an abortion. He said the Department of Justice, in bringing the lawsuit against the country’s second-largest state, “has a duty to uphold the rule of law.” He said “all provisions” of the law concerned him.  The U.S. Supreme Court, on a 5-4 vote last week, allowed the law to take effect, a decision praised by anti-abortion advocates looking to eventually overturn the court’s landmark 1973 decision declaring that women in the U.S. hold a constitutional right to have an abortion. Those supporting U.S. abortion rights, including President Joe Biden, derided the court’s late-night decision, which has stopped most abortions in the state. Biden warned that the law would cause “unconstitutional chaos” because it gives private citizens, rather than government officials, the right to enforce it by filing civil lawsuits against people who help a woman obtain an abortion after six weeks, whether it be a doctor who performs the procedure or someone who drives a woman to a clinic. The law allows people winning such lawsuits to collect at least $10,000 and makes no exceptions in cases of rape or incest. FILE – Texas Gov. Greg Abbott …

Teams working on two continents have marked similar milestones in their respective efforts to tap an energy source key to the fight against climate change: They’ve each produced very impressive magnets.  On Thursday, scientists at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in southern France took delivery of the first part of a massive magnet so strong its American manufacturer claims it can lift an aircraft carrier.Almost 20 meters (about 60 feet) tall and more than 4 meters (14 feet) in diameter when fully assembled, the magnet is a crucial component in the attempt by 35 nations to master nuclear fusion.Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists and a private company announced separately this week that they, too, have hit a milestone with the successful test of the world’s strongest high-temperature superconducting magnet that may allow the team to leapfrog ITER in the race to build a “sun on earth.”Unlike existing fission reactors that produce radioactive waste and sometimes catastrophic meltdowns, proponents of fusion say it offers a clean and virtually limitless supply of energy. If, that is, scientists and engineers can figure out how to harness it — they have been working on the problem for nearly a century.Rather than splitting atoms, fusion mimics a process that occurs naturally in stars to meld two hydrogen atoms together and produce a helium atom — as well as a whole lot of energy.Achieving fusion requires unimaginable amounts of heat and pressure. One approach to achieving that is to turn the hydrogen into an electrically …

A series of spacewalks is underway outside the International Space Station. Plus, a fire scare occurs in the Russian section of the ISS, and amateur stargazers have set up camp at an ancient Mesopotamian site in modern-day Iraq. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us the Week in Space. …

The crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) Thursday reported that smoke alarms went off in the Russian segment of orbiting laboratory, and the crew reported seeing smoke and smelling burned plastic. Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, said the incident took place in the Russian-built Zvezda module and occurred as the station’s batteries were being recharged. The smell reportedly wafted from the Russian module into the module operated by the U.S. space agency NASA.  Roscosmos said the crew activated air filters and returned to their normal schedule once the air quality was back to normal. It was unclear what caused the smoke. Russian Cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov proceeded with their scheduled six-hour spacewalk to continue integrating the Russian-built Nauka science lab that docked with the space station in July. Shortly after docking, the lab briefly knocked the orbital outpost out of position by accidentally firing its engines — an incident Russian space officials blamed on a software failure. The space station is also occupied by NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet.  Some information for this report came from the Associated Press.   …

U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday is planning to order 2.5 million federal workers and contractors to get vaccinated against the coronavirus as part of a new effort to control the infectious disease.    The new order, which eliminates an option he previously gave the workers to get regularly tested for the virus in lieu of being inoculated, is part of a six-point plan Biden is laying out in a White House address to combat the surge in recent weeks of delta variant coronavirus cases and deaths.    Aides said the U.S. leader will spell out new efforts to convince the unvaccinated to get inoculated, protecting those already vaccinated with booster shots in coming weeks, keeping schools open, increasing testing and requiring face masks in some situations, advancing the economic recovery and improving care for those who have contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.    With the mandate for federal worker vaccinations, the White House is hoping businesses across the U.S. will follow suit. Some major companies are already requiring their workers to get vaccinated or be fired.    It was not immediately clear if Biden’s order covering federal workers and contractors would allow for exceptions for those seeking religious or medical exemptions from vaccination.    The latest surge in U.S. coronavirus cases and deaths is mostly among the unvaccinated, although there have been some breakthrough infections among those who were vaccinated months ago. FILE – In this Aug. 17, 2021, photo, an ICU nurse moves electrical cords for …

U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to call for a summit on boosting the global supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, according to U.S. news outlets. The summit will be held during the United Nations General Assembly later this month.  The Washington Post reports the topics will include coordination among world leaders to collectively tackle the health crisis and address inequities, including the slow rate of vaccinations in the developing world.The United States and other wealthy nations have been under increasing pressure to donate their surplus of COVID-19 vaccines to poorer countries as the pandemic wreaks havoc across the globe with the emergence of new and more contagious variants of the coronavirus, which causes COVID-19. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, on Wednesday implored wealthy nations to forgo COVID-19 vaccine booster shots for the rest of the year to ensure that poorer countries have more access to the vaccine.  Tedros had previously asked rich countries not to provide boosters until September.The global vaccine sharing initiative COVAX also announced Wednesday that it expects to receive about 1.4 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of the year, as opposed to the projection of 1.9 billion doses it made in June.FILE – Workers unload 1.5 million doses of Moderna vaccine donated by the U.S. through the COVAX program, at the Armando Escalon aerial base, in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, June 27, 2021, in this handout picture released by the Honduran presidency.Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Board of Education is expected to approve …

U.S. President Joe Biden will unveil a new strategy to combat the dramatic surge of COVID-19 cases across the nation during a major White House speech Thursday afternoon.White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Wednesday that Biden will spell out six methods designed to encourage more Americans to get inoculated against the virus, including involvement of the private sector.Biden’s speech comes as the U.S. is experiencing a growing number of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths sparked by the highly contagious delta variant, which has completely upended the administration’s aggressive vaccination efforts during its first months in office.The majority of new infections have been among Americans who have not been vaccinated, including a spike in the number of young children who are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine.The American Academy of Pediatrics said cases among children soared to 750,000 between Aug. 5 and Sept. 2.The latest surge has pushed hospitals and health care workers across the U.S. to a breaking point, with intensive care units filled to capacity with COVID-19 patients, and stalled the nation’s economic recovery from the pandemic, a key goal of Biden’s first year in office. …

It’s been 20 years since terrorists rammed passenger planes into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington. The wars that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq were wars in which medical advances saved more lives than in any other war. VOA’s Carol Pearson tells us about one of those advances. Camera: Mike Burke …

The Texas anti-abortion law, which was allowed to go into effect last week despite being in clear conflict with decades-old precedents set by the United States Supreme Court in the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, is a complex piece of legal engineering. It was intentionally built to avoid initial judicial review and structured to compel people to comply with it, even if they believe it violates their constitutional rights, through fear of being bombarded with excessive legal fees that could bankrupt them. Attorney General Merrick Garland this week ordered the Justice Department to explore “all options” to challenge Texas’s highly restrictive abortion law and to protect abortion clinics that are under attack. Many Democrats and abortion rights proponents caution, however, that while they believe the law is unconstitutional, it was crafted in a way that makes legal challenges difficult.  FILE – U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland attends a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, June 25, 2021.Senate Bill 8, as the legislation is called, makes it illegal in Texas for a doctor to perform an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy — before most women are even aware that they are pregnant. Crucially, however, the law explicitly bans state officials from acting to enforce the law, delegating that responsibility instead to private citizens, who are eligible to recover a $10,000 judgment, plus attorney’s fees, from anyone who they can prove aided or abetted a woman seeking an abortion. The law casts a broad net, meaning that not only doctors, …

Malawi health authorities fear vaccine hesitancy could lead to tens of thousands of COVID-19 jabs expiring early next month.  With just 2% of Malawi’s population vaccinated, authorities hope to increase uptake by deploying mobile vaccination clinics to bring the vaccine closer to people.Malawi has so far received just over 1.2 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines under the COVAX facility.But vaccine hesitancy in Malawi is widespread largely because of misperceptions of the jabs’ efficacy and safety.   Dr. Gift Kawalazira, who heads Health and Social Services at the Blantyre Health Office, says there’s yet another reason for the low vaccination rate.   “We have noticed that with the coming of summer, the number of cases has drastically reduced, and also the number of people coming for vaccination have reduced from having over 2,000 people per day to having just about 400 people per day now,” he said.Kawalazira said deploying mobile vaccination centers will help increase vaccine uptake, noting that when the initiative was launched Saturday over 600 people were vaccinated – and six companies booked the mobile clinic to come and vaccinate their workers.He predicted the initiative will help Malawi meet its vaccination target of 60% by 2022 and allay fears that more vaccines will expire.“Johnson & Johnson is actually expiring after December and AstraZeneca has got two different batches, one of which is expiring next month, and the other one is going up until December,” he said.In May, Malawi incinerated about 20,000 AstraZeneca doses that had expired …

A new report released Wednesday says the COVID-19 pandemic had a “devastating” impact in the fight against HIV and tuberculosis last year.The Global Fund, an alliance of governments, civil society groups and private sector entities, says the number of people reached with HIV prevention programs and services declined 11 percent in 2020 compared with the year before, while testing for HIV dropped 22 percent last year.The number of people treated for drug-resistant tuberculosis fell by 19 percent in countries where the Fund invests — a figure the Geneva-based group described as “staggering” — while those being treated for “extensively” drug-resistant tuberculosis plummeted by 37 percent.Peter Sands, the executive director of The Global Fund, told the Reuters news agency that about one million fewer people were treated for tuberculosis in 2020 than the year before, a fact he says will “inevitably mean that hundreds of thousands of people will die.”The Fund said programs to fight malaria appear to have been “less badly affected” by COVID-19 than HIV or tuberculosis.Meanwhile, the Bloomberg news service says a study conducted in South Africa found that Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot COVID-19 vaccine reduces the risk of contracting the disease by about half. The study, which involved nearly half a million health workers in the country, found that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was about 70 percent effective against hospitalization and as much as 96 percent effective against death.Glenda Gray, the study’s co-leader, tells Bloomberg the final results from the study will be submitted for publication …

Mexico’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Tuesday that penalizing abortion is unconstitutional, a major victory for advocates of women’s health and human rights, just as parts of the United States enact tougher laws against the practice.The decision in the world’s second-biggest Roman Catholic country means that courts can no longer prosecute abortion cases, and follows the historic legalization of the right in Argentina, which took effect earlier this year.Arturo Zaldivar, president of the Mexican Supreme Court, hailed the decision as “a watershed moment” for all women, especially the most vulnerable.The court’s ruling stemmed from a 2018 case challenging a criminal law on abortion in Coahuila, a northern Mexican state which borders Texas, which has just tightened its laws.It also comes as a growing feminist movement has taken to the streets in Mexico to press for change, including calls to end anti-abortion laws on the books in much of the country.At a demonstration in Coahuila state capital Saltillo, women wearing green bandanas to symbolize the pro-choice movement embraced and shouted “abortion is no longer a crime!””We’re very happy that abortion has been decriminalized, and now we want it to be legal,” said 26-year-old Karla Cihuatl, one of the demonstrators, who belongs to the feminist organization Frente Feminista in Saltillo.”This step has broken the stigma a little. But I believe that we still have to change the social aspect.”With some 100 million Catholics, Mexico is the largest predominantly Catholic country after Brazil. The Catholic Church opposes all forms of abortion procedures.Hundreds of …

Mexico’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Tuesday that penalizing abortion is unconstitutional, a major victory for advocates of women’s health and human rights, just as parts of the United States enact tougher laws against the practice.The court ruling in the majority Roman Catholic nation follows moves to decriminalize abortion at the state level, although most of the country still has tough laws in place against women terminating their pregnancy early.”This is a historic step for the rights of women,” said Supreme Court Justice Luis Maria Aguilar.A number of U.S. states have recently taken steps to restrict women’s access to abortion, particularly Texas, which last week enacted the strictest anti-abortion law in the country after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene.The Mexican ruling opens the door to the possibility for the release of women incarcerated for having had abortions. It also could lead to U.S. women in states such as Texas deciding to travel south of the border to terminate their pregnancies. In July, the state of Veracruz became just the fourth of Mexico’s 32 regions to decriminalize abortion. …

Coronavirus vaccines offer protection not only against infection and serious illness but may also help prevent so-called “Long COVID,” where symptoms can last for several weeks or months, according to new research from scientists at Kings College London.  There are no official figures, but it’s thought millions of people worldwide who contracted the coronavirus have suffered from so-called “Long COVID,” with reported symptoms including muscle pain, fatigue, shortness of breath and brain fog lasting longer than four weeks. Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 8 MB480p | 12 MB540p | 15 MB720p | 32 MB1080p | 62 MBOriginal | 463 MB Embed” />Copy Download AudioThe condition remains poorly understood, says British campaigner Ondine Sherwood, who founded the ‘Long Covid SOS’ campaign group after suffering from the disease caused by the coronavirus. “Amongst medical practitioners, there is a bit of variation in terms of recognition. I think people are still getting told that it’s due to anxiety. Some doctors don’t fully understand this condition,” Sherwood told VOA. “It is a case of treating symptoms. Research is ongoing as to the mechanisms of Long COVID and it’s not fully understood. There are quite a lot of theories, many of which have been backed up with research. But we haven’t reached the stage where we have targeted treatments,” Sherwood added. The research from Kings College London suggests that coronavirus vaccines halve the risk of suffering from long COVID, for the very …

A greater share of U.S. soldiers survived the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq than those who fought in previous conflicts. Advances in medicine and new concepts in trauma care over the past two decades have made the difference. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports on the most dramatic advances. Camera: Mike Burke         Video editor: Marcus Harton …

The U.S. ended its conflict in Afghanistan, but the Veterans Health Administration continues researching ways to reduce the impact of the most serious injuries U.S. troops suffered in conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports on one area of research, traumatic brain injury. …