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New tests to decide Shanghai reopening as Beijing stocks up
Shanghai authorities said new COVID-19 testing over the next few days will determine which neighborhoods can safely start reopening, as residents in Beijing watched carefully for word for whether the capital will lock down.
On Wednesday, China reported 14,222 new cases of coronavirus infection, the vast majority in people not showing symptoms.
Shanghai residents will begin another round of testing over the next few days and areas that have achieved “societal zero COVID” could see some measure of limited freedom, the vice head of the city health committee, Zhao Dandan, said.
China’s zero-COVID strategy is being tested by the country’s largest outbreak of the pandemic, which began in the central city of Wuhan in late December 2019. The phrase refers to new infections being detected only in people already under surveillance, such as those in a centralized quarantine facility or known close contacts of existing patients, and the virus is no longer being spread in the community.
Shanghai’s lockdown began a month ago, taking a toll on residents confined to their homes. While a small, lucky portion of people have been allowed to leave their homes in the past week, the vast majority of people remain confined.
The flow of industrial goods has also been disrupted by the suspension of access to Shanghai, home of the world’s busiest port, and other industrial cities including Changchun and Jilin in northeast China.
Officials reported 48 deaths on Wednesday, bringing the total to at least 238 in the city.
Meanwhile, the capital Beijing is in the middle of mass testing millions of residents after discovering a cluster of cases last week. The city reported 34 new cases Wednesday, three of them in people showing no symptoms.
In the last couple of days, nervous Beijing residents had started stockpiling food and supplies, following Shanghai’s troubles where residents struggled to get a continuous and reliable supply of food while under lockdown.
Also read: Surprisingly low Shanghai COVID death count spurs questions
Beijing city officials were quick to promise that they were ensuring grocery stores would be well-stocked. They said they were monitoring the Xinfadi wholesale market, where the city gets the vast majority of its supplies.
Demand has soared, with city residents sharing online lists of what to stock. Farms on the outskirts of Beijing told the official Beijing Daily News that April and May are typically when demand peaks. Compared to the same period last year, the number of orders rose 20%, owing to the demand generated by the epidemic, according to one major farm the paper interviewed.
Another farm said it was even more. “Starting from yesterday, the number of orders we’ve received have clearly increased, roughly double the amount at this time last year,” supply chain manager Zhang Xinming told Beijing Daily News.
So far, officials have locked down only specific areas of Beijing where virus cases were found. On Wednesday, the Tongzhou district suspended classes for all its schools from kindergarten through high school.
Given that China for now remains committed to its “zero-COVID” approach, “I do think we will continue to see the use of these lockdowns across the country,” said Karen Grepin, a public health expert at the University of Hong Kong. “If anything, the omicron variant has made it more challenging to control the virus and thus more stringent measures are needed if the goal is to continue to strive for local elimination.”
The “zero-COVID” strategy has worked well against previous versions of the virus, keeping China mostly virus-free for two years as the pandemic spread around the world. Questions are being raised about its effectiveness now, with vaccines protecting most people from serious illness and the immense challenge of trying to contain the more transmissible omicron variant.
UN secretary-general arrives in Ukraine
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday he has arrived in Ukraine.
"I have arrived in Ukraine after visiting Moscow," Guterres tweeted.
He said the UN will continue the work to expand humanitarian support and secure the evacuation of civilians from conflict zones, and he urged the end of hostilities.
Also Read: UN chief calls for cease-fire on Moscow visit
"The sooner this war ends, the better -- for the sake of Ukraine, Russia, and the world," the UN chief said.
On April 26, Guterres visited Moscow and held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
What Musk’s past tweets reveal about Twitter’s next owner
Three days before Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter, the world’s richest man tweeted a photo of Bill Gates and used a crude sexual term to make fun of his belly.
Playful, aggressive and often juvenile, Musk’s past tweets show how he has used social media to craft his public image as a brash billionaire unafraid to offend. They may also reveal clues as to how Musk will govern the platform he hopes to own.
“Look at the feed: It’s all over the place. It’s erratic. At times it’s pretty extreme,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University professor who studies social media and who recently assigned Musk’s tweets as reading material for their students. “It paints him as some sort of rebel leader who will take control of the public square to save it. That is a myth he has constructed.”
Musk joined Twitter in 2010 and now has more than 85 million followers — the seventh most of any account and the highest for any business leader. He had mused about buying the site before he agreed on Monday to pay $44 billion for Twitter, which he said he hopes to turn into a haven where all speech is allowed.
Also read: Elon Musk buys Twitter for $44B and will privatize company
“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk wrote in a tweet.
As the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk uses his Twitter account to make business announcements and promote his enterprises. He muses about technology and trade, but has also posted jokes about women’s breasts and once compared Canada’s prime minister to Hitler. He regularly weighs in on global events, as he did in March 2020 when he tweeted that “The coronavirus pandemic is dumb.”
He’s also used the account to punch back at critics, such as when he called a diver working to rescue boys trapped in a cave in Thailand a “pedo,” short for pedophile. The diver had previously criticized Musk’s proposal to use a sub to rescue the boys. Musk, who won a defamation suit filed by the diver, later said he never intended “pedo” to be interpreted as “pedophile.”
A few years ago, after software engineer Cher Scarlett criticized Musk’s handling of the cave incident, the tech billionaire fired back and she was soon being harassed by dozens of Musk’s online fans. He later deleted the posts, but not before Scarlett had to lock down her account because she was receiving so many hateful messages.
“It’s ironic to me that somebody who claims they want to buy Twitter to protect free speech has such thin skin,” she said. “He’s a very smart man, and when he replies to people that criticize him, he knows what he’s doing. To me that’s not championing free speech, it’s weaponizing free speech, and I think that’s what he’ll do owning this platform.”
Also read: Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter, make it 'maximally trusted'
Nineteen-year-old Jack Sweeney got Musk’s attention when he created an automated Twitter account that tracked the movements of Musk’s jet. Musk responded by offering Sweeney $5,000 to pull the account. When Sweeney refused, Musk blocked him on Twitter.
Sweeney said he’s worried he may get kicked off the site entirely if Musk’s takeover is approved. But he said he likes Musk’s free speech absolutism, and hopes he sees it through.
“He’ll make it more open, and I think that’s a good thing,” Sweeney said.
Musk’s use of Twitter has also led to problems for his own companies. In one August 2018 tweet, for instance, Musk asserted that he had the funding to take Tesla private for $420 a share, although a court has ruled that it wasn’t true. That led to an SEC investigation that Musk is still fighting.
More recently, Musk appeared to have violated SEC rules that required him to disclose that he’d acquired a 5% stake in Twitter; instead he waited until he had more than 9%. Experts say these issues aren’t likely to affect his Twitter acquisition.
Last year another federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board, ordered Musk to delete a tweet that officials said illegally threatened to cut stock options for Tesla employees who joined the United Auto Workers union.
Those tweets helped cement Musk’s reputation as a brash outsider, a workingman’s billionaire, Grygiel said. But that doesn’t mean he is equipped to run a social media platform with more than 200 million users, the professor added.
“Maybe he wants to burn it down,” Grygiel said. “I don’t know. But I do know that it shows that no one person should have this kind of power.”
US: Allies must move ‘at the speed of war’ to help Ukraine
The U.S. defense chief urged Ukraine’s allies to “move at the speed of war” to get more and heavier weapons to Kyiv as Russian forces rained fire on eastern and southern Ukraine amid new fears the fighting could spill over the country’s borders.
For the second day, explosions rocked the separatist region of Trans-Dniester Tuesday in neighboring Moldova, knocking out two powerful radio antennas. And a Russian missile hit a strategic railroad bridge linking Ukraine’s Odesa port region to neighboring Romania, a NATO member, Ukrainian authorities said.
Just across the border in Russia, an ammunition depot in the Belgorod region was burning early Wednesday after several explosions were heard, the governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said on the messaging app Telegram. Early this month, Russia said two Ukrainian helicopter gunships hit an oil reservoir in the same region, causing a fire.
NATO members Poland and Bulgaria said the Kremlin is cutting off natural gas supplies starting Wednesday, the first such actions of the war. Poland has been a major gateway for the delivery of weapons to Ukraine and confirmed this week that it is sending the country tanks.
Poland said it was well-prepared after working for years to reduce its reliance on Russian energy. Poland also has ample natural gas in storage, and it will soon benefit from two pipelines coming online, analyst Emily McClain of Rystad Energy said.
Bulgaria gets over 90% of its gas from Russia, and officials said they were working to find other sources, such as from Azerbaijan.
Both countries had refused Russia’s demands that they pay in rubles, as have almost all of Russia’s gas customers in Europe.
Two months into the fighting, Western arms have helped Ukraine stall Russia’s invasion, but the country’s leaders have said they need more support fast.
Read: Myanmar court sentences Suu Kyi to 5 years for corruption
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin convened a meeting Tuesday of officials from about 40 countries at the U.S. air base at Ramstein, Germany, and said more help is on the way.
“We’ve got to move at the speed of war,” Austin said.
He said he wanted officials to leave the meeting “with a common and transparent understanding of Ukraine’s near-term security requirements because we’re going to keep moving heaven and earth so that we can meet them.”
After unexpectedly fierce resistance by Ukrainian forces thwarted Russia’s attempt to take Ukraine’s capital, Moscow now says its focus is the capture of the Donbas, the mostly Russian-speaking industrial area in eastern Ukraine.
In the town of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, people fleeing the shelling lined up Tuesday to board a train headed to the far west of the country. One person was lifted onto the train in a wheelchair, another on a stretcher.
The passengers took with them cats, dogs, a few bags and boxes, and the memory of those who did not flee in time.
“We were in the basement, but my daughter didn’t make it and was hit with shrapnel on the doorstep” during shelling on Monday, said Mykola Kharchenko, 74. “We had to bury her in the garden near the pear tree.”
He said his village, Vremivka, was under heavy fire for four days and all but destroyed. With tears in his eyes, Kharchenko said he somehow held himself together at home, but once he reached the train station he fell apart. In a flash of anger, he lashed out at Russia.
“Is this liberation? From whom am I, a Russian speaker, from whom am I being liberated? From whom? From my daughter? From everything I have built during my whole life?”
In the gutted southern port city of Mariupol, authorities said Russian forces hit the Azovstal steel plant with 35 airstrikes over 24 hours. The plant is the last known stronghold of Ukrainian fighters in the city. About 1,000 civilians were said to be taking shelter there with an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian defenders.
Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, said Russia was using heavy bunker bombs. He also accused Russian forces of shelling a route they had offered as an escape corridor from the steel mill.
Read: Poland, Bulgaria say Russia suspending natural gas supplies
Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region of the Donbas, said on the Telegram messaging app that Russian forces “continue to deliberately fire at civilians and to destroy critical infrastructure.”
Ukraine also said Russian forces shelled Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, which lies in the northeast, outside the Donbas. But it is seen as key to Russia’s apparent bid to encircle Ukrainian troops in the Donbas from the north, east and south.
Ukrainian forces struck back in the Kherson region in the south.
The attack Tuesday on the bridge near Odesa — along with a series of strikes on key railroad stations a day earlier — appeared to signal a major shift in Russia’s approach. Until now, Moscow has spared strategic bridges, perhaps in hopes of keeping them for its own use in seizing Ukraine. But now it seems to be trying to thwart Ukraine’s efforts to move troops and supplies.
No injuries were reported in the strike on the bridge, and Ukraine’s military said repair work was underway.
The southern Ukraine coastline and Moldova have been on edge since a senior Russian military officer said last week that the Kremlin’s goal is to secure not just eastern Ukraine but the entire south, so as to open the way to Trans-Dniester, a long, narrow strip of land with about 470,000 people along the Ukrainian border where about 1,500 Russian troops are based.
It was not clear who was behind the blasts in Trans-Dniester, but the attacks gave rise to fears that Russia is stirring up trouble so as to create a pretext to either invade Trans-Dniester or use the region as another launching point to attack Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the explosions were carried out by Russia and were “designed to destabilize,” with the intention of showing Moldova what could happen if it supports Ukraine.
Austin, the U.S. defense secretary, said the U.S. was still looking into blasts and trying to determine what was going on, but added: “Certainly we don’t want to see any spillover” of the conflict.
With the potentially pivotal battle for the east underway, the U.S. and its NATO allies are scrambling to deliver artillery and other heavy weaponry in time to make a difference.
German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said her government will supply Gepard self-propelled armored anti-aircraft guns to Ukraine. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has faced mounting pressure to send heavy weapons such as tanks and other armored vehicles.
Austin noted that more than 30 allies and partners have joined the U.S. in sending military aid to Ukraine and that more than $5 billion worth of equipment has been committed.
The U.S. defense secretary said the war has weakened Russia’s military, adding, “We would like to make sure, again, that they don’t have the same type of capability to bully their neighbors that we saw at the outset of this conflict.”
A senior Kremlin official, Nikolai Patrushev, warned that “the policies of the West and the Kyiv regime controlled by it would only be the breakup of Ukraine into several states.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov cautioned that if the Western flow of weapons continues, the talks aimed at ending the fighting will not produce any results.
Myanmar court sentences Suu Kyi to 5 years for corruption
A court in military-ruled Myanmar convicted the country’s former leader Aung San Suu Kyi of corruption and sentenced her to five years in prison Wednesday in the first of several corruption cases against her.
Suu Kyi, who was ousted by an army takeover last year, had denied the allegation that she had accepted gold and hundreds of thousands of dollars given her as a bribe by a top political colleague.
Her supporters and independent legal experts consider her prosecution an unjust move to discredit Suu Kyi and legitimize the military’s seizure of power while keeping the 76-year-old elected leader from returning to an active role in politics.
She has already been sentenced to six years imprisonment in other cases and faces 10 more corruption charges. The maximum punishment under the Anti-Corruption Act is 15 years in prison and a fine. Convictions in the other cases could bring sentences of more than 100 years in prison in total for a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who already spent years in detention for defying military rule.
READ: Myanmar’s Suu Kyi sentenced to 4 more years in prison
News of Wednesday’s verdict came from a legal official who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to release such information. Suu Kyi’s trial in the capital Naypyitaw was closed to the media, diplomats and spectators, and her lawyers were barred from speaking to the press.
Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party won a landslide victory in the 2020 general election, but lawmakers were not allowed to take their seats when the army seized power on Feb. 1, 2021, arresting Suu Kyi and many senior colleagues in her party and government. The army claimed it acted because there had been massive electoral fraud, but independent election observers didn’t find any major irregularities.
The takeover was met with large nonviolent protests nationwide, which security forces quashed with lethal force that has so far led to the deaths of almost 1,800 civilians, according to a watchdog group, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
Read: Tortured to death: Myanmar mass killings revealed
As repression escalated, armed resistance against the military government grew, and some U.N. experts now characterize the country as being in a state of civil war.
Suu Kyi has not been seen or allowed to speak in public since she was detained and is being held in an undisclosed location. However, at last week’s final hearing in the case, she appeared to be in good health and asked her supporters to “stay united,” said a legal official familiar with the proceedings who asked not to be named because he is not authorized to release information.
In earlier cases, Suu Kyi was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment on convictions of illegally importing and possessing walkie-talkies, violating coronavirus restrictions and sedition.
In the case decided Wednesday, she was accused of receiving $600,000 and seven gold bars in 2017-18 from Phyo Min Thein, the former chief minister of Yangon, the country’s biggest city and a senior member of her political party. Her lawyers, before they were served with gag orders late last year, said she rejected all his testimony against her as “absurd.”
The nine other cases currently being tried under the Anti-Corruption Act include several related to the purchase and rental of a helicopter by one of her former Cabinet ministers. Violations of the law carry a maximum penalty for each offense of 15 years in prison and a fine.
Suu Kyi is also charged with diverting money meant as charitable donations to build a residence, and with misusing her position to obtain rental properties at lower-than-market prices for a foundation named after her mother. The state Anti-Corruption Commission has declared that several of her alleged actions deprived the state of revenue it would otherwise have earned.
Another corruption charge alleging that she accepted a bribe has not yet gone to trial.
Suu Kyi is also being tried on a charge of violating the Official Secrets Act, which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years, and on a charge alleging election fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of three years.
Weary of many disasters? UN says worse to come
A disaster-weary globe will be hit harder in the coming years by even more catastrophes colliding in an interconnected world, a United Nations report issued Monday says.
If current trends continue the world will go from around 400 disasters per year in 2015 to an onslaught of about 560 catastrophes a year by 2030, the scientific report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction said. By comparison from 1970 to 2000, the world suffered just 90 to 100 medium to large scale disasters a year, the report said.
The number of extreme heat waves in 2030 will be three times what it was in 2001 and there will be 30% more droughts, the report predicted. It’s not just natural disasters amplified by climate change, it’s COVID-19, economic meltdowns and food shortages. Climate change has a huge footprint in the number of disasters, report authors said.
Also read: Despite emissions growth slowing, window for climate action 'closing fast': UN body
People have not grasped how much disasters already cost today, said Mami Mizutori, chief of the UN Office of Disaster Risk Reduction, “If we don't get ahead of the curve it will reach a point where we cannot manage the consequences of disaster,” she said. “We're just in this vicious cycle.”
That means society needs to rethink how it finances, handles and talks about the risk of disasters and what it values the most, the report said. About 90% of the spending on disasters currently is emergency relief with only 6% on reconstruction and 4% on prevention, Mizutori said in an interview Monday.
Not every hurricane or earthquake has to turn into a disaster, Mizutori said. A lot of damage is avoided with planning and prevention.
In 1990, disasters cost the world about $70 billion a year. Now they cost more than $170 billion a year, and that’s after adjusting for inflation, according to report authors. Nor does that include indirect costs we seldom think about that add up, Mizutori said.
For years disaster deaths were steadily decreasing because of better warnings and prevention, Mizutori said. But in the last five years, disaster deaths are “way more” than the previous five years, said report co-author Roger Pulwarty, a U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate and social scientist.
Also read: Twitter bans ads that contradict science on climate change
That's because both COVID-19 and climate change disasters have come to places that didn't used to get them, like tropical cyclones hitting Mozambique, Mizutori said. It's also the way disasters interact with each other, compounding damage, like wildfires plus heatwaves or a war in Ukraine plus food and fuel shortages, Pulwarty said.
Pulwarty said if society changes the way it thinks about risk and prepares for disasters, then the recent increase in yearly disaster deaths could be temporary, otherwise it’s probably “the new abnormal."
Disasters are hitting poorer countries harder than richer ones, with recovery costs taking a bigger chunk out of the economy in nations that can’t afford it, co-author Markus Enenkel of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative said.
“These are the events that can wipe out hard-earned development gains, leading already vulnerable communities or entire regions into a downward spiral,” he said.
The sheer onslaught of disasters just add up, like little illnesses attacking and weakening the body's immune system, Pulwarty said.
The report calls for an overhaul in how we speak about risk. For example, instead of asking about the chances of a disaster happening this year, say 5%, officials should think about the chances over a 25-year period, which makes it quite likely. Talking about 100-year floods or chances of something happening a couple times in 100 years makes it seem distant, Mizutori said.
“In a world of distrust and misinformation, this is a key to moving forward,” said University of South Carolina Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute Co-Director Susan Cutter, who wasn’t part of the report. “We can move forward to reduce the underlying drivers of risk: Inequality, poverty and most significantly climate change.”
In Kyiv, Blinken and Austin announce aid, diplomatic surge
The United States announced new military assistance for Ukraine and a renewed diplomatic push in the war-ravaged nation as President Joe Biden’s secretary of state and Pentagon chief completed a secrecy-shrouded trip to Kyiv.
In the highest-level American visit to the capital since Russia invaded in late February, top envoy Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Ukraine’s president, Volodomyr Zelenskyy, and his advisers that the U.S. would provide more than $300 million in foreign military financing and had approved a $165 million sale of ammunition.
They also said Biden would soon announce his nominee to be ambassador to Ukraine and that American diplomats who left Ukraine before the war would start returning to the country this coming week. The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv will remain closed for the moment.
Zelenskyy had announced Saturday that he would meet with the U.S. officials in Kyiv on Sunday, but the Biden administration refused to confirm that and declined to discuss details of a possible visit even though planning had been underway for more than a week.
Read: To Europe’s relief, France’s Macron wins but far-right gains
Journalists who traveled with Austin and Blinken to Poland were barred from reporting on the trip until it was over, were not allowed to accompany them on their overland journey into Ukraine, and were prohibited from specifying where in southeast Poland they waited for the Cabinet members to return. Officials at the State Department and the Pentagon cited security concerns.
Austin and Blinken announced a total of $713 million in foreign military financing for Ukraine and 15 allied and partner countries; some $322 million is earmarked for Kyiv. The remainder will be split among NATO members and other nations that have provided Ukraine with critical military supplies since the war with Russia began, officials said.
Such financing is different from previous U.S. military assistance for Ukraine. It is not a donation of drawn-down U.S. Defense Department stockpiles, but rather cash that countries can use to purchase supplies that they might need.
The new money, along with the sale of $165 million in non-U.S. made ammunition that is compatible with Soviet-era weapons the Ukrainians use, brings the total amount of American military assistance to Ukraine to $3.7 billion since the invasion, officials said.
Zelenskyy had urged the Americans not to come empty-handed. U.S. officials said they believed the new assistance would satisfy at least some of the Ukrainians’ urgent pleas for more help. New artillery, including howitzers, continues to be delivered at a rapid pace to Ukraine’s military, which is being trained on its use in neighboring countries, the officials said.
On the diplomatic front, Blinken told Zelenskyy that Biden will announce his nomination of veteran diplomat Bridget Brink to be the next U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. A career foreign service officer, Brink has served since 2019 as ambassador to Slovakia. She previously held assignments in Serbia, Cyprus, Georgia and Uzbekistan as well as with the White House National Security Council. The post requires confirmation by the U.S. Senate.
Blinken also told Ukraine’s foreign minister that the small staff from the now-shuttered U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, which has relocated to Poland from temporary offices in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, would begin making day trips to Lviv in the coming days. Officials said the U.S. had accelerated its review of security conditions in the capital and that the State Department will reopen the embassy there as soon as the situation allows.
Biden has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of genocide for the destruction and death wrought on Ukraine. Just on Thursday, Biden said he would provide a new package of $800 million in military aid to Ukraine that included heavy artillery and drones.
Congress approved $6.5 billion for military assistance last month as part of $13.6 billion in spending for Ukraine and allies in response to the Russian invasion.
From Poland, Blinken plans to return to Washington while Austin will head to Ramstein, Germany, for a meeting Tuesday of NATO defense ministers and other donor countries.
Read: Tomorrow could be too late to halt fighting in Mariupol: UN
That discussion will look at battlefield updates from the ground, additional security assistance for Ukraine and longer-term defense needs in Europe, including how to step up military production to fill gaps caused by the war in Ukraine, officials said. More than 20 nations are expected to send representatives to the meeting.
The Ukrainian officials participating were Zelenskyy, Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba, Defense Minister Olexiy Reznikov, Ambassador Oskana Markarova, presidential administration head Andriy Yermak, chief of defense Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and Andrii Sybiya of Zelenskyy’s office.
Representing the United States in addition to Blinken and Austin were State Department deputy chief of staff Tom Sullivan, senior military assistant Lt. Gen. Randy George and Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Laura Cooper.
COVID shots still work but researchers hunt new improvements
COVID-19 vaccinations are at a critical juncture as companies test whether new approaches like combination shots or nasal drops can keep up with a mutating coronavirus — even though it’s not clear if changes are needed.
Already there’s public confusion about who should get a second booster now and who can wait. There’s also debate about whether pretty much everyone might need an extra dose in the fall.
“I’m very concerned about booster fatigue” causing a loss of confidence in vaccines that still offer very strong protection against COVID-19’s worst outcomes, said Dr. Beth Bell of the University of Washington, an adviser to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Also raed:Beijing on alert after COVID-19 cases discovered in school
Despite success in preventing serious illness and death, there’s growing pressure to develop vaccines better at fending off milder infections, too — as well as options to counter scary variants.
“We go through a fire drill it seems like every quarter, every three months or so” when another mutant causes frantic tests to determine if the shots are holding, Pfizer vaccine chief Kathrin Jansen told a recent meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Yet seeking improvements for the next round of vaccinations may seem like a luxury for U.S. families anxious to protect their littlest children — kids under 5 who are not yet eligible for a shot. Moderna’s Dr. Jacqueline Miller told The Associated Press that its application to give two low-dose shots to the youngest children would be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration “fairly soon.” Pfizer hasn’t yet reported data on a third dose of its extra-small shot for tots, after two didn’t prove strong enough.
COMBINATION SHOTS MAY BE NEXT
The original COVID-19 vaccines remain strongly protective against serious illness, hospitalization and death, especially after a booster dose, even against the most contagious variants.
Updating the vaccine recipe to match the latest variants is risky, because the next mutant could be completely unrelated. So companies are taking a cue from the flu vaccine, which offers protection against three or four different strains in one shot every year.
Moderna and Pfizer are testing 2-in-1 COVID-19 protection that they hope to offer this fall. Each “bivalent” shot would mix the original, proven vaccine with an omicron-targeted version.
Moderna has a hint the approach could work. It tested a combo shot that targeted the original version of the virus and an earlier variant named beta — and found vaccine recipients developed modest levels of antibodies capable of fighting not just beta but also newer mutants like omicron. Moderna now is testing its omicron-targeted bivalent candidate.
But there’s a looming deadline. FDA’s Dr. Doran Fink said if any updated shots are to be given in the fall, the agency would have to decide on a recipe change by early summer.
DON’T EXPECT BOOSTERS EVERY FEW MONTHS
For the average person, two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine plus one booster — a total of three shots — “gets you set up” and ready for what may become an annual booster, said Dr. David Kimberlin, a CDC adviser from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
After that first booster, CDC data suggests an additional dose offers most people an incremental, temporary benefit.
Also read: WHO recommends Pfizer's Covid pill Paxlovid
Why the emphasis on three shots? Vaccination triggers development of antibodies that can fend off coronavirus infection but naturally wane over time. The next line of defense: Memory cells that jump into action to make new virus-fighters if an infection sneaks in. Rockefeller University researchers found those memory cells become more potent and able to target more diverse versions of the virus after the third shot.
Even if someone who’s vaccinated gets a mild infection, thanks to those memory cells “there’s still plenty of time to protect you against severe illness,” said Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
But some people — those with severely weakened immune systems — need more doses up-front for a better chance at protection.
And Americans 50 and older are being offered a second booster, following similar decisions by Israel and other countries that offer the extra shot to give older people a little more protection.
The CDC is developing advice to help those eligible decide whether to get an extra shot now or wait. Among those who might want a second booster sooner are the elderly, people with health problems that make them particularly vulnerable, or who are at high risk of exposure from work or travel.
COULD NASAL VACCINES BLOCK INFECTION?
It’s hard for a shot in the arm to form lots of virus-fighting antibodies inside the nose where the coronavirus latches on. But a nasal vaccine might offer a new strategy to prevent infections that disrupt people’s everyday lives even if they’re mild.
“When I think about what would make me get a second booster, I actually would want to prevent infection,” said Dr. Grace Lee of Stanford University, who chairs CDC’s immunization advisory committee. “I think we need to do better.”
Nasal vaccines are tricky to develop and it’s not clear how quickly any could become available. But several are in clinical trials globally. One in late-stage testing, manufactured by India’s Bharat Biotech, uses a chimpanzee cold virus to deliver a harmless copy of the coronavirus spike protein to the lining of the nose.
“I certainly do not want to abandon the success we have had” with COVID-19 shots, said Dr. Michael Diamond of Washington University in St. Louis, who helped create the candidate that’s now licensed to Bharat.
But “we’re going to have a difficult time stopping transmission with the current systemic vaccines,” Diamond added. “We have all learned that.”
UNGA chief calls for shift to green economies on Mother Earth Day
In keeping with this year's Mother Earth Day theme "Harmony with Nature and Biodiversity: Ecological economics and Earth-centered law," UN General Assembly (UNGA) President Abdulla Shahid Friday called for a shift to green economies.
"Nature is suffering. Oceans are filling with plastic and turning more acidic; extreme heat, wildfires and floods have affected millions; and we are still facing Covid-19, a worldwide health pandemic linked to the health of our ecosystem," the senior UN official said.
"Science has shown that our continued and careless encroachment into the world's ecosystems" has damaged biodiversity and endangered human health and well-being."
The international community needs to use the tools and targets of the Paris Agreement on climate change and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as blueprints for a sustainable recovery from Covid, Abdulla said.
Climate change, man-made changes to nature as well as crimes that disrupt biodiversity, such as deforestation, land-use change, intensified agriculture and livestock production or the growing illegal wildlife trade, can accelerate the speed of destruction of the planet.
This is the first Mother Earth Day celebrated within the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
Ecosystems support all life on Earth. The healthier the ecosystems are, the healthier the planet and its people will be.
Restoring the damaged ecosystems will help end poverty, combat climate change and prevent mass extinction, says the UN.
Guterres to meet Putin, Zelenskyy next week
UN Secretary-General António Guterres will travel to Russia and Ukraine next week to meet with the foreign ministers and presidents of these countries.
Nearly two months of intense and escalating hostilities in Ukraine continue to have horrific repercussions for civilians and caused a grave humanitarian crisis.
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Guterres will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow Tuesday, where he will also hold talks with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
The UN secretary-general will then travel to Kyiv Thursday, where he will meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.
In both visits, he aims to talk about "what can be done to bring peace to Ukraine urgently" and help people get to safety, UN Spokesperson Eri Kaneko said at a briefing in New York.
To step up efforts to end the war in Ukraine, Guterres had asked to meet the leaders of Russia and Ukraine in separate letters handed to their countries' permanent missions to the UN.
Over 5 million people fled Ukraine to seek safety in other countries and another 7.1 million have been internally displaced across the country, according to the intergovernmental organisation.