Category: Key Issues

An international group of vaccine experts have come out in opposition of providing booster shots of COVID-19 vaccines to the general population, an opinion that pushes back against increasing efforts in the United States and other nations battling a surge of new cases.

In an essay published Monday in The Lancet medical journal, the experts say recent studies show the current vaccines in use around the world continue to provide strong protection against the virus despite the presence of the more contagious delta variant, especially against severe illness and hospitalization.

The trend to provide booster shots of COVID-19 vaccines began after studies out of Israel suggested the two-dose Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness had significantly decreased among elderly people who were inoculated at the beginning of this year. The data prompted Israel to begin administering booster shots to people 50 years of age or older.

The authors suggest that modifying the vaccines to match the specific COVID-19 variants is a better approach than providing extra doses of the original vaccine.

The authors include two leading scientists with the World Health Organization, Ana-Maria Henao-Restrepo and Soumya Swaminathan, and Dr. Marian Gruber and Dr. Philip Krause, two key officials in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine review office who are leaving their posts before the end of the year. The New York Times recently reported that Gruber and Krause are upset over the Biden administration’s recent announcement that booster shots would be offered for some Americans beginning next month, well before the FDA had time to properly review the data.

The FDA is nearing a decision on whether to recommend COVID-19 vaccines for children under 12 years of age and booster shots of the current vaccines already approved for adult Americans.

Both the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month recommended a third shot of Pfizer or Moderna for some people with weakened immune systems.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, recently implored wealthy nations to forgo COVID-19 vaccine booster shots for the rest of the year to ensure that low- and lower-middle-income countries have more access to the vaccine. Tedros had previously asked high and upper-middle income nations not to provide boosters until September.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to announce Wednesday that the government will provide COVID-19 vaccine booster shots for citizens 50 years of age and older in time for the upcoming winter months.

Putin self-isolating

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin is self-isolating after several members of his entourage tested positive for COVID-19, according to a statement by the Kremlin.

President Putin has tested negative for the virus, but has decided not to travel to Tajikistan for upcoming security conferences, the statement added. He met Monday with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and held a separate public event with several members of Russia’s Paralympic team.

Putin has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 with the domestically-developed two-dose Sputnik V vaccine.

Source: Voice of America

WASHINGTON - Four people are set to become the world’s first all-civilian crew to fly into Earth orbit when they blast off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Wednesday as space tourism takes its biggest leap yet.

Weather conditions are 70% favorable for Wednesday night’s scheduled launch of Americans Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Chris Sembroski and Sian Proctor from the U.S. spaceport’s historic Launch Pad 39A, which was used for the Apollo moon missions during the 1960s and 70s.

The four-member crew will fly into space aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft built by SpaceX, the privately-run company which has begun sending astronauts to the International Space Station. The fully automated Crew Dragon spacecraft will take the crew to an altitude of 575 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, just above the current positions of both the ISS and the Hubble Space Telescope.

SpaceX said the four space tourists will “conduct scientific research designed to advance human health on Earth and during future long-duration spaceflights” before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean near the Florida coast three days later.

The mission, dubbed Inspiration4, will be led by the 38-year-old Isaacman, a billionaire technology entrepreneur and founder of an online payment-processing company who is said to have paid SpaceX several million dollars for the flight. The 29-year-old Arceneaux is a childhood bone cancer survivor who has a titanium rod in her leg, which makes her the first person to fly in space with a prosthesis. Sembroski is a 42-year-old retired U.S. Air Force ballistic missile maintenance engineer who now works in the aviation industry, while 51-year-old Proctor is a geoscientist and community college professor who was a NASA astronaut finalist in 2009.

Sembroski and Proctor were selected through a nationwide search contest, while Arceneaux is flying as a representative of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, where she was treated during her battle with cancer and now works as a physician’s assistant. Isaacman is using the flight to raise $100 million for St. Jude, and has pledged $100 million of his own money to the hospital.

Isaacman’s flight will far exceed those of fellow billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, who each took brief non-orbital flights to the edge of space aboard their own self-financed vehicles — Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, respectively — earlier this year.  

Source: Voice of America

The former president of Chad, Hissène Habré, died on Tuesday at age 79, five years into a life sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

His trial in Senegal marked the first time an African country tried a former leader of another African country for crimes committed in office. However, his conviction was less than perfect justice.

Hissène Habré oversaw the killing and torture of tens of thousands of people during his rule as Chad’s president from 1982 to 1990. He was also accused of rape and sexual slavery.

At the time, Habré received support from the United States and France to defend against Libya’s invasions of northern Chad.

He was found guilty of crimes against humanity in 2016 by a Senegalese court, and was still serving his life sentence when he died of COVID-19.

Allan Ngari is the organized crime observatory coordinator for West Africa with the Institute of Security Studies in Dakar.

“It was the first time for universal jurisdiction to be successful in Africa. It was the first time that a former head of state was found guilty for personally committing acts of rape. But it came almost 26 years later from when he was deposed of presidency in Chad,“ he said.

Habré’s victims and their supporters worked tirelessly over those years to bring the former dictator to justice.

Reed Brody is a member of the International Commission of Jurists and a human rights lawyer who has worked with Habré’s victims since 1999.

“That a band of torture victims never gave up and were able to turn the tables and bring a dictator to justice in Africa before an African court — these are enormous achievements that I feel proud of and that I know the victims feel proud of,“ he said.

One of those victims is Clément Abaifouta, the president of the Association of Victims of the Crimes of the Hissène Habré Regime.

Abaifouta endured four years of torture at the hands of Habré’s regime. During that time he not only witnessed the deaths of many of his co-detainees from torture, illness and sexual violence, but he was forced to dig their graves.

He says when Hissène Habré was convicted, all of Africa celebrated and jumped for joy because Africans proved they were capable of trying dictators on African soil. "The case of Hissène Habré is a lesson for all dictators: you cannot hide. Justice is like the sun. It will always catch you," he said.

Habré and the Chadian government were ordered to pay Abaifouta and the other victims tens of millions of dollars, and the African Union was tasked with setting up a trust fund. The victims, however, have yet to see a penny and the fund was never established.

Abaifouta said he will continue to pressure the Senegalese authorities and the African Union to begin the process of reparations.

Habre is to be buried in Dakar on Thursday, his family told the Agence France-Presse.

Source: Voice of America

Malawi's Constitutional Court has agreed to hear a challenge to last year's presidential election rerun from the opposition Democratic Progressive Party. President Lazarus Chakwera defeated the DPP's Peter Mutharika in the rerun after the court nullified the 2019 election, which Mutharika had won. The DPP argues the rerun should also be nullified after the High Court quashed the appointment of four DPP commissioners to the Malawi Electoral Commission.

This past June, the High Court quashed the appointment of four DPP commissioners Jean Mathanga, Linda Kunje, Steven Duwa and Arthur Nanthuru, saying their appointment was invalid and unconstitutional.

The court acted after the governing Malawi Congress Party had challenged the appointment of the commissioners.

In his ruling, Judge Kenyatta Nyirenda further said the quashing of the appointments did not affect the validity of the June 2020 re-run presidential election.

But the opposition DPP said Nyirenda erred in his ruling because he touched on issues beyond his mandate.

The party wants the court to also invalidate the rerun election because it was managed by commissioners who it says were wrongly appointed.

They argue that the Malawi Constitution does not recognize an election that was presided over by undeserving commissioners.

Charles Mhango is a lawyer for the opposition DPP.

“My clients believe strongly that the elections that took place on 23rd June, electing President Chakwera, is also null and void because the principal of the law is very clear; out of nothing, come nothing,” he said.

Critics fear the case will result in another long and protracted legal battle which will cost the government a lot of money.

They believe the case could have been avoided had the government listened to the advice of the former attorney general, Chikosa Silungwe, that the government should recognize the commissioners.

Osman Kennedy, a law lecturer at Blantyre International University, told VOA that serious implications will happen only if the court rules in favor of the DPP.

“Because what will happen is that we will revert back to 2020 when Mutharika was the president. Because the court may say ‘no, if you [President Chakwera] were elected by the commission that was illegal, then you were not elected, then you were no longer the president and therefore we are reverting the status quo back to Mutharika and Chilima respectively.'”

Social commentator Humphrey Mvula said the case demonstrates failure by political leaders to accept electoral defeat.

“Our challenge as most African countries including Malawi is that we rarely accept that we have lost the elections. We always want to fight and always want the court to tell us that we have lost the elections. Even at that time, we have been able to trash the decision of the court," he said.

Former president Mutharika has said he does not recognize the results of the rerun election he lost to Chakwera.

In the meantime, the Constitutional Court has set Monday next week to decide whether to proceed with the case and if so, how.

Source: Voice of America

The United States imposed sanctions Monday on a top Eritrean defense official, citing Eritrea’s actions during the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.

The Treasury Department said in a statement that it is sanctioning Filipos Woldeyohannes, the chief of staff of the Eritrean Defense Forces (EDF), accusing the forces of carrying out abuses in Tigray.

The Treasury Department said the EDF engaged in “despicable acts” in Tigray, including "massacres, looting and sexual assaults."

"The EDF have purposely shot civilians in the street and carried out systematic house-to-house searches, executing men and boys, and have forcibly evicted Tigrayan families from their residences and taken over their houses and property," it said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a separate statement Monday, "The United States will continue to identify and pursue action against those involved in serious human rights abuse in Ethiopia and prolonging the ongoing conflict and humanitarian crisis."

The Eritrean Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the U.S. allegations, calling them "utterly baseless."

"Eritrea calls on the U.S. administration to bring the case to an independent adjudication if it indeed has facts to prove its false allegations," the ministry said in a statement.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent troops into Tigray last November, saying it was a response to attacks on federal army camps by forces loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF).

Both Ethiopia and Eritrea denied for months that Eritrean troops were also in the region. Eritrea later acknowledged their presence, but denied they were involved in human rights abuses.

Tigrayan forces retook the regional capital Mekele in June, forcing a withdrawal of some Eritrean troops from the region. However, Blinken said in his statement Monday, “the United States is concerned that large numbers of EDF have reentered Ethiopia, after withdrawing in June.”

The United Nations says the fighting in Tigray has killed thousands of people and put hundreds of thousands of people in danger of famine.

Source: Voice of America

The United States on Monday imposed sanctions on an Eritrean official it accused of being engaged in serious human rights abuse in the conflict in Ethiopia's Tigray region, where thousands have been killed and over 2 million displaced.

The U.S. Treasury Department in a statement said it had blacklisted Filipos Woldeyohannes, the chief of staff of the Eritrean Defense Forces, accusing the forces of being responsible for massacres, sexual assaults and purposely shooting civilians in the streets, among other human rights abuses.

The United States has repeatedly called for Eritrean troops to withdraw from Tigray.

"Today’s action demonstrates the United States’ commitment to imposing costs on those responsible for these despicable acts, which worsen a conflict that has led to tremendous suffering by Ethiopians," Andrea Gacki, director of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, said in the statement.

"We urge Eritrea to immediately and permanently withdraw its forces from Ethiopia, and urge the parties to the conflict to begin ceasefire negotiations and end human rights abuses," Gacki added.

Eritrea's Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel did not return calls and text messages seeking comment.

War broke out in November between the federal army and forces loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) that controls the region.

The government declared victory at the end of that month, after seizing the regional capital Mekelle. But the TPLF kept fighting and at the end of June retook Mekelle and most of Tigray after government soldiers withdrew.

Source: Voice of America

Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera says he will take steps to mitigate the steep rise of fertilizer prices which have doubled in the last year. He says about 80 percent of Malawi farmers can no longer afford to buy fertilizer.

Farmers in Malawi say the rise in fertilizer prices is likely to affect production in this agro-based southern Africa country.

Jacob Nyirongo is Chief Executive Officer for Farmers Union of Malawi.

“Most farmers in Malawi are poor and it’s quite a struggle for farmers to access fertilizer even at the prices that they were like last year. So, the increase that we have seen this year means it is pushing more farmers to a bracket where most farmers won’t be able to access fertilizer," he said.

Fertilizer prices have hit an all-time high in Malawi with a bag weighing 50 kilogram now selling between $40 and $50 dollars. This is almost double the prices of last year.

Agriculture experts say this would likely lead to higher costs for government subsidized fertilizers under the Affordable Inputs Program, in which ultra-poor farmers buy at $6 dollars per 50 kilograms bag.

But in his national televised address Saturday, President Chakwera vowed the keep the prices low.

He said the price hike is the result of actions by a cartel, which he did not name, and accused it of trying to undermine his Affordable Inputs Program.

He says “But what I want you to know is that I and my government cannot allow someone to kill agriculture in this country. Whether one likes it or not, farmers will buy fertilizer at a cheaper price this year.”

He, however, said the prices might be slightly higher than last year’s but not as exorbitant as they are now.

But the Fertilizer Importers Association in Malawi, a group of fertilizer importers justifies the current price rise.

Speaking in Malawi Parliament Wednesday, the group said the rise is dictated by the international market which is facing the rise in fertilizer’s raw materials like phosphate.

In response to the rise in fertilizer prices, the Ministry of Agriculture announced in July that it has trimmed the number of beneficiaries of the subsidized farm input program this year from 3.7 million to 2.7 million.

But Chakwera has reversed that decision.

“I will not allow anyone to remove any family or village from the list of beneficiaries of the cheap fertilizer. This is taking the government for granted. If there are people I vowed to fight for, they are the farmers,” he said.

Dr. Betchani Tchereni is a lecturer in Economics at Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences.

He says farmers should do organic farming which largely relies on manure.

“This organic way of farming is the way to go. We just need to propagate it to make sure that everyone understands the best way of doing it. Once we do that, I think issues of biodiversity will come in and I am very sure that at the end of the day, we are going to benefit as a country economically and also in terms of our own health,” he said.

But Farmers Union’s Nyirongo, also an agronomist, says manure cannot stand alone.

“So what we have seen as farmers is that if you use manure, you improve the health of the soil. And you enable the soil to utilize the fertilizer that you apply to a crop. So, if for example, you combine manure with inorganic fertilizer, you get the best yield,” he said.

Nyirongo says for now, farmers are keeping their fingers crossed on President Chakwera’s pledge to help control the overpricing of fertilizer.

Source: Voice of America

China's global ambitions may have taken a hit in the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan and India, but in Africa, its sustained power and influence are forcing Washington to recalibrate its strategy toward the continent, home to 54 nations.

The United States recently committed $217 million to finance a power plant in Sierra Leone through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. When finished, this America-financed power plant will stand alongside eight key government structures China has built for Sierra Leone, including parliamentary offices, army and police headquarters, and the building that houses the West African country's ministry of foreign affairs.

"It's overstating to say that the continent has largely been taken over by China, though my assessment is that Beijing is the most influential foreign actor on the continent," says Joshua Meservey, senior analyst for Africa and the Middle East at the Heritage Foundation.

"China does dominate certain important sectors," Meservey told VOA, listing construction and telecoms among those sectors. But, he said, "the U.S. is still influential."

In a study published in December 2020, Meservey presented a list of 186 government buildings that Chinese companies have built in Africa in recent years, many of which house parliamentary offices, presidential palaces, ministries of foreign affairs and military facilities. Beijing has also built more than a dozen intra-governmental telecommunication networks on the continent, Meservey noted.

While Washington has persuaded some allies to keep Chinese telecom giant Huawei out of their 5G networks, the company is working on 25 projects in Africa, having already carved out 70% of the continent's 4G network and primed itself for the next step.

In June, the president of Senegal instructed his government to "rapidly repatriate all national data hosted out of the country" to a state data center built by Huawei.

"If you look at the Belt and Road, 50 African countries have signed up. That makes Africa the biggest bloc within China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)," said Paul Nantulya, a research associate at the U.S. National Defense University's Africa Studies Center, in a phone interview with VOA.

"The question then becomes, how does United States compete with China [on the African continent]?"

According to studies done by the China Africa Research Initiative based at Johns Hopkins University, Chinese foreign direct investment to Africa has been increasing steadily since 2003 and surpassed that of the U.S. in 2014. U.S. FDI to Africa has been declining since 2010, according to data collected by the group.

To beef up the U.S. overseas presence in the face of competition from China, a growing number of American thought leaders are calling for the government to rethink its role in strengthening U.S. corporate and strategic interests abroad.

"The genius, if you will, of the Chinese economic system is that they are working to align the company interest and the state interest together," said Robert D. Atkinson, an economist who has served in both Democratic and Republican administrations. "What the Chinese have that we don't is they have a strongly held view that certain industries are more important than others."

Given that the Chinese government pours "massive subsidies" into these strategic sectors to fund its global expansion, Atkinson believes Washington could fight back by increasing foreign aid and backing private companies' strategic ventures abroad.

"Does that mean we do everything China does? Of course not," he said. The U.S. government should avoid "over-involvement," he added, but "continuing what we have been doing is clearly not enough."

Atkinson, who heads the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, believes there is a middle ground.

"The whole notion that we shouldn't have our own national industrial policy – that's an idea that only works if you're not facing a competitor like China; the reality is, we are facing a competitor like China," he said. "We can either get China to change – that's not going to happen, we tried and failed – or we can adapt our own policies."

Scott Morris, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, told VOA the aggregate U.S. foreign aid budget directed toward Africa "is around 25 to 30 billion dollars a year," a figure he said "certainly rivals Chinese lending."

But, he said, most of the U.S. aid goes to global health programs, disease eradication and humanitarian assistance. He also acknowledged that a significant portion of the U.S. foreign aid budget goes toward multilateral institutional lending and developmental agencies, such as the World Bank.

"Where we clearly see a difference is that China is very concentrated in the very area the U.S. is largely absent, and that is [country-to-country] infrastructure financing," Morris said. "Allowing China to finance and/or control much of the enabling infrastructure in key sectors could harm U.S. prospects in Africa going forward."

Nantulya thinks that America could benefit from a reevaluation of what the continent means for the United States.

"Do we view Africa as a partner? Do we view Africa as a place that generates security threats that must be met with military force? Or do we view Africa as a place that, yes, has its security problems, but where strategic opportunities outweigh security risks?"

While questions linger on the American side, he said, Beijing made up its mind what Africa means for its strategic aims long ago.

Nantulya said China's official foreign policy doctrine casts big powers as the key, neighboring countries as the priority, developing countries as "the foundation" and "multilateral platforms as the stage."

Cast in this light, Africa is a continent where China sees "tremendous opportunities in spite of risks" and has no doubt seized upon those opportunities in political, economic and military areas alike, Nantulya told VOA.

Ultimately, the challenge that China represents is "first and foremost ideological," he said, and that this is where the United States has an opening to compete with Beijing on a continent where China is now widely regarded the most influential foreign power.

"Values matter; Africans are fighting for and championing the values that have also guided the American experiment and the American story," said Nantulya, a native of Tanzania who studied in Kenya and South Africa and worked across the continent before moving to the United States.

He hopes that Americans can understand that the two sides have a shared future and look at the relationship as an opportunity, rather than one where the United States is constantly coming in to put out fires.

Source: Voice of America

Singapore's tourism board said on Wednesday that a cruise ship operated by Genting Cruise Lines on a so-called cruise to nowhere had returned to the city-state after a 40-year-old passenger was suspected to have contracted COVID-19.

"The passenger was identified as a close contact of a confirmed case on land, and was immediately isolated as part of onboard health protocols," the tourism board said in a statement.

It said the passenger took a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test onboard, tested positive and had been conveyed to a hospital for further testing to confirm the result.

The passenger's three traveling companions were identified and isolated, the tourism board said. They have tested negative for COVID-19 and further contact tracing was being done.

All leisure activities aboard the Dream Cruises' World Dream ship had ceased and passengers had been asked to stay in their cabins until test results are received and contact tracing was complete, the tourism board said.

Genting did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The ship left Singapore on Sunday for a four-day cruise, according to a media report.

The global cruise industry has taken a major economic hit from the coronavirus pandemic, with some of the earliest big outbreaks found on cruise ships.

Singapore, which has seen relatively few domestic COVID-19 cases, launched round-trips cruses on luxury liners in November, which have no port of call and last only a few days.

Such cruises have become popular during the pandemic and are restricted to Singapore residents.

Source: Voice of America

Government has revealed that all vulnerable persons who had been lined up to receive the Shs100,000 Covid-19 relief cash to cushion them from shocks of the second wave of the virus will have to wait until next week.

The revelation was made Wednesday by the State Minister for Gender, Mr Sam Engola who argued that the delay would be to allow government sufficiently comb through the gathered data and ably verify it for transparency purposes.

"To create transparency in what we are doing, after collecting all these data which will take one week from now, we shall have all the data we need. So after one week, we shall display all this data. This will be before the payment," Col Engola told legislators on the Parliamentary Covid taskforce.

This means that the exercise that was purposed to kick off tomorrow (July 8) will be delayed for another extra seven days for proper scrutiny of the collected information collected on the beneficiaries.

The lawmakers also demanded that government expands the list of beneficiaries to accommodate more people affected by the second wave and the virus-induced lockdown that was announced by President Museveni last month as one of the measures to contain the surging virus cases.

On Tuesday, government said a total of 21,480 vulnerable people from cities and municipalities would, starting July 8 receive Shs100,000 each as the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development rolls out the Covid-19 cash relief.

The money will be sent via mobile phone.

Gender minister Betty Amongi told journalists in Kampala yesterday, that money will be sent to the vulnerable families after uploading data of at least half of the targeted beneficiaries (250,553).

Related

The planned government cash release, however, covers only 4.2 per cent of the targeted beneficiaries. Data of 479,627 (95.8 per cent) beneficiaries is yet to be verified and uploaded on the system for payment.

"We held a meeting with Kampala town clerks yesterday [Monday] and they informed us that they were processing their data," Ms Amongi said.

Source: The Monitor