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ABUJA, NIGERIA – Doctors in Nigeria’s state-run hospitals have walked off the job over what they call poor salaries, insurance, and facilities despite a third wave of coronavirus infections. Hospitals were already struggling to cope with the caseload and health authorities fear the strike, which began Monday, could overwhelm them and end up costing lives.
The Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors, or NARD, said the goal is to compel the government to uphold an earlier agreement on pay arrears, hazard allowances and honor benefits for families of members who die in service to the country. The government, for its part, said it was not aware of the plan for the doctors to go on strike.
But as the country faces a third coronavirus wave caused by the lethal delta variant, health authorities said the strike action is dangerous.

Ndaeyo Iwot is the executive secretary at the Abuja Primary Health Care Board.
“It is expected to affect those that are 50 years and above particularly those with co-morbidities,” Iwot said. “The effect of the disease is most likely to be aggravated.”
Out of about 42,000 registered doctors in Nigeria, some 16,800 or 40%, are residents.
Union officials have said there will be no exception for doctors responding to coronavirus cases at hospitals.
Uyilawa Okhuaihesuyi is the national president of the association.
“There’s no better time to have a strike action,” Okhuaihesuyi said. “And as it stands, we have waited patiently for them to try and sort out the issues concerning the welfare of our members, those we lost, those that are still alive. And we actually want to apologize to Nigerians generally but at this stage you can’t blame us.”
Nineteen members of NARD have died since the pandemic started. The union is also demanding improvement on health care facilities across state-run centers.
In April, the union suspended a 10-day strike that stalled activities in various state health facilities.
The latest strike action comes as President Muhammadu Buhari visits Britain for medical reasons. He is expected to return to Nigeria during the second week of August.

Source: Voice of America

WASHINGTON – Tyson Foods, the biggest U.S. food company, said Tuesday it is requiring all its employees to be fully vaccinated, joining a growing list of employers who are making vaccination a condition of further employment.
For months, Tyson said it has encouraged its 139,000 workers to get vaccinated, but to date only about 56,000 have been inoculated.
“We did not take this decision lightly,” Donnie King, Tyson’s president and chief executive, said of the mandatory vaccination requirement.
“We take this step today because nothing is more important than our team members’ health and safety, and we thank them for the work they do, every day, to help us feed this country, and our world,” he said in a letter to Tyson workers.
Under the Arkansas-based company’s policy, Tyson workers at its U.S. locations must be vaccinated by October 1, with workers at its foreign locations vaccinated by November 1, although it plans to make exceptions to the directive for legitimate medical or religious reasons.
After individual workers are vaccinated, Tysons said it would pay them a $200 bonus, similar to what some other companies are doing to encourage vaccinations.
The U.S. meat-packing industry has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, with critics saying Tyson, among others, has not done enough to protect its workers. Early in the pandemic last year, Tyson was forced to close some of its meat processing plants because of an outbreak of the virus.
The federal government said in May it was legal for employers to require their workers to get vaccinated.
As the virus seemed to be a diminished threat weeks ago, many companies started to make plans to reopen offices and there was little talk of requiring mandatory vaccinations.
Now, with the surging spread of the highly transmissible delta variant of the virus, major employers by the day are requiring vaccinations before employees can return to offices in the coming weeks.
U.S. President Joe Biden ordered more than 2 million federal workers to get vaccinated, without threatening to fire them if they did not. But he said they would be required to undergo frequent testing for the virus if they refused to get inoculated.
“Unlike a year ago, we have the ability to save lives and keep our economy growing,” Biden said Monday on Twitter. “We know we can dramatically lower the cases in the country. We can do this. Get vaccinated.”
The number of vaccinations in the U.S. had dropped for weeks, but with the spread of the delta variant, first discovered in India, the number of inoculations is on the rise again, to about 800,000 on Sunday.
But so are the number of new infections, to about 85,000 a day in the last week, up from about 10,000 daily a month ago. Some analysts say the number of new daily cases could reach 300,000 this month.
With the surge in the new cases, numerous companies have ordered their employees to get vaccinated, including the search engine company Google, social media company Facebook, the movie supply company Netflix, giant retailer Walmart, clothier Saks Fifth Avenue, The Washington Post newspaper, financial firms BlackRock and Morgan Stanley and ride share companies Uber and Lyft.
Major U.S. medical professional groups have called for mandatory vaccinations, but millions of health workers remain unvaccinated, with many workers resisting.
On Monday, the U.S. said it reached a new milestone, with 70% of all adults having at least one vaccination shot of the typical two-shot regimen, a figure achieved a month after the July 4 Independence Day goal that Biden had called for.
The government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that not quite half of the country’s total population of 332 million people has been fully vaccinated.

Source: Voice of America

Britain has opened its borders to fully vaccinated travelers from the United States and much of Europe, as the government continues to ease coronavirus travel restrictions.
Monday was the first day that travelers arriving in Britain from the United States and most parts of the European Union could do so without going into quarantine.
New arrivals must still be tested for the coronavirus before boarding a flight to Britain and within two days of arrival.
Britain is maintaining quarantine requirements for French travelers, saying the country has a concerning number of cases of the beta variant in some areas. The beta variant was first detected in South Africa.
Britain has one of the highest vaccination rates for its population with nearly 90% of adults having at least one shot.

The country will begin offering a booster dose of a COVID-19 vaccine to 32 million Britons starting in early September, The Telegraph reported Sunday. The shots will be available in as many as 2,000 pharmacies with the goal of getting them into arms by early December.
The government has been preparing since at least June, when the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) called for a plan to offer the third shot to people 70 years old or older, home care residents and those who are vulnerable for health reasons.
US rules
In the U.S., more jurisdictions are requiring employees to get vaccinated or submit to regular testing as the country grapples with a rise of infections blamed on the delta variant.
Denver, Colorado, Mayor Michael Hancock announced Monday the city will mandate all city employees and private sector workers in high-risk settings to be vaccinated against the virus by the end of September.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said state health care workers, along with workers in corrections facilities or assisted living centers, must be vaccinated or face testing twice a week.

In New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo urged businesses to turn away unvaccinated customers. He said it is in businesses’ best interests because many customers want to know that the customer next to them is vaccinated.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that 70% of U.S. adults have received at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine. President Joe Biden had originally aimed to pass that milestone by July 4.
In Myanmar
A group of 16 humanitarian aid organizations has issued a joint statement warning about the “spiraling humanitarian catastrophe in Myanmar triggered by skyrocketing COVID-19 cases and widespread violence.”
“Over 60 percent of reported deaths from COVID-19 in Myanmar have occurred in the past month alone, with the number of confirmed cases doubling in the last two months,” according to the statement issued Monday.
“Health care facilities from Kachin to Mandalay to Yangon remain shuttered as health care workers face violence and threats,” the statement said. “More than 400 doctors and 180 nurses have been given arrest warrants since the military takeover in February 2021.”
“The communities we work with are desperate and dying. … The population needs safe and fair access to humanitarian aid and health care now,” Laura Marshall, country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council in Myanmar, said in the statement.
Around the globe
In Australia, officials extended a lockdown in Brisbane, the country’s third-largest city until Sunday because of a growing COVID-19 outbreak. Sydney, the biggest city in the country, is beginning its sixth week of lockdown.
Olympics organizers in Tokyo reported 17 new coronavirus cases tied to the Games, including one athlete. That brings the total number since the beginning of July to 276.

Germany said Monday that beginning in September, it will start to offer a booster shot against COVID-19 to vulnerable individuals, including the elderly and those with weak immune systems.
In Berlin, thousands marched Sunday to protest pandemic restrictions, and about 600 protesters were detained after clashes with police, The Associated Press reported.
While Germany eased many of its restrictions in May, large gatherings remain banned.
More than 200,000 people turned out Saturday in France to protest vaccination requirements.
There are 198.7 million cases of COVID-19 as of Monday and 4.2 million deaths globally, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

Source: Voice of America

A U.S. labor board official has recommended a rerun of a landmark Amazon union election in Alabama, where employees had voted overwhelmingly against making their warehouse the online retailer’s first to organize in the United States.
In the coming weeks, a regional director for the U.S. National Labor Relations Board will decide whether to order the rerun based on this recommendation, said an official on Monday with the board who asked not to be named.
Amazon said it planned to appeal.
“Our employees had a chance to be heard during a noisy time when all types of voices were weighing into the national debate, and at the end of the day, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of a direct connection with their managers and the company,” Amazon said in a statement.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which workers rejected joining earlier this year by a more than 2-1 margin, had said Amazon illegally threatened staff with reduced benefits and compromised the election’s integrity via a ballot collection box it secured outside the warehouse.
Specifically, the RWDSU argued, Amazon improperly influenced voting by pressuring employees to drop ballots in the mailbox while they were in view of warehouse cameras, creating a perception of surveillance that U.S. labor law forbids. Amazon also improperly adorned a tent surrounding the mailbox with messaging related to its anti-union campaign, the RWDSU said.
Amazon has said that the mailbox was installed to give nearly 6,000 eligible voters a convenient option for returning their ballots, and that the tent shielded workers from cameras, which predated the collection box.
The recommendation casts doubt on Amazon’s victory over the unionizing effort in a contest that amounted to a setback for the U.S. labor movement. The union’s organizing campaign drew implicit support from U.S. President Joe Biden and lawmakers including Senator Bernie Sanders, who visited the warehouse.
U.S. labor law forbids companies from threatening to cut benefits or close facilities when workers support a union. The law also prohibits companies from spying on organizing activities or leaving employees with the impression they are under surveillance.
Still, employers such as Amazon have wide legal latitude to campaign aggressively, including by requiring employees to attend mandatory meetings that cast unions in a negative light. Amazon held such meetings, sent text messages to employees and even displayed campaign literature in at least one of the Alabama warehouse’s restroom stalls.

Source: Voice of America

NEW DELHI – The mountain kingdom of Bhutan has scripted a rare success story in the South Asian region devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic, reporting just two deaths, about 2,500 cases and inoculating 90% of its adult population in one of the world’s fastest inoculation campaigns.
Experts say mobilizing the community, meticulous planning by authorities and international donations of vaccines paved the way for the tiny country with limited resources to get a grip on the pandemic and emerge ahead of most nations.
When the coronavirus began ravaging countries last year, Bhutan offered financial incentives to people to augment its small pool of health workers and simultaneously called for volunteers.
Thousands stepped forward.
“Within a very short period of time the volunteer system crashed because there were so many people wanting to volunteer. And it was an amazing experience to see that instead of the incentives people were registering to volunteer, wanting to give something back to the community,” Dechen Wangmo, the country’s health minister, told VOA.
The country now has a roughly 30,000-strong force of citizens volunteers. Dressed in bright orange and known as “desuups,” they have boosted the efforts of some 350 doctors and 3,000 health workers. They have helped reinforce public health messages such as encouragement of wearing masks, and assisted in testing, surveillance and contact tracing among Bhutan’s approximately 750,000 people.
The first half a million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, donated by India, were administered in March during a 16-day campaign that was timed to coincide with auspicious dates suggested by Buddhist monks. Choosing the right time to roll out the vaccines helped build faith in the shot — Bhutan is a Buddhist country and is sometimes called the world’s last Shangri-la.
When New Delhi halted exports due to domestic shortages, Bhutan turned elsewhere. A batch of Moderna vaccines arrived in July from the COVAX program, an initiative to give vaccines to underdeveloped countries. Several other countries have also donated vaccines.
While some questions were raised on social media about inoculating people with two different vaccines, those issues were quickly laid to rest in a country known for its implicit faith in its Oxford-educated, 41-year-old constitutional monarch, King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk. Although he has turned the country from an absolute monarchy into a democratic, constitutional monarchy, he is still hugely popular.
The medical background of its leadership helped — Bhutan’s prime minister and foreign minister are doctors and health minister Wangmo is a Yale-educated epidemiologist.

Unlike many countries, vaccine hesitancy did not pose a problem — although Bhutan has few doctors, it has a strong primary health care system.
“There is a lot of trust and confidence in the health system and people do understand the benefits of vaccine, that vaccines prevent diseases and they have seen it for generations,” Wangmo said.
The second doses were administered to 90% of the adult population in a weeklong campaign that began July 20, the health ministry said. UNICEF officials called it the fastest vaccination campaign during the pandemic. While Bhutan’s small population made the task easier, it faced the challenge of reaching far-flung mountain areas, often across difficult terrain.
“If Bhutan can succeed in a monsoon with so few health workers to get almost the entire population vaccinated and then move to the children, maybe Bhutan can be a beacon of hope in a region that is on fire,” said Will Parks, UNICEF Representative in Bhutan.
Even as many countries scramble for vaccines for adults, Bhutan now plans to inoculate 12- to 17-year-olds. The goal, officials said, is to reach herd immunity or at least avert serious infections in a country with only one doctor trained in critical care.

Inoculations are not the only achievement. Unlike many countries, Bhutan opened schools earlier this year.
UNICEF’s Park and domestic media credit the leadership with astutely navigating the pandemic.
King Wangchuck has traveled to remote hamlets to alert people about the pandemic – by car, foot or horseback. When the transmissible delta variant tore through India earlier this year, he visited areas in the east and south that adjoin India, with which the country has a porous border.
Bhutanese officials say those visits reinforced the message of solidarity and were more effective than public health guidelines.
“The visits conveyed that it is time for everyone to fight the common enemy. He would give that moral confidence to people and assurance that we are in it together and we are all going to follow the same rules,” Wangmo said.
The king would follow the country’s strict quarantine rules after each trip.
Bhutan has shown that the COVID pandemic is not just about the virus, but also about leadership, according to Parks.
“If there are lessons to be learnt from Bhutan, it is about compassionate leadership that has to come from the top,” Parks said. “By compassionate leadership I mean having deep empathy, really walking in the shoes of others, and then actively making efforts to support people throughout this terrible, terrible pandemic.”

Source: Voice of America

TOKYO – Marcell Jacobs won the men’s Olympic 100-meter race Sunday night, crossing the line in 9.8 seconds to bring the marquee sprint gold to Italy for the first time.
Even in a race with no clear favorites, Jacobs was a surprise. He topped America’s Fred Kerley and Canada’s Andre DeGrasse to take the spot held for the past 13 years by the now-retired Usain Bolt.
Jacobs’ victory came on quite a night for Italy. Only a few minutes before his stunner, countryman Gianmarco Tamberi tied Qatari high jumper Mutaz Essa Barshim for gold in the high jump. Tamberi, writhing on the ground, kicking his feet up in jubilation needed someone to hug – and found him when Jacobs, of all people, crossed the line first.
Earlier, Yulimar Rojas of Venezuela broke a 26-year-old world record in the triple jump with a leap of 51 feet, 5 inches (15.67 meters).
The Jacobs victory left everyone outside Italy – and maybe some in the country, as well – letting out a collective “Who?”
He was born in El Paso, Texas – the son of an American father and an Italian mother.
He moved to Italy as a young boy when the U.S. military transferred his dad to South Korea. He was a long-jump specialist for years, and his biggest major success was an indoor 60-meter win at European champions. Now, he’s on the same list with Bolt — an Olympic sprint champion.
His path was made that much easier when American Trayvon Bromell, who came into Tokyo with the world’s leading time and as the odds-on favorite, didn’t even make the 100-meter final.
Bromell ran his semifinal heat in 9.996 seconds to finish third, and said “I’m not really sure what I could’ve done better, but the race went the way the race went.”
The day’s other gold medal went to Gong Lijao of China, who bested American Raven Saunders of the United States. Saunders, who is openly gay and wears an “Incredible Hulk” mask when she competes, closed out the medals ceremony by lifting her arms above her head and forming an “X” with her wrists.
“It’s the intersection of where all people who are oppressed meet,” she explained.

Source: Voice of America

Florida reported a record 21,683 COVID-19 cases on Saturday, making the Southeastern U.S. state the national epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
The state’s previous record was 19,334 cases reported on January 7, before vaccinations had become widely available, according to federal health data, The Associated Press reported.
Florida, with a population of nearly 21.5 million people, now accounts for about one-fifth of all new COVID-19 cases in the U.S., the CDC said. The state had reported about 17,000 new cases on Friday, the same day state Governor Ron DeSantis barred schools from requiring that students wear masks when they return to in-person classes in August.
AdventHealth, one of the state’s largest health care systems, said on Friday that its Central Florida Division would not perform nonemergency surgeries in an effort to conserve resources because of the increase in COVID-19 patients in the region.
Since the start of the pandemic, Florida has recorded 2.6 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 39,000 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.
Cruises return
The cruise ship industry, which is a big part of Florida’s tourism industry, was hit hard when the pandemic began in early 2020. On Saturday, the Carnival Cruise Line’s Mardi Gras ship was to set sail from Port Canaveral, Florida, the first ship since March 2020.
The ship, planning a seven-day voyage to the Caribbean, was running at just 70% of its normal 5,282-passenger capacity.
The pandemic forced cruise lines to suspend trips leaving from U.S. ports. Carnival Cruise Line is requiring — at least for its July and August voyages — that 95% of its passengers and crew be vaccinated, according to the AP.
A day earlier, Royal Caribbean announced that six passengers — four fully vaccinated adults and two unvaccinated minors — had tested positive for COVID-19. All six were Americans, Royal Caribbean spokesperson Lyan Sierra-Caro told the AP. She said the six, who were not all traveling together, had disembarked in Nassau, the Bahamas, after a seven-day cruise. Royal Caribbean planned to fly the six back to the U.S. on private transportation, Sierra-Caro said, according to the AP.

Florida also is home to several major theme parks, including Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando Resort and SeaWorld. On Saturday, Universal and SeaWorld began asking guests to wear masks indoors. Universal also is requiring employees to wear masks while indoors and to practice social distancing protocols.
“The health and safety of our guests and team members is always our top priority,” Universal said in a statement.
On Friday, the Walt Disney Co. started requiring employees and guests older than 2 to wear masks indoors and on Disney transportation and said it would be requiring all salaried and nonunion employees who work at its properties in the U.S. to be fully vaccinated. As of now, face coverings are not required outdoors at the parks.

Those Disney employees who are unvaccinated will have 60 days to receive the shots.
Across the country, the state of Arizona, in the U.S. Southwest, is dealing with a worsening outbreak caused by the delta variant of the coronavirus, as well as low vaccination rates in the state, health officials said.
“Unlike last summer when we were headed into school w/ declining rates, the match has been lit and the kindling is aflame this time,” Dr. Joe K. Gerald, a University of Arizona researcher who tracks COVID-19 data, said on Twitter, according to AP.
The state reported more than 2,000 new daily COVID-19 cases for the first time in nearly five months, according to an AP report. The number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients topped 1,000 for a third straight day as well, according to officials.
Arizona, with a population of 7.2 million, has reported 925,169 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 18,224 deaths since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins.
Vaccine distribution
The CDC also reported that as of Saturday, the U.S. had distributed 400.6 million vaccine doses and had administered 345.6 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, which include the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna and the one-dose Johnson & Johnson.
More than 190.8 million people had received at least one dose of the vaccine, while more than 164.4 million had been fully vaccinated as of Saturday.
As of Saturday, 197.7 million cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and 4.2 million deaths had been recorded globally, according to Johns Hopkins. The U.S. led the world in number of COVID-19 cases, with nearly 35 million, and related deaths, 613,113, according to the university.

Source: Voice of America

PARIS – Thousands of people protested France’s special virus pass by marching through Paris and other French cities on Saturday. Most demonstrations were peaceful but some in Paris clashed with riot police, who fired tear gas.
About 3,000 security forces deployed around the French capital for a third weekend of protests against the pass that will be needed soon to enter restaurants and other places. Paris police took up posts along the Champs-Elysees to guard the famed avenue.
With virus infections spiking and hospitalizations rising, French lawmakers have passed a bill requiring the pass in most places as of August 9. Polls show a majority of French support the pass, but some are adamantly opposed. The pass requires a vaccination or a quick negative test or proof of a recent recovery from COVID-19 and mandates vaccine shots for all health care workers by mid-September.
For anti-pass demonstrators, liberty was the slogan of the day.
Hager Ameur, a 37-year-old nurse, said she resigned from her job, accusing the government of using a form of blackmail.
“I think that we mustn’t be told what to do,” she told The Associated Press, adding that French medical workers during the first wave of COVID-19 were quite mistreated. “And now, suddenly we are told that if we don’t get vaccinated it is our fault that people are contaminated. I think it is sickening.”
Tensions flared in front of the famed Moulin Rouge nightclub in northern Paris during what appeared to be the largest demonstration. Lines of police faced down protesters in up-close confrontations during the march. Police used their fists on several occasions.

Tear gas, water cannon, injuries
As marchers headed eastward and some pelted police with objects, police fired tear gas into the crowds, and plumes of smoke filled the sky. A male protester was seen with a bleeding head and a police officer was carried away by colleagues. Three officers were injured, the French press quoted police as saying. Police, again responding to rowdy crowds, also turned a water cannon on protesters as the march ended at the Bastille.
A calmer march was led by the former top lieutenant of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who left to form his own small anti-EU party. But Florian Philippot’s new cause, against the virus pass, seems far more popular. His contingent of hundreds marched Saturday to the Health Ministry.
Among those not present this week was Francois Asselineau, leader of another tiny anti-EU party, the Popular Republican Union, and an ardent campaigner against the health pass, who came down with COVID-19. In a video on his party’s website, Asselineau, who was not hospitalized, called on people to denounce the “absurd, unjust and totally liberty-killing” health pass.
French authorities are implementing the health pass because the highly contagious delta variant is making strong inroads. More than 24,000 new daily cases were confirmed Friday night, compared with just a few thousand cases a day at the start of the month.
The government announcement that the health pass would take effect August 9 has driven many unvaccinated French to sign up for inoculations so their social lives won’t be shut down during the summer holiday season. Vaccinations are now available at a wide variety of places, including some beaches. More than 52% of the French population has been vaccinated.
About 112,000 people have died of the virus in France since the start of the pandemic.

Source: Voice of America

The WHO said Friday that Japan was doing its best to minimize the risk of Covid-19 spreading during the Tokyo Olympics but stressed there was no such thing as zero risk.
The World Health Organization’s warning came as Japan extended a virus state of emergency in Tokyo and expanded the measure to four more regions as it battles a record surge in infections a week into the pandemic-postponed Games.
“There is no zero risk. There could be less or more risk. And then, for things to happen with low risk, you try your best,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual press conference from the UN health agency’s Geneva headquarters.
Japan and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) “did their best to minimise risk, because nobody should expect zero risk”, he said.

“I know that they have done their best, and we have supported them all along.”
Across Japan, new virus cases topped 10,000 for the first time on Thursday, and a string of government officials and health experts have warned that the more contagious Delta variant is fuelling a dangerous surge.
Tedros went to the Olympics opening ceremony and also addressed the IOC in Tokyo.
On Friday he called on the world to draw on the Olympic spirit of unity to bring the pandemic to an end, and said his IOC speech was aimed at using the Games as the biggest platform to spread the message.
Morally ‘wrong path’
“Do you really accept 1.5% vaccination in Africa while in some countries it’s already 70%?” he said.
“Don’t we need a platform like the Olympics to go and tell the truth that the world is actually morally, epidemiologically and economically doing the wrong things?
“We are taking the wrong path and we need to use the spirit of the Olympics to correct it.”
He said the image of an Olympic torchbearer wearing a mask would remind the world of the pandemic for generations to come.
“It shows that we are doing this in very difficult conditions when we are taken hostage by a dangerous virus. But at the same time, it shows me the determination to fight back.”
WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan said the Games organisers and the IOC had comprehensive risk management measures in place, with strong surveillance, regular testing of athletes and delegates, and the use of quarantine and isolation.
“The true drivers of this pandemic are not within the Olympic Games; they’re really related to the deep inequities we have in the distribution and availability of vaccines,” Ryan said.
He said the Olympics were founded on fair play and Tedros’s trip to Tokyo was to urge the world to do likewise with regard to the distribution of vaccines to combat Covid-19, which is hitting some countries “very unjustly and very unfairly”.

Source: Voice of America