Countries should levy an “orbit congestion charge” on satellite operators to tackle the growing concentration of space junk cluttering the skies, researchers said on Monday, but with some doubting the practicalities of such a fee. From dead satellites to bits of rockets, the amount of debris orbiting the planet is already so great that space agencies often have to alter the course of satellites to avoid collisions. With the world increasingly reliant on orbital infrastructure to maintain communications links and steer new generations of autonomous vehicles, scientists warn that the danger posed by debris is growing exponentially. The best way to deal with it would be to charge satellite operators an annual orbital-use fee for every satellite launched, according to an economics analysis by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Space is a common resource, but companies aren’t accounting for the cost their satellites impose on other operators when they decide whether or not to launch,” Matthew Burgess, who co-authored the study, said in a statement. “We need a policy that lets satellite operators directly factor in the costs their launches impose on other operators,” he added. Under current regulations, satellite operators are unable to secure exclusive property rights on orbital paths or recover collision-related costs that result from others’ junk, the researchers said. This encourages companies to race into space to make some money before it gets too crowded, according to the study published in the scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Solutions proposed so far have mainly focused on technological fixes — such as removing debris with nets or harpoons — that do not address the roots of the problem, said Akhil Rao, the paper’s lead author.  “From an incentive standpoint, if we start sucking the debris out, then people are just going to launch more and more satellites until there’s enough debris that it’s not worth it for them to launch anymore,” added Burgess. He said an annual fee agreed through an international treaty would push companies to be more mindful about the risk of creating more junk and to de-orbit satellites when necessary. Holger Krag, the head of European Space Agency (ESA) space debris office, said the idea was “interesting” and the agency was studying similar approaches and looking at ways to calculate the environmental impact of space missions. But the plan could be tricky to put into practice, Christopher Newman, a professor of space law at Northumbria University in Britain told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. A levy could be seen as a restriction on the freedom of usage of space enshrined in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which regulates life far from earth, and getting states to agree to it was no easy task. “A scheme like this could easily get bogged down in a quagmire of detail,” he said.  
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The World Health Organization said Monday that it will temporarily drop hydroxychloroquine — the malaria drug U.S. President Trump says he is taking — from its global study into experimental COVID-19 treatments, saying that its experts need to review all available evidence to date.
In a press briefing, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that in light of a paper published last week in the Lancet that showed people taking hydroxychloroquine were at higher risk of death and heart problems, there would be “a temporary pause” on the hydroxychloroquine arm of its global clinical trial.
“This concern relates to the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in COVID-19,” Tedros said, adding that the drugs are approved treatments for people with malaria or autoimmune diseases. Other treatments in the trial, including the experimental drug remdesivir and an HIV combination therapy, are still being tested.
Tedros said the executive group behind WHO’s global “Solidarity” trial met on Saturday and decided to conduct a comprehensive review of all available data on hydroxychloroquine and that its use in the trial would be suspended for now.
Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s emergencies chief, said there was no indication of any safety problems with hydroxychloroquine in the WHO trial to date, but that statisticians would now analyze the information.
“We’re just acting on an abundance of caution based on the recent results of all the studies to to ensure that we can continue safely with that arm of the trial,” he said. WHO said it expected to have more details within the next two weeks.  
Last week, Trump announced he was taking hydroxychloroquine although he has not tested positive for COVID-19. His own administration has warned the drug can have deadly side effects, and both the European Medicines Agency and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned health professionals last month that the drug should not be used to treat COVID-19 outside of hospital or research settings due to numerous serious side effects that in some cases can be fatal.
Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are approved for treating lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and for preventing and treating malaria, but no large rigorous tests have found them safe or effective for preventing or treating COVID-19.
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When President Donald Trump doesn’t like the message, he shoots the messenger.
So it was this past week when he took very personally a scientific study that should give pause to anyone thinking of following Trump’s lead and ingesting a potentially risky drug for the coronavirus. He branded the study’s researchers, financed in part by his own administration, his “enemy.”
Boastful on the occasion of Memorial Day, Trump exaggerated some of his accomplishments for veterans’ health care. Over the weekend, he also repeated a baseless allegation of rampant mail-in voting fraud and resurrected claims of unspecified conspiracies against him in 2016.
A look at the rhetoric and reality as the pandemic’s death toll approached 100,000 in the U.S.:Voting FraudTrump: “The United States cannot have all Mail In Ballots. It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history. People grab them from mailboxes, print thousands of forgeries and ‘force’ people to sign. Also, forge names. Some absentee OK, when necessary. Trying to use Covid for this Scam!” — tweet Sunday.The Facts: Voting fraud is rare.  
It’s true that some election studies have shown a slightly higher incidence of mail-in voting fraud compared with in-person voting, but the overall risk is extremely low. The Brennan Center for Justice said in 2017 the risk of voting fraud is 0.00004% to 0.0009%.
“Trump is simply wrong about mail-in balloting raising a ‘tremendous’ potential for fraud,” Richard L. Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, recently wrote in an op-ed. “While certain pockets of the country have seen their share of absentee-ballot scandals, problems are extremely rare in the five states that rely primarily on vote-by-mail, including the heavily Republican state of Utah.”
Trump’s push for in-person voting runs counter to the current guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which urge Americans to maintain 6 feet (1.8 meters) of separation and avoid crowds.
The CDC guidelines “encourage mail-in methods of voting if allowed in the jurisdiction,” given the coronavirus threat. Last week, Trump threatened to “hold up” funding for Michigan and Nevada if they allowed more residents to cast mail-in or absentee ballots out of pandemic safety concerns. He later backed off the threat.
Trump cast an absentee ballot by mail in the Florida Republican primary in March.
A commission Trump convened after the 2016 election to investigate potential voting fraud disbanded without producing any findings.’Deep State’Trump, on the 2016 election: “I’m fighting the deep state. I’m fighting the swamp. … They never thought I was going to win, and then I won. And then they tried to get me out. That was the ‘insurance policy.’ She’s going to win, but just in case she doesn’t win we have an insurance policy.” — interview aired Sunday on “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”The Facts: He’s repeating a false claim that there was a conspiracy afoot to take him out if he won the 2016 presidential race, based on a text message between two FBI employees.
Trump has repeatedly depicted the two as referring to a plot — or insurance policy — to oust him from office if he beat Democrat Hillary Clinton. It’s apparent from the text that it wasn’t that.
Agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page, both now gone from the bureau, said the text messages reflected a debate about how aggressively the FBI should investigate Trump and his campaign when expectations at the time were that he would lose anyway.
Strzok texted about something Page had said to the FBI’s deputy director, to the effect that “there’s no way he gets elected.” But Strzok argued that the FBI should not assume Clinton would win: “I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.” He likened the situation to “an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.” He has said he was not discussing a post-election plot to drive Trump from office.Virus DrugTrump, on why he considers hydroxychloroquine safe for the treatment of COVID-19: “Frankly, I’ve heard tremendous reports. Many people think it saved their lives.” — interview with Attkisson.  Trump: “I’ve received a lot of positive letters and it seems to have an impact. And maybe it does; maybe it doesn’t. But if it doesn’t, you’re not going to get sick or die. This is a pill that’s been used for a long time — for 30, 40 years on the malaria and on lupus too, and even on arthritis.” — remarks on May 18.Trump: “It doesn’t hurt people.” — remarks Tuesday after a GOP policy lunch.The Facts: He’s wrong to assert there is no risk of harm if people take the malaria drug to try to prevent a coronavirus infection. Trump’s own health agencies have cautioned that taking hydroxychloroquine to stave off the virus could be dangerous due to side effects. If the president is to be believed, he’s taking the drug himself.
Trump repeatedly has pushed hydroxychloroquine, with or without the antibiotic azithromycin. No large, rigorous studies have found them safe or effective for COVID-19, and they can cause heart rhythm problems and other serious side effects. The Food and Drug Administration has warned against the drug combination and said hydroxychloroquine should only be used for the coronavirus in hospitals and research settings.
Two large observational studies, each involving about 1,400 patients in New York, recently found no benefit from hydroxychloroquine. Two new ones in the journal BMJ, one by French researchers and the other from China, reached the same conclusion.  
On Friday, a study published by the journal Lancet suggested that hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, with or without an antibiotic, did not help hospitalized patients and was tied to a greater risk of death or heart rhythm problems. Although it was observational rather than a rigorous test, it’s by far the largest so far to examine these drugs in real-world settings — nearly 100,000 patients in 671 hospitals on six continents. Researchers estimated that the death rate attributable to use of the drugs, with or without an antibiotic such as azithromycin, is roughly 13% versus 9% for patients not taking them.
The drug has been available for decades to treat the mosquito-borne illness malaria; it is also prescribed for some lupus and arthritis patients.
Technically, doctors can already prescribe the drug to patients with COVID-19, a practice known as off-label prescribing. But that is not the same as the FDA approving the drug specifically for the pandemic, which would mean it had met the agency’s standards for safety and effectiveness.
FDA regulators issued a warning alert last month in part based on increased reports of dangerous side effects called in to U.S. poison control centers.Trump: “The only negative I’ve heard was the study where they gave it — was it the VA? With, you know, people that aren’t big Trump fans gave it …they had a report come out.” — remarks on May 18.
Trump: “It was given by, obviously, not friends of the administration.” — remarks Tuesday at Cabinet meeting.  Trump: “And if you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, they were giving it to people that were in very bad shape. They were very old, almost dead. It was a ‘Trump enemy statement.'” — remarks Tuesday after GOP policy lunch.  The Facts: There’s no evidence of a political plot at the Department of Veterans Affairs or elsewhere to produce a study pointing to poor outcomes for veterans who took hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 in a bid to make Trump look bad. That study was led by independent researchers — at the University of Virginia and University of South Carolina — and grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Virginia school paid for the work.  
The study released last month found no benefit from hydroxychloroquine.  
The analysis, conducted by the researchers with VA approval, was not a rigorous experiment, nor was it peer-reviewed. Still, with 368 patients, it was the largest look at hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 at the time. Researchers stressed a “great and immediate need” to conduct the analysis due to limited scientific evidence on the drug’s safety and “increasingly widespread use” both as a way to prevent COVID-19 and to treat it.
Researchers analyzed medical records of male veterans hospitalized with confirmed coronavirus infection at VA medical centers who died or were discharged by April 11. About 28% of veterans who were given hydroxychloroquine plus usual care died, versus 11% of those getting routine care alone.  
“These findings highlight the importance of awaiting the results of ongoing prospective, randomized, controlled studies before widespread adoption of these drugs,” the researchers wrote.  
It’s also a point that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, has repeatedly made, urging caution on the drug.  
“Although there is anecdotal evidence that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin may benefit people with COVID-19, we need solid data,” Fauci said.
No drug has been approved for treating the disease, although several have “emergency use” authorization. Most people who get COVID-19 recover.Trump, on the study of VA hospital data: “If you look at that phony report that was put in, that report on the hydroxyl — was given to people that were in extraordinarily bad condition — extraordinarily bad, people that were dying.” — remarks on May 18.Trump: “There was a false study done where they gave it to very sick people — extremely sick people, people that were ready to die. … And the study came out. The people were ready to die. Everybody was old, had bad problems with hearts, diabetes, and everything else you can imagine.” — remarks Tuesday at Cabinet meeting.VA secretary Robert Wilkie: “They did not even look at what the president just mentioned — the various comorbidities that the patients who were referenced in that study had.” — Cabinet meeting Tuesday.Willkie: “The analysis did not adjust for patients’ clinical status.” — letter on April 29 to veterans’ groups.The Facts: Trump and his VA secretary are incorrect. Researchers did use standard statistical methods to adjust for differences in the groups being compared, including clinical status and the presence of other chronic health conditions. They did not cherry-pick only the oldest or sickest ones who took the drug.  
Even though the VA hospital patients given the drug tended to be sicker than those in the comparison group, researchers still saw no benefit from the drug after taking that into account.
The study included all VA patients treated with the drug. One of the measurements was whether it helped prevent the need for breathing machines. It didn’t.
Researchers did not track side effects, but noted there were hints hydroxychloroquine might have damaged other organs. The drug has long been known to have potentially serious side effects such as altering the heartbeat in a way that could lead to sudden death.
The study noted that the median age of the test group was over 65, meaning half the patients were below that and half above it.
The NIH and others have more rigorous tests underway.Obesity
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Trump’s statement that he’s taking hydroxychloroquine: “He’s our president and I would rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists, especially in his age group and in his, shall we say, weight group — morbidly obese, they say.” — interview Tuesday on CNN.The Facts: Trump is not “morbidly” obese.  
Trump is 73. At his last full checkup in February 2019 he passed the official threshold for being considered obese, with a body mass index of 30.4. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an index of 40 or above is considered “severe” obesity, which some also call “morbid” obesity.  
Pelosi’s statement was not purely or even primarily an expression of concern about the president’s health. She said later she was giving him “a dose of his own medicine” for his history of putting down women for their weight.VeteransTrump: “You know we got the Veterans Choice.” — remarks Friday at veterans’ event.
Trump: “We’ve done the greatest job maybe of anything in the VA, because I got VA Choice … approved.” — remarks on May 18.The Facts: False. He didn’t get Veterans Choice approved; President Barack Obama did in 2014. Trump expanded it, under a 2018 law known as the MISSION Act.Trump: “Choice is when they wait for two months to see a doctor … they go outside, they get themselves a good doctor, we pay the bill, and they get taken care of.” — remarks Friday at veterans’ event.The Facts: His suggestion that veterans no longer have waits for care because of the Choice program is also false.
Since March, the VA actually has halted the program’s key provisions that granted veterans the option to see private doctors if they endured long delays at VA, citing the pandemic. Internal VA emails obtained by The Associated Press reveal that some veterans are being turned away, even when private doctors are available to see them.
The program allows veterans to see a private doctor for primary or mental health care if their VA wait is 20 days (28 for specialty care) or their drive to a VA facility is 30 minutes or more.
But since the program’s expansion in June 2018, the VA has not seen a major increase in veterans seeking private care. Two months ago, after the coronavirus outbreak, the VA also took the step of restricting veterans’ access to private doctors, citing the added risks of infection and limited capacity at private hospitals.
Under the temporary guidelines, the VA is reviewing referrals for nonemergency care “on a case-by-case basis for immediate clinical need and with regard to the safety of the veteran when being seen in-person, regardless of wait time or drive time eligibility,” according to VA spokeswoman Christina Noel. The department has boosted telehealth appointments and says VA referrals for private care will be made where it is “deemed safe” and private doctors are available.
Veterans’ organizations and internal VA emails suggest the department is painting an overly rosy picture of health care access.
“We have community facilities open and able to see patients; however, our Veterans are being denied community care granted under criteria of the MISSION Act,” one VA employee wrote in a May 14 email to Tammy Czarnecki, an assistant deputy undersecretary for health operations at VA.
The employee works in a rural region that covers Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Oklahoma, where private doctors are often key to filling gaps in VA care. The person said veterans were being told by their local VAs they may need to wait “well past July, August or September” for private care, according to the email, which was provided to the AP on condition the sender not be identified.
Czarnecki’s office replied by referring the employee to the VA guidance that set forth the restrictions due to a pandemic.
The VA on Thursday said referrals had increased in the employee’s city during the pandemic. It did not provide figures.
The VA, which announced this past week it would start returning to more normal operations, hasn’t said when it will remove its temporary restrictions on Choice.
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Several snow leopards, including a mother and her cub, have been spotted near the Kazakh city of Almaty wandering through a usually popular hiking destination that is now mostly off limits due to the coronavirus lockdown.
 
There are only around 150 snow leopards left in Kazakhstan, out of a global population of less than 10,000 across Central and South Asia. Classified as vulnerable by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the big cats are rarely seen in the wild, let alone within city limits.
 
However, in the past few weeks at least three animals – a lone male and a female with a cub – were caught on film by a motion sensor-equipped camera trap installed near the Big Almaty Lake by an NGO set up to protect the species.
 
Zoologist Alexey Grachyov, who works with the Snow Leopard Foundation, said that in the mountains near Almaty there are only around 20 of the animals left, making the sighting extremely rare.
 
The snow leopard has grey or white fur with black spots and a bushy tail, and its population is distributed across a wide area including mountainous regions of Russia, Mongolia, China, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
 
A common misconception is that snow leopards live only at high altitudes, when in reality they live closer to humans than most people realize, Grachyov said.
 
“This is a unique population that has adapted to human presence. Every snow leopard probably sees humans, cars, sees the city every day, sees it encroach on its habitat.”
 
The foundation’s long-term plan is to rebuild the snow leopard population by breeding and releasing them into the wild.
 
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The global pandemic is causing major anxiety for many. Some are finding treatment via online therapy. Deana Mitchell reports.
Camera, produced by: Deana Mitchell
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The newest branch of the U.S. military began a mostly-classified mission in public view while Japan launched a rocket to the International Space Station. Meanwhile, astronauts scheduled to make history next week reported for duty.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi transports us through This Week in Space.
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Nearly 80 million children under age 1 are at higher risk of preventable diseases such as measles, cholera and polio because of the disruption of routine vaccination programs, according to a report released Friday by the World Health Organization and other global organizations.  Immunization campaigns have been disrupted in half of the 129 countries surveyed around the world in March and April, according to data produced by the WHO, UNICEF, the Sabin Vaccine Institute, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Of the 68 countries, 27 have suspended their measles initiatives. Thirty-eight countries have suspended campaigns to vaccinate children against polio.  The COVID-19 pandemic is “walking back progress” that was made in vaccinating children around the world, putting children and their families at greater risk of diseases that routine vaccinations can prevent, Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, said.”More children in more countries are now protected against more vaccine-preventable diseases than at any point in history,” Berkley said in a statement. “Due to COVID-19, this immense progress is now under threat, risking the resurgence of diseases like measles and polio. Not only will maintaining immunization programs prevent more outbreaks, but it will also ensure we have the infrastructure we need to roll out an eventual COVID-19 vaccine on a global scale.”Fearing doctor visitsRoutine immunization has been hindered for many reasons.Some parents are no longer taking their children to clinics and hospitals out of fear of exposure to the virus, while others are unable to do so because of lockdowns.The delivery of vaccines and required protective equipment has been delayed in many countries because of a cutback in commercial flights and chartered plane availability.Health care workers also have been relocated to help fight the pandemic, leaving fewer to administer vaccinations.UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said that to combat this decline in immunizations, countries need to intensify efforts to find and track unvaccinated children, address gaps in delivery and develop innovative solutions.The consequences if countries are unable to give routine immunizations, “can be deadly,” Fore said.Experts are concerned that deaths from normally preventable diseases could surpass coronavirus deaths if vaccination efforts are not reinstated.Berkley, of Gavi, requested $7.4 billion for vaccination efforts over the next five years.Experts said a decline in vaccinations in one country could have consequences for other countries.Dr. Kate O’Brien, director of WHO’s Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals, said inoculation efforts should be viewed as a “global public good” because “pathogens do not recognize borders,” and if one country is at risk of an outbreak, all countries are at risk.
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In ordinary times, the beaches and roads along Florida’s Space Coast would be packed with hundreds of thousands of spectators, eager to witness the first astronaut launch from Florida in nine years.  
In the age of coronavirus, local officials and NASA are split on whether that’s a good idea. NASA and SpaceX are urging spectators to stay at home next Wednesday for safety reasons.
Officials in Brevard County, home to the Kennedy Space Center, are rolling out the welcome mat in an effort to jump-start a tourism industry hit hard this spring by coronavirus-related lockdowns.
If people are comfortable coming and watching the launch, “by all means, come. If they aren’t, I respect that too,” said Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey.
“I’m not going to tell Americans they can’t watch a great piece of history. I’m just not going to do it,” he said.  
The sheriff said he is asking visitors to practice social distancing as they watch the launch of astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on a test flight of SpaceX’s Dragon crew capsule. Liftoff is set for 4:33 p.m. EDT.
Around 85 reserve deputies will be on hand to monitor crowds and ask people to comply with social distancing if they are in groups. A local chain of beach shops is distributing 20,000 masks to spectators in coordination with the sheriff’s office, Ivey said.
The sheriff, who grew up in Florida watching launches, wants a new generation to be able to experience the energy, excitement and feelings of patriotism that comes from watching a U.S. launch with astronauts.
“NASA is a true part of our history in Brevard County,” Ivey said.
Earlier this month, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine asked potential spectators to watch the launch online or on TV from home. The space agency is also offering a “virtual launch experience.”
NASA is doing its best to facilitate social distancing inside the Kennedy Space Center by limiting access, although it may be hosting two VIPS. Vice President Mike Pence says he plans to be there, and President Donald Trump said he’s thinking of attending.  
The visitor center at Kennedy, usually a prime spot for viewing launches, is closed to the public.  
NASA astronauts have not launched from the U.S. since the space shuttle program ended in 2011. It will be the first attempt by a private company to fly astronauts to orbit for the space agency.
“The challenge that we’re up against right now is we want to keep everybody safe,” Bridenstine said. “And so we’re asking people not to travel to the Kennedy Space Center, and I will tell you that makes me sad to even say it. Boy, I wish we could make this into something really spectacular.”.
Although crowd sizes varied, a high-profile space shuttle launch could attract a half million visitors to the Space Coast. Local tourism officials think next week’s launch will bring in no more than 200,000 spectators.
With airline passenger traffic drastically down and nearby Orlando theme parks closed because of the pandemic, “we’re not going to be getting the out-of-state traffic we may have gotten during the shuttle era,” said Peter Cranis, executive director of the Space Coast Office of Tourism.
“The environment is different with COVID and people now reemerging from stay-at-home orders,” Cranis said. “There are going to be a number of people who are hesitant.”
The Space Coast’s tourism business is down by about 40% for the year, and that could cost the area $1 billion, he said.
“A launch like this after a big long weekend could really give us a shot in the arm,” Cranis said.
Local hoteliers are looking forward to the influx of visitors after two bad months. Tom Williamson, who is general manager of two hotels on the Space Coast, each with 150 rooms or more, said one hotel was closed and the other only had 15% occupancy in April. He expects both hotels to be at or near capacity on the night of the launch.
“We’re glad to seem some signs of life,” Williamson said.
Steven Giraldo works as a technical consultant for a software company in St. Petersburg, Florida, but he has a side gig with some space-buff friends offering charter boat tours for watching launches. For next week’s SpaceX launch, he had booked around 150 people from as far away as Australia for $75 a head on a fleet of boats. He ended up scrapping those plans.
“It would take too much logistical effort to see if everyone is wearing a mask, making sure no one has a fever, and how to you social distance on a boat?” Giraldo said.  
Instead, he plans to watch the launch with seven other friends, some from Arizona and Indiana, in a boat on the Banana River.
“This was going to be our biggest event. The historical significance of it created a lot of buzz,” Giraldo said. “But I just don’t know how we could have done it.” 
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Malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which U.S. President Donald Trump says he has been taking, is tied to increased risk of death in COVID-19 patients, according to a study published in  medical journal Lancet.
 
The study which observed over 96,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19, showed that people treated with the drug, or the closely related drug chloroquine, had higher risk of death when compared to those who had not been given the medicine.
 
Demand for hydroxychloroquine, a drug approved decades ago, surged after Trump touted its use as a coronavirus treatment in early April. Earlier this week, he surprised the world by admitting he was taking the pill as a preventative medicine.
 
The Lancet study authors suggested these treatment regimens should not be used to treat COVID-19 outside of clinical trials until results from clinical trials are available to confirm the safety and efficacy of these medications for COVID-19 patients. The authors said they could not confirm if taking the drug resulted in any benefit in coronavirus patients.
 
Weeks ago, Trump had promoted the drug as a potential treatment based on a positive report about its use against the virus, but subsequent studies found that it was not helpful. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in April issued a warning about its use.
 
The Lancet study looked at data from 671 hospitals, where 14,888 patients were given either hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, with or without the antibiotic macrolide, and 81,144 patients were not on any of the treatment regimens.
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NASA and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida have welcomed the two astronauts who, next Wednesday, are scheduled to head to space, becoming the first humans to do so from U.S. soil in nine years.  NASA test pilots Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken arrived from their home base in Houston aboard one of the space agency’s jets Wednesday. They will also make history as the first astronauts to go into space in a privately-funded spacecraft. The two are scheduled to blast off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, bound for the International Space Station. Hurley was a crew member on the final shuttle flight launched from the space center July 4, 2011. He told reporters it was “incredibly humbling” to be there for the restart of manned space launches from the United States. Behnken called it “an opportunity but also a responsibility for the American people, for the SpaceX team, for all of NASA.” Hurley and Behnken are scheduled to dock at the International Space Station on the 28th. The two still don’t know how long they’ll spend at the space station. Only one American, Chris Cassidy, is there now. Since the end of the shuttle program in 2011, the only way to the orbiting outpost has been on Russian rockets launched from Kazakhstan. 
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Healthcare workers at British hospitals will be the first participants in a global study testing the anti-malarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to see if they can be used to treat or prevent COVID-19. The University of Oxford-led study, kicking off Thursday, will test over 40,0000 frontline health workers in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America, testing at 25 sites in Britain alone, according to Reuters. All healthcare workers who have not contracted COVID-19 are eligible to participate in the “COPCOV” study. Workers in Britain will be administered either hydroxychloroquine or a placebo for three months, while in Asia, participants will be given chloroquine or a placebo.Interest in the drug intensified after President Donald Trump began lauding its usefulness at news conferences in April. Earlier this week Trump announced that he was taking hydroxychloroquine as prophylactic against COVID-19. Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the drug for limited hospital use to treat COVID-19 patients, it does not approve of non-clinical use “due to risk of heart rhythm problems,” a statement from the organization read. While laboratory evidence demonstrates hope for the drug, the results are inconclusive, prompting the creation of the international, double-blind study. “We really do not know if chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine are beneficial or harmful against COVID-19,” said Nicholas White, a University of Oxford professor and the study’s co-principal investigator. Interest in a preventative treatment is rising as the hunt for a vaccine continues. Martin Llewelyn is professor at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School and is leading the study with White. “A widely available, safe and effective vaccine may be a long way off,” Llewelyn said. “If drugs as well-tolerated as chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine could reduce the chances of catching Covid-19, this would be incredibly valuable.”
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