Category: General

When Emmanuel Obeng-Dankwa is worried about making rent on his New York City apartment, he sometimes holds off on filling his blood pressure medication.

“If there’s no money, I prefer to skip the medication to being homeless,” said Obeng-Dankwa, a 58-year-old security guard.

He is among a majority of adults in the U.S. who say that health care is not handled well in the country, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The poll reveals that public satisfaction with the U.S. health care system is remarkably low, with fewer than half of Americans saying it is generally handled well. Only 12% say it is handled extremely or very well. Americans have similar views about health care for older adults.

Overall, the public gives even lower marks for how prescription drug costs, the quality of care at nursing homes and mental health care are being handled, with just 6% or less saying those health services are done very well in the country.

“Navigating the American health care system is exceedingly frustrating,” said A. Mark Fendrick, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Value-Based Insurance Design. “The COVID pandemic has only made it worse.”

More than two years after the pandemic’s start, health care worker burnout and staffing shortages are plaguing hospitals around the country. And Americans are still having trouble getting in-person medical care after health centers introduced restrictions as COVID-19 killed and sickened millions of people around the country, Fendrick said.

In fact, the poll shows an overwhelming majority of Americans, nearly 8 in 10, say they are at least moderately concerned about getting access to quality health care when they need it.

Black and Hispanic adults in particular are resoundingly worried about health care access, with nearly 6 in 10 saying they are very or extremely concerned about getting good care. Fewer than half of white adults, 44%, expressed the same level of worry.

Racial disparities have long troubled America’s health care system. They have been abundantly clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, with Black and Hispanic people dying disproportionately from the virus. Black and Hispanic men also make up a disproportionately high rate of recent monkeypox infections.

Fifty-three percent of women said they are extremely or very concerned about obtaining quality care, compared to 42% of men.

While Americans are united in their dissatisfaction with the health care system, that agreement dissolves when it comes to solutions to fix it.

About two-thirds of adults think it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage, with adults ages 18 to 49 more likely than those over 50 to hold that view. The percentage of people who believe health care coverage is a government responsibility has risen in recent years, ticking up from 57% in 2019 and 62% in 2017.

Still, there’s not consensus on how that coverage might be delivered.

About 4 in 10 Americans say they support a single-payer health care system that would require Americans to get their health insurance from a government plan. More, 58%, say they favor a government health insurance plan that anyone can purchase.

There also is broad support for policies that would help Americans pay for the costs of long-term care, including a government-administered insurance plan similar to Medicare, the federal government’s health insurance for people 65 or older.

Retired nurse Pennie Wright, of Camden, Tennessee, doesn’t like the idea of a government-run health care system.

After switching to Medicare this year, she was surprised to walk out of her annual well-woman visit, once fully covered by her private insurance plan, with a $200 bill.

She prefers the flexibility she had on her private insurance plan.

“I feel like we have the best health care system in the world, we have a choice of where we want to go,” Wright said.

A majority of Americans, roughly two-thirds, were happy to see the government step in to provide free COVID-19 testing, vaccines and treatment. Roughly 2 in 10 were neutral about the government’s response.

The government’s funding for free COVID-19 tests dried up at the beginning of the month. And while the White House says the latest batch of recommended COVID-19 boosters will be free to anyone who wants one, it doesn’t have money on hand to buy any future rounds of booster shots for every American.

Eighty percent say they support the federal government negotiating for lower drug prices. President Joe Biden this summer signed a landmark bill into law allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs. The move is expected to save taxpayers as much as $100 billion over the next decade.

“Medication costs should be low, to the minimum so that everyone can afford it,” said Obeng-Dankwa, the Bronx renter who has trouble paying for his medication. “Those who are poor should be able to get all the necessary health they need, in the same way someone who also has the money to pay for it.”

Source: Voice Of America

In an executive order signed Monday, President Joe Biden announced steps by his administration to bolster the “bioeconomy” in the United States, a classification that covers research and development across a broad swath of products, including medical supplies, sustainable new fuels and food, as well as technologies meant to help fight climate change.

The order comes barely a month after Biden signed a major piece of legislation, the CHIPS Act, meant to supercharge U.S. manufacturing of semiconductors, an area in which the U.S. has lost its once-dominant global position.

The effort to boost the U.S. biotech sector further underscores the administration’s apparent belief that deeper engagement by the federal government with domestic manufacturing operations is necessary to preserve U.S. competitiveness in the global economy.

In a briefing over the weekend, administration officials made it clear that the administration’s push to bring more U.S.-based biotechnology manufacturing online comes as a response to other countries — particularly China — investing heavily in the sector.

Administration officials stressed that biotechnology-based products and “biomanufacturing” present a promising alternative to many current products — fuel, plastics and other materials — that are currently made using the byproducts of carbon-laden petrochemicals.

Order text

The executive order reads, in part, “It is the policy of my Administration to coordinate a whole-of-government approach to advance biotechnology and biomanufacturing towards innovative solutions in health, climate change, energy, food security, agriculture, supply chain resilience, and national and economic security.”

It continues, “Central to this policy and its outcomes are principles of equity, ethics, safety, and security that enable access to technologies, processes, and products in a manner that benefits all Americans and the global community and that maintains United States technological leadership and economic competitiveness.”

Caution urged

Among the Biden administration’s promises in the executive order is a vow to “substitute fragile supply chains from abroad with strong chains at home.” But not everyone agrees that a government effort to manipulate the supply chain is the smartest strategy for the long run.

“Government can play a role in funding basic research, university labs and the rest, but when it starts micromanaging supply chains, you end up with more fragile supply chains than robust ones,” Scott Lincicome, a director for general economics and trade at the Libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, told VOA.

Similarly, he said, government decisions to privilege “onshore” production over foreign producers can be dangerous.

“There’s nothing wrong with domestic manufacturing, but as we’ve learned throughout the pandemic, there’s a big problem with putting all of your eggs in one basket, either all foreign or all domestic,” Lincicome said.

“While onshoring can insulate you from foreign shocks, it makes you far more vulnerable to domestic shocks,” he added. “And in the process, it makes you poorer and weaker overall. The best approach is to have a very open, diverse global supply chain with domestic networks, foreign suppliers, and a very light government touch on trade, investment, talent and the rest.”

Multiple aims

The executive order lays out a number of areas in which the Biden administration plans to flex the federal government’s muscle, including the domestic manufacturing of biotechnology products. The aim is to encourage both the creation of domestic manufacturing facilities, as well as the supply chains of fuel and raw materials needed to operate them.

The administration also promises to help create markets for biotechnology products by increasing mandatory purchasing requirements for federal agencies.

In addition, the executive order proposes to push more funding into research and development and to provide innovators support in the form of federal data that helps identify unmet needs. Other efforts will include job training programs, streamlined regulatory approval of new products, and cooperative programs with international partners.

Mending fences

The administration’s push to help U.S. biotechnology firms could go some way toward mending fences with the industry, which was angered by elements of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Biden recently signed into law.

The IRA, for the first time, allows Medicare, the government health insurance program for senior citizens, to bargain with pharmaceutical firms over the prices of some prescription drugs. Many in the industry strongly opposed the measure, claiming it would reduce incentives to innovate.

The executive order comes less than a week after the Biotechnology Innovation Organization sent a letter to the administration requesting it to “take additional steps to foster the development and deployment of pioneering technologies that will further reduce greenhouse gas emissions in manufacturing, transportation, and agricultural supply chains to build a stronger, more resilient, and environmentally sustainable economy.”

Biden signed the order before traveling to Boston, where he was scheduled to tout the results of the infrastructure bill he signed last year, which pumped federal money into a wide array of construction projects.

Also on Monday, Biden named Renee Wegrzyn, a biotechnology executive, to head the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. The announcement came as part of a discussion of Biden’s “moonshot” initiative to drive new research on treatments for cancer.

Source: Voice Of America

A global search for alternative sources to Russian energy in light of the war in Ukraine has refocused attention on smaller, easier-to-build nuclear power stations, which proponents say could provide a cheaper, more efficient alternative to older model mega-plants.

U.K.-based Rolls-Royce SMR says its small modular reactors, or SMRs, are much cheaper and quicker to get running than standard plants, delivering the kind of energy security that many nations are seeking. France already relies on nuclear power for a majority of its electricity, and Germany kept the option of reactivating two nuclear plants it will shut down at the end of the year as Russia cuts natural gas supplies.

While Rolls-Royce SMR and its competitors have signed deals with countries from Britain to Poland to start building the stations, they are many years away from operating and cannot solve the energy crisis now hitting Europe.

Nuclear power also poses risks, including disposing of highly radioactive waste and keeping that technology out of the hands of rogue countries or nefarious groups that may pursue a nuclear weapons program.

Those risks have been accentuated following the shelling around Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, which has raised fears of potential nuclear disaster.

In the wake of the war, however, “the reliance on gas imports and Russian energy sources has focused people’s minds on energy security,” Rolls-Royce SMR spokesman Dan Gould said.

An SMR’s components can be built in a factory, moved to a site in tractor trailers and assembled there, making the technology more attractive to frugal buyers, he said.

“It’s like building Lego,” Gould said. “Building on a smaller scale reduces risks and makes it a more investible project.”

SMRs are essentially pressurized water reactors identical to some 400 reactors worldwide. The key advantages are their size — about one-tenth as big as a standard reactor — the ease of construction and the price tag.

The estimated cost of a Rolls-Royce SMR is $2.5 billion to $3.2 billion, with an estimated construction time of 5 1/2 years. That’s two years faster than it took to build a standard nuclear plant between 2016 and 2021, according to International Atomic Energy Agency statistics. Some estimates put the cost of building a 1,100-megawatt nuclear plant at between $6 billion and $9 billion.

Rolls-Royce aims to build its first stations in the U.K. within 5 1/2 years, Gould said. Similarly, Oklahoma-based NuScale Power signed agreements last year with two Polish companies — copper and silver producer KGHM and energy producer UNIMOT — to explore the possibility of building SMRs to power heavy industry. Poland wants to switch from polluting, coal-powered electricity generation.

Rolls-Royce SMR said last month that it signed a deal with Dutch development company ULC-Energy to look into setting up SMRs in the Netherlands.

Another partner is Turkey, where Russia is building the Akkuyu nuclear power plant on the southern coast. Environmentalists say the region is seismically active and could be a target for terrorists.

The introduction of “unproven” nuclear power technology in the form of SMRs doesn’t sit well with environmentalists, who argue that proliferation of small reactors will exacerbate the problem of how to dispose of highly radioactive nuclear waste.

“Unfortunately, Turkey is governed by an incompetent administration that has turned it into a ‘test bed’ for corporations,” said Koray Dogan Urbarli, a spokesman for Turkey’s Green Party.

“It is giving up the sovereignty of a certain region for at least 100 years for Russia to build a nuclear power plant. This incompetence and lobbying power make Turkey an easy target for SMRs,” said Koray, adding that his party eschews technology with an “uncertain future.”

Gould said one Rolls-Royce SMR would generate nuclear waste the size of a “tennis court piled 1-meter high” throughout the plant’s 60-year lifetime. He said initially, waste would be stored on site at the U.K. plants and would eventually be transferred to a long-term disposal site selected by the British government.

M.V. Ramana, professor of public policy and global affairs at the University of British Columbia, cites research suggesting there’s “no demonstrated way” to ensure nuclear waste stored in what authorities consider to be secure sites won’t escape in the future.

The constant heat generated by the waste could alter rock formations where it’s stored and allow water seepage, while future mining activities could compromise a nuclear waste site’s integrity, said Ramana, who specializes in international security and nuclear energy.

Skeptics also raise the risks of possibly exporting such technology in politically tumultuous regions. Gould said Rolls-Royce is “completely compliant” with U.K. and international requirements in exporting its SMR technology “only in territories that are signatories to the necessary international treaties for the peaceful use of nuclear power for energy generation.”

Ramana said, however, there’s no guarantee nations will follow the rules.

“Any country acquiring nuclear reactors automatically enhances its capacity to make nuclear weapons,” he said, adding that every SMR could produce “around 10 bombs worth of plutonium each year.”

Rolls-Royce SMR could opt to stop supplying fuel and other services to anyone flouting the rules, but “should any country choose to do so, it can simply tell the International Atomic Energy Agency to stop inspections, as Iran has done, for example,” Ramana said.

Although spent fuel normally undergoes chemical reprocessing to generate the kind of plutonium used in nuclear weapons, Ramana said such reprocessing technology is widely known and that a very sophisticated reprocessing plant isn’t required to produce the amount of plutonium needed for weapons.

Source: Voice of America

Voice-operated smartphones are aiming at a vast yet widely overlooked market in sub-Saharan Africa — the tens of millions of people who face huge challenges in life because they cannot read or write.

In Ivory Coast, a so-called "Superphone" using a vocal assistant that responds to commands in a local language is being pitched to the large segment of the population — as many as 40 percent — who are illiterate.

Developed and assembled locally, the phone is designed to make everyday tasks more accessible, from understanding a document and checking a bank balance to communicating with government agencies.

"I've just bought this phone for my parents back home in the village, who don't know how to read or write," said Floride Jogbe, a young woman who was impressed by adverts on social media.

She believed the 60,000 CFA francs ($92) she forked out was money well spent.

The smartphone uses an operating system called "Kone" that is unique to the Cerco company, and covers 17 languages spoken in Ivory Coast, including Baoule, Bete, and Dioula, as well as 50 other African languages.

Cerco hopes to expand this to 1,000 languages, reaching half of the continent's population, thanks to help from a network of 3,000 volunteers.

The goal is to address the "frustration" illiterate people feel with technology that requires them to be able to read or write or spell effectively, said Cerco president Alain Capo-Chichi, a Benin national.

"Various institutions set down the priority of making people literate before making technology available to them," he told AFP.

"Our way skips reading and writing and goes straight to integrating people into economic and social life."

Of the 750 million adults around the world who cannot read or write, 27 percent live south of the Sahara, according to UN figures for 2016, the latest year for which data is available.

The continent also hosts nearly 2,000 languages, some of which are spoken by tens of millions of people and are used for inter-ethnic communication, while others are dialects with a small geographical spread.

Lack of numbers or economic clout often means these languages are overlooked by developers who have already devised vocal assistants for languages in bigger markets.

Twi and Kiswahili

Other companies investing in the voice-operation field in Africa include Mobobi, which has created a Twi language voice assistant in Ghana called Abena AI, while Mozilla is working on an assistant in Kiswahili, which has an estimated 100 million speakers in East Africa.

Telecommunications expert Jean-Marie Akepo questioned whether voice operation needed the platform of a dedicated mobile phone.

Existing technology "manages to satisfy people", he said.

"With the voice message services offered by WhatsApp, for example, a large part of the problem has already been solved."

Instead of a new phone, he recommended "software with local languages that could be installed on any smartphone".

The Ivorian phone is being produced at the ICT and Biotechnology Village in Grand-Bassam, a free-trade zone located near the Ivorian capital.

It came about through close collaboration with the government. The company pays no taxes or customs duties and the assembly plant has benefited from a subsidy of more than two billion CFA francs.

In exchange, Cerco is to pay 3.5 percent of its income to the state and train around 1,200 young people each year.

The company says it has received 200,000 orders since launch on July 21.

Thanks to a partnership with French telecommunications giant Orange, the phone will be distributed in 200 shops across Ivory Coast.

Source: Voice of America

Californians tried to weather the extremes of a changing climate Friday, as a punishing heat wave that has helped fuel deadly wildfires had the state teetering on the edge of blackouts for a 10th consecutive day while a tropical storm barreled ashore with the promise of cooler temperatures but also possible flooding.

The abrupt swing in conditions even whipsawed weather junkies.

"This is perhaps the singularly most unusual and extreme weather week in quite some time in California — and that is saying something. Whew," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles wrote on his Western weather blog.

While the rains may be welcome in the drought-plagued state and will bring relief with more normal temperatures, deluges and more brutal heat waves are forecast to become regular fixtures as climate change warms the planet and weather-related disasters become more extreme.

"We'll see these heat waves continue to get hotter and hotter, longer and longer, more wildfire-plagued," said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. "The odds of really intense precipitation are going up. And so that's why we are worried about flooding associated with this remnant hurricane."

California is just the latest casualty in a year of sometimes deadly heat waves that began in Pakistan and India this spring and swept across parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including China, Europe and other areas of the U.S.

Climate change also has exacerbated droughts, dried up rivers, made wildfires more intense and — conversely — led to massive flooding around the globe as moisture evaporating from land and water is held in the atmosphere and then redeposited by intense rains.

Scientists are reluctant to attribute any specific weather event, such as Hurricane Kay, now downgraded to a tropical storm as it heads into California, to global warming. But they say heat waves are exactly the type of change that will become more common.

The so-called heat dome that cooked California was stuck in place by an exceptional high-pressure region over Greenland, of all places, that essentially created a meteorological traffic jam, said Paul Ullrich, a professor of regional climate modeling at the University of California, Davis. That prevented the high-pressure system that was forcing hot air over California from moving along.

A marquee outside a former theater in Los Angeles' Chinatown said: "Satan called. He wants his weather back."

Record high temperatures

Temperatures hit an all-time high in Sacramento of 46.7 Celsius on Tuesday. Many other locations hit record highs for September, and even more set daily high marks.

The heat that colored weather maps dark red for more than a week in California is only a preview of coming attractions.

Sacramento, the state capital, has about 10 "extreme heat" days per year, and that will double again by the middle of the century. In the 1970s, the city had five, Ullrich said.

"That's pretty much going to be the story for much of the Central Valley and much of Southern California," Ullrich said. "This kind of exponential growth in the number of extreme heat days. If you tie those all together, then you end up with heat waves like we've experienced."

For nine days through Thursday, the vast energy network that includes power plants, solar farms and a web of transmission lines strained under record-setting demand driven by air conditioners.

"If we're going to build a statue to anybody in the West, it will be a Willis Carrier," said Bill Patzert, retired climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, about the inventor of the air conditioner. "Really large areas of Southern California would essentially be unlivable without air conditioning."

Threat of power outages

Air conditioning puts the biggest strain on power sources during a heat wave, and operators of the electrical grid called for conservation and warned of the threat of power outages as usage hit an all-time high Tuesday, surpassing a record set in 2006.

The state may have averted a repeat of the rolling outages two summers ago by sending a first-ever text alert that blared on 27 million phones, urging Californians to "take action" and turn off nonessential power. Enough turned up thermostats, turned off lights or pulled the plug on appliances to avoid power cuts, though thousands of customers did lose power at various times for other reasons.

The West is in the throes of a 23-year megadrought that has nearly drained reservoirs and put water supplies in jeopardy. That, in turn, led to a sharp decrease in the hydropower that California relies on when power is in peak demand.

"Part of the country that's getting hit worst is the Southwest and western United States," Overpeck said. "It is a global poster child for the climate crisis. And this year, this summer, it's really the Northern Hemisphere [that] has been just an unusually hot and wildfire-plagued hemisphere."

The extreme heat helped fuel deadly wildfires at both ends of the state as flames fed on grass, brush and timber already "preconditioned to burn" by drought and then pushed over the edge by the heat wave, Overpeck said.

Firefighters struggled to control major wildfires in Southern California and the Sierra Nevada that exploded in growth, forced thousands to evacuate, and produced smoke that could interfere with solar power and further hamper electricity supplies.

Two people were killed in the fire that erupted last Friday in the Northern California community of Weed at the base of Mount Shasta. Two others died trying to flee in their car from a fire in Riverside County that was threatening 18,000 homes.

What remains of the hurricane is expected to bring heavy rains and even flash floods to Southern California from Friday night through Saturday. Strong winds could initially make it difficult and dangerous for firefighters trying to corral blazes, Patzert said.

Heavy downpours could also unleash mudslides on mountainsides charred by recent fires. While several inches of rain could fall, much of it will run off the arid landscape and will not make a dent in the drought.

"It comes at you like a firehose, and you're trying to fill your champagne glass," Patzert said. "Everybody's sort of excited, but on Saturday night, a lot of people will be saying, 'Yeah, we could have done without that.'"

Source: Voice of America

Bernard Shaw, former CNN anchor and a pioneering Black journalist remembered for his blunt question at a presidential debate and calmly reporting the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991 from Baghdad as it was under attack, has died. He was 82.

He died of pneumonia, unrelated to COVID-19, on Wednesday at a hospital in Washington, according to Tom Johnson, CNN's former chief executive.

A former CBS and ABC newsman, Shaw took a chance and accepted an offer to become CNN's chief anchor at its launch in 1980. He later reported before a camera hurriedly set up in a newsroom after the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Regan.

He retired at age 61 in 2001.

As moderator of a 1988 presidential debate between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, he asked the Democrat — a death penalty opponent — whether he would support that penalty for someone found guilty of raping and murdering Dukakis' wife Kitty.

Dukakis' coolly technocratic response was widely seen as damaging to his campaign, and Shaw said later he got a flood of hate mail for asking it.

“Since when did a question hurt a politician?” Shaw said in an interview aired by CSPAN in 2001. “It wasn't the question. It was the answer.”

Shaw memorably reported, with correspondents Peter Arnett and John Holliman, from a hotel room in Baghdad as CNN aired stunning footage of airstrikes and anti-aircraft fire at the beginning of U.S. invasion to liberate Kuwait.

“I've never been there,” he said that night, “but this feels like we're in the center of hell.”

The reports were crucial in establishing CNN when it was the only cable news network and broadcasters ABC, CBS and NBC dominated television news. “He put CNN on the map,” said Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief and now a professor at George Washington University.

Shaw, who grew up in Chicago wanting to be a journalist and admiring legendary CBS newsmen Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, recognized it as a key moment.

“In all of the years of preparing to being anchor, one of the things I strove for was to be able to control my emotions in the midst of hell breaking out,” Shaw said in a 2014 interview with NPR. “And I personally feel that I passed my stringent test for that in Baghdad.”

Shaw covered the demonstrations in China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, signing off as authorities told CNN to stop its telecast. While at ABC, he was one of the first reporters on the scene of the 1978 Jonestown massacre.

On Twitter, CNN’s John King paid tribute to Shaw’s “soft-spoken yet booming voice” and said he was a mentor and role model to many.

“Bernard Shaw exemplified excellence in his life,” Johnson said. “He will be remembered as a fierce advocate of responsible journalism.”

CNN’s current chief executive, Chris Licht, paid tribute to Shaw as a CNN original who made appearances on the network as recently as last year to provide commentary.

So guarded against any appearance of bias that he didn't vote, Shaw asked tough questions of several politicians. He asked George H.W. Bush's pick for vice president, Dan Quayle, if “fear of being killed in Vietnam” led to Quayle joining the National Guard in 1969.

As a member of the U.S. Marines, Shaw angled for a meeting with one of his heroes, Cronkite, in Hawaii in 1961.

“He was the most persistent guy I've ever met in my life,” the late Cronkite told the Washington Post in 1991. “I was going to give him five begrudging minutes and ended up talking to him for a half hour. He was just determined to be a journalist.”

He got a radio job in Chicago, where an early assignment was covering an appearance by Martin Luther King. Shaw recalled for CNN King telling him, “one day you're going to make it. Just do some good.”

In retiring at a relatively young age, Shaw acknowledged the toll on his personal life that went with being a successful journalist. Because of all the things he missed with his family while working, he told NPR that “I don't think it was worth it.”

His funeral will be private, with a public memorial planned for later, Johnson said. He is survived by his wife, Linda, and two children.

Source: Voice of America

A new malaria vaccine developed by Britain's University of Oxford is 80% effective in preventing infection, according to trial results published Thursday in The Lancet medical journal. Scientists say it represents a huge breakthrough that has the potential to save millions of lives and eventually eradicate the disease.

The vaccine, named R21/Matrix-M, had already shown encouraging trial results after three primary doses. Maintaining that immunity has always been a big challenge and the latest trial shows that a booster dose is effective, explained Professor Adrian Hill, the director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford and co-author of The Lancet paper.

"The technology has been complex to develop because we need very strong antibody responses to get protection against malaria and those antibodies, like all responses, decline over time," Hill told VOA.

"One of the worries was that this would be short-term protection and only last for a few months. That's definitely not the case with the data we're releasing today," Hill said. "And indeed, 80% efficacy in the second year of follow up after a booster dose is really very encouraging in that respect."

The latest phase II trial involved 450 children between 5 and 17 months old, recruited from the Nanoro region in Burkina Faso. The results show a higher strength booster dose was 80% effective in preventing malaria infection. No serious side effects were seen.

"This is a parasite we're trying to vaccinate against. It's not a virus. It's got thousands of genes. [So it's] complex to design a vaccine," Hill said. "Over 100 have been in clinical trials and this looks like the best data so far. So we're excited."

The Serum Institute of India, which has produced billions of doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, is producing the R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine. It has signed an agreement to rapidly scale up production if the vaccine receives World Health Organization (WHO) approval in coming months.

"We're trying to do something similar with malaria, to produce a low-cost vaccine — a few dollars a dose — and to manufacture that really upscale so we can get 100 million doses or more out there as soon as possible," Hill told VOA.

Malaria killed an estimated 627,000 people in 2020, the most recent available data. The majority are children under five years old in sub-Saharan Africa.

The WHO approved the first-ever malaria vaccine in October of last year, called RTS,S. But R21 may offer even greater hope, said Hill.

"A vaccine with high efficacy like this should be able to save hundreds of thousands of lives a year and ultimately millions of lives over the next decade or so," he said. "After we get a vaccine rolled out for that very vulnerable population, we'll be looking at a travelers' vaccine and then we'll be looking at a vaccine that could actually eliminate regionally and eradicate globally this terrible disease."

Results from the ongoing phase III trial involving 4,800 children are due later this year and it's hoped that mass production and rollout can begin in 2023, following WHO approval.

Source: Voice of America

Companies that accept U.S. funding under a plan to build up America's computer chip-making capacity will be barred from establishing advanced fabrication facilities in China for 10 years, the administration of President Joe Biden announced this week.

The Commerce Department rolled out its plan to distribute $50 billion provided by the CHIPS Act, which Biden signed into law last month. In an appearance at the White House on Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the rules include specific language on transferring technology to China.

"Companies who receive CHIP funds can't build leading-edge or advanced technology facilities in China for a period of 10 years," she said. "Companies who receive the money can only expand their mature node factories in China to serve the Chinese market."

Mature node factories refer to semiconductor fabrication facilities that only produce older technology that is already widely available.

Raimondo reminded her audience of the semiconductor supply shortage during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying, "We saw the impact of the chip shortage on American families when car prices drove a third of inflation because of lack of chips, factory workers were furloughed, household appliances were often unavailable, all because of a lack of semiconductors."

"With this funding, we're going to make sure that the United States is never again in a position where our national security interests are compromised or key industries are immobilized due to our inability to produce essential semiconductors here at home," she said.

Low US capacity

The CHIPS Act is a response not just to the computer chip shortage that snarled global supply chains during the pandemic but also to the perceived national security threat that a lack of domestic semiconductor manufacturing presents.

According to the Commerce Department, the U.S. consumes 25% of the world's most advanced computer chips but does not produce any of them. As for less advanced chips, the U.S. consumes 30% but manufactures only 13%.

Because advanced chips are used not only in consumer goods but in weapons systems and other technology important to national security, the federal government worries that global adversaries could choke off supply in the event of a conflict.

For example, a large percentage of the chips the U.S. imports come from Taiwan, which has come under increasingly serious threat from China, whose government claims the island nation as part of its country.

'Unusual' policy

James A. Lewis, senior vice president and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told VOA that the 10-year time limit is "an unusual" policy for the U.S., and it probably represents an effort to find middle ground between technology companies and China hawks in the federal government.

"I can't think of any other case where we've put a time limit like that. ... It's not how we usually do things internationally," he said.

The Commerce Department, Lewis said, found itself between technology companies reluctant to be completely cut off from one of the world's largest markets on one side, and Congress and the White House on the other. Lawmakers and President Biden are both eager to prevent China from producing cutting-edge semiconductors.

Technology restrictions not new

Although a decade-long ban on the manufacture of advanced semiconductor technology in China may be stricter than expected, U.S. companies are used to facing restrictions on the export of critical technology.

"U.S. companies will follow U.S. law. They will continue to sell chips to Chinese buyers in accordance with existing law," Doug Barry, a vice president with the U.S.-China Business Council, told VOA in an email exchange. "They have long been required to apply for export licenses to sell certain kinds of chips and have halted sales to specific China entities when U.S. law required them to do so."

Barry said that his organization's members "support the policies of a strong indigenous semiconductor industry and robust national security."

He added: "The key for preserving U.S. competitiveness in important technologies is to narrow the scope of export and investment controls, and to consult regularly with the business community to avoid unintended policy consequences."

Chinese embassy responds

In a reply to a query from VOA, the Chinese embassy in Washington emailed a response to the measure from spokesperson Liu Pengyu.

"The Chinese side opposes the relevant Act's intervention in and restriction on economic, trade and investment cooperation of the global business community," Liu said. "The Act which includes terms limiting relevant companies' normal investment and trade in China and normal China-U.S/ sci-tech cooperation. It would distort the global semiconductor supply chains and disrupt international trade. China is firmly against that."

In conclusion, Liu said, "The U.S. politicizes, instrumentalizes and weaponizes tech and trade issues, and engages in tech blockade and decoupling in an attempt to monopolize the world's advanced technologies, perpetuate its hegemony in the sci-tech sector, and damage the closely-knit global industrial and supply chains. Such moves would hurt others without benefiting oneself."

A bifurcated future

Lewis, of CSIS, said the 10-year ban strengthens the possibility that China will simply go its own way, investing in the capacity to produce its own technology, perhaps to standards that would not be compatible with Western technology.

Were it to do so, it might find willing customers in countries such as Russia and Iran, which find themselves on the receiving end of U.S.-backed sanctions. China might also begin to compete with the U.S. in other markets.

"If nothing changes, by 2030 we'll see a bifurcated system," Lewis said. "It's a new kind of competition. There'll be Chinese stuff made on Chinese standards that they'll want to sell to the global market. And there will be Western stuff made on Western standards that they'll want to sell to the global market."

Source: Voice of America

Apple on Wednesday avoided price hikes of its best-selling iPhones during its biggest product launch of the year, focusing on safety upgrades rather than flashy new technical specs, with the exception of a new adventure-focused watch.

The iPhone maker leaned into safety technologies, like the ability to detect a car accident and summon a rescue from a remote mountaintop, to add allure to its devices. Apple positioned itself as the brand to allow users to pursue excitement and adventure — with a safety net.

Such intangible features "are the things that make you not just want the products for yourself, but also for loved ones," said Ben Bajarin, head of consumer technologies at Creative Strategies. "Ultimately, the increased emphasis on safety — safety as a service — is super interesting as a value proposition."

The iPhone lineup that generates half of Apple's sales got tweaks to cameras and battery life, though only the iPhone Pro lineup got an upgrade to a completely new processor chip.

Prices of the high-end iPhone 14s are the same as last year's iPhone 13 models. But Apple dropped its cheapest option, the iPhone Mini, meaning its lowest-priced model now costs $100 more than last year.

The iPhone 14 will start at $799 and the iPhone 14 Plus at $899 and be available for preorder starting Friday. The iPhone Pro will cost $999 and the iPhone Pro Max $1,099 and be available September 16.

"They decided to essentially maintain pricing despite inflationary pressure," said D.A. Davidson analyst Tom Forte.

Nintendo and T-Mobile have also said they will hold off on price increases.

Satellite SOS feature

Apple said its satellite SOS feature will work with emergency responders. It also said that users will be able to use its FindMy app to share their location via satellite when they have no other connectivity.

The service will be free for two years with the iPhone 14. Apple did not say what would happen after that period.

Shares in Globalstar jumped 20% on Wednesday after the satellite services firm announced it would be the satellite operator for Apple's emergency SOS service.

The Cupertino, California-based company also showed a trio of new Apple Watches, including a new Watch Ultra model aimed at extreme sports and diving and designed to challenge sports watch specialists such as Garmin and Polar.

On the watch front, the $799 Ultra has a bigger battery to last through events like triathlons and better waterproofing and temperature resistance to operate in outdoor environments, as well as better GPS tracking for sports.

All of the watches, which include a Series 8 priced the same as last year and an updated, cheaper SE model, and new iPhones will have the ability to detect when a user has been in a serious car crash and call emergency services.

Ovulation detection

The new Series 8 watch has a temperature sensor that will retroactively detect ovulation. The company emphasized the privacy approach of its cycle tracking. Privacy and reproductive health data have become a focus for tech companies in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended a constitutional right to abortion in the United States.

But while accessories like the Apple Watch have driven incremental sales from Apple's existing user base, the iPhone remains the bedrock of its business with 52.4% of sales in its most recent fiscal year, and investors continue to wonder what, if anything, will be the company's next major product category.

Analysts expect that category to be a mixed reality headset that could come to market as soon as next year, but Apple gave no hints at those potential products on Wednesday.

Source: Voice of America