The European Commission called on the United States and other major COVID-19 vaccine producers Friday to export what they make, as the European Union does, rather than talk about waiving intellectual property (IP) rights to the shots.Commission head Ursula von der Leyen told a news conference on the sidelines of a summit of EU leaders that discussions about the waiver would not produce a single dose of COVID-19 vaccine in the short and medium term.”We should be open to lead this discussion. But when we lead this discussion, there needs to be a 360-degree view on it because we need vaccines now for the whole world,” she said.”The European Union is the only continental or democratic region of this world that is exporting at large scale,” von der Leyen said.She said about 50% of European-produced coronavirus vaccine is exported to almost 90 countries, including those in the World Health Organization-backed COVAX program, whose aim is to supply vaccines to mainly poor countries.”And we invite all those who engage in the debate of a waiver for IP rights also to join us to commit to be willing to export a large share of what is being produced in that region,” she said.Only higher production, removing export barriers and the sharing of already-ordered vaccines could immediately help fight the pandemic quickly, she said.”So what is necessary in the short term and the medium term: First of all, vaccine sharing. Secondly, export of vaccines that are being produced. And the third is investment in the increasing of the capacity to manufacture vaccines,” she said.Von der Leyen said the European Union had started its vaccine sharing mechanism, citing delivery of 615,000 doses to the Western Balkans as an example.
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First came the amazing pictures, then the video. Now NASA is sharing sounds of its little helicopter humming through the thin Martian air.NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California released this first-ever audio Friday, just before Ingenuity was set to soar on its fifth test flight.The low hum from the helicopter blades spinning at more than 2,500 revolutions per minute is barely audible. It almost sounds like a low-pitched, far-away mosquito or other flying insect.That’s because the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) helicopter was more than 260 feet (80 meters) from the microphone on the Perseverance rover. Martian wind gusts also obscured the chopper’s sound.Scientists isolated the sound of the whirring blades and magnified it, making it easier to hear.The sound was recorded during the helicopter’s fourth test flight on April 30.Ingenuity — the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet — arrived at Mars on February 18, clinging to Perseverance’s belly. Its first flight was April 19; NASA named the takeoff and landing area Wright Brothers Field in honor of Wilbur and Orrville, who made the world’s first airplane flights in 1903. A postage-stamp-size piece of wing fabric from the original Wright Flyer is aboard Ingenuity.The $85 million tech demo was supposed to end a few days ago, but NASA extended the mission by at least a month to get more flying time.Friday afternoon’s test flight was aiming for twice the altitude — as high as 33 feet (10 meters). The helicopter was also headed to a new touchdown spot.With the helicopter’s first phase complete, the rover can now start hunting for rocks that might contain signs of past microscopic life. Core samples will be collected for eventual return to Earth.
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Debris from a large, out-of-control Chinese rocket that is expected to reenter the atmosphere this weekend is unlikely to cause damage, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Friday. The Long March 5B rocket was launched April 29 from Hainan Island. It was carrying a module for a planned Chinese space station. After the unmanned Tianhe module separated from the rocket, the nearly 21,000-kilogram rocket should have followed a planned reentry trajectory into the ocean, but now, no one knows where the debris will land. “U.S. Space Command is aware of and tracking the location of the Chinese Long March 5B in space, but its exact entry point into the Earth’s atmosphere cannot be pinpointed until within hours of its reentry,” Lt. Col. Angela Webb, U.S. Space Command Public Affairs, told CBS News. Reentry is expected May 8. While the odds are that any debris will fall into the ocean, in May 2020, debris from another Long March 5B rocket fell on parts of Ivory Coast, causing damage to some buildings. Harvard-based astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told Reuters that the debris could fall as far north as New York or as far south as Wellington, New Zealand. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks during a briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, May 6, 2021.Speaking with reporters Thursday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the United States has no plans to try to shoot down the rocket. “We have the capability to do a lot of things, but we don’t have a plan to shoot it down as we speak,” said Austin. “We’re hopeful that it will land in a place where it won’t harm anyone. Hopefully in the ocean, or someplace like that,” he added. The launch of the Tianhe module is the first of 11 planned missions to build the Chinese space station.  
 
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African nations have welcomed news that the U.S. supports a proposal to waive intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines. But, they warn, the road ahead is long and full of obstacles.Health experts and activists say the decision, announced this week by the U.S. trade representative, could save lives in parts of the world where the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage and vaccines are in short supply.  Fatima Hassan is director of the Health Justice Initiative, a South African group that advocates for equitable health care. While Hassan said she welcomes U.S. support of the so-called “TRIPS” waiver — it stands for “Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property” — she worries that the process is moving too slowly. “Obviously … we welcome the Biden administration’s announcement — and really its giving effect, partially, to a promise he made when he was campaigning to be the president of the United States,” he said, but added that it is only a “small step to be able to go forward in terms of the TRIPS waiver, but also in terms of other initiatives to scale up manufacturing not just in Africa, but in the global South, particularly in Latin America and Asia as well.” Biden Agrees to Waive COVID-19 Vaccine Patents, but It’s Still Complicated Implementing waiver of intellectual property rights at WTO is not as simple as handing over vaccine recipes so countries can make generic versionsThe waiver idea came from two nations that have suffered greatly during the pandemic: South Africa and India. South Africa is the continent’s worst-hit country, with nearly 1.6 million confirmed cases and a vaccination program that has been plagued by fits and starts. Health officials are now bracing for a third wave of infections. Hassan stressed that the waiver alone won’t immediately produce a bounty of locally produced vaccines. The Africa Centers for Diseases Control has identified about six facilities on the continent that are capable of manufacturing vaccines — hardly enough to quickly meet the needs of more than 1.2 billion Africans.And, says Yuan Qiong Hu of global aid group Doctors Without Borders, the U.S. does not have the final word here. The World Trade Organization meets in June to hammer out the conditions, and there are a number of high-profile opponents, including the European Union, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Germany, Brazil and Australia.While more than 100 countries support the waiver proposal, countries that oppose the waiver, says Hassan, may fear that it sets an irreversible precedent. 
 
Industry groups also have weighed in.Canada’s Procurement minister Anita Anand poses for a photo in front of a shipment from South Africa of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at Toronto Pearson Airport in Ontario, Canada, April 28, 2021.Despite such opposition, Hassan remains upbeat.“Maybe this statement from the U.S. trade office is actually the first of a long journey, where over the next few decades we’ll finally be able to have a real reckoning around the impact of intellectual property on access to healthcare services, in particular medicine,” she said. “The fact that medicines are still commodified, that they are subject to a trade regime and subject to the quite excessive and quite protectionist rules of the World Trade Organization is a key concern for many organizations and many health advocates and activists. “I think that we shouldn’t underestimate the statement and the move by the U.S. government,” she added. “It’s certainly going to create a ripple effect.”Umunyana Rugege, director of South African advocacy group Section 27, certainly hopes that is the case. Her group campaigns for social justice in South Africa. Before COVID-19 appeared, their health advocacy focused on another pandemic: HIV. South Africa carries the world’s heaviest burden of that virus. Rugege said her country’s lengthy experience in that battle enabled them to act quickly when COVID-19 first appeared. “Early in the pandemic, what we did was to call for a number of things,” she said. “The first thing was a moratorium on any new patents on COVID-related technologies. So that’s before we even had vaccines, before we knew what treatments were going to work. We said, let’s make sure that we’re not giving out new patents on these technologies. The second thing we demanded was for automatic compulsory licenses where there are health technologies that are found to be effective against COVID, but that have patents.”  This is familiar ground for African health activists. From the mid-90s, activists lobbied hard for the World Trade Organization to issue a similar waiver for lifesaving antiretroviral medications. A final agreement was inked in 2001. According to the United Nations, as many as 42 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since counting began more 40 years ago. Since COVID was first recognized in early 2020, the World Health Organization says it has killed 3.2 million people.
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As India sets new daily records in COVID-19 deaths and infections, some experts see the humanitarian crisis as an opportunity for other nations to counter China’s vaccine diplomacy elsewhere.Three of the nations that make up the Quad — U.S., Australia and Japan — are expected to assist the fourth, India, after U.S. President Joe Biden promised April 26 to provide New Delhi with the China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying gestures during a press conference in Beijing on Dec. 10, 2020.China has denied it is engaged in vaccine diplomacy, and it says it is supplying “vaccine aid,” This handout photo taken on May 3, 2021, shows Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte receiving a dose of China’s Sinopharm to battle the COVID-19 coronavirus at Malacanang Palace in Manila.The partnership allows Quad leaders to take “shared action necessary to expand safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing in 2021” and “work together to strengthen and assist countries in the Indo-Pacific with vaccination, in close coordination with the existing relevant multilateral mechanisms including World Health Organization (WHO) and COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access),” according to a statement the White House released March 12.Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, thinks that the partnership will need to be modified “given that it was dependent on Indian vaccine manufacturing capacity. India will, understandably, prioritize vaccines for its domestic population.”Ideally, such partnerships should be fully coordinated with COVAX and WHO to maximize impact, Adalja said in an email to VOA Mandarin. However, Joe Thomas Karackattu, assistant professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India, where he focuses on Sino-Indian relations and China’s foreign and economic policy, told VOA Mandarin via email that COVID-19 relief cannot become a strategic turf war.”All countries have to work together,” he said. “If the Quad delivers on the pitch for the ‘Quad Vaccine Partnership’ … it might cement a longer-term foundation for the Quad to coordinate on multilateral cooperation, but that necessarily does not automatically translate into an organic and systematic modus vivendi in strategic affairs.” On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced that it supports waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines. South Africa and India had proposed the waiver, which is opposed by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a group that includes vaccine makers such as AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” wrote U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai.This is a monumental moment in the fight against #COVID19. The commitment by @POTUS Joe Biden & @USTradeRep@AmbassadorTai to support the waiver of IP protections on vaccines is a powerful example of ?? leadership to address global health challenges. pic.twitter.com/3iBt3jfdEr— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) May 5, 2021 While a waiver could remove obstacles to ramping up the production of vaccines in developing countries, crafting the waiver may take time because it will require approval from all 164 members of the World Trade Organization.Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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Sixty years after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, everyday people are on the verge of following in his cosmic footsteps.Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin used Wednesday’s anniversary to kick off an auction for a seat on the company’s first crew spaceflight — a short Shepard-like hop launched by a rocket named New Shepard. The Texas liftoff is targeted for July 20, the date of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic aims to kick off tourist flights next year, just as soon as he straps into his space-skimming, plane-launched rocketship for a test run from the New Mexico base.And Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch a billionaire and his sweepstakes winners in September. That will be followed by a flight by three businessmen to the International Space Station in January.”We’ve always enjoyed this incredible thing called space, but we always want more people to be able to experience it as well,” NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough said from the space station Wednesday. “So I think this is a great step in the right direction.”It’s all rooted in Shepard’s 15-minute flight on May 5, 1961. Shepard was actually the second person in space — the Soviet Union launched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin three weeks earlier, to Shepard’s everlasting dismay. The 37-year-old Mercury astronaut and Navy test pilot cut a slick sci-fi figure in his silver spacesuit as he stood in the predawn darkness at Cape Canaveral, looking up at his Redstone rocket. Impatient with all the delays, including another hold in the countdown just minutes before launch, he famously growled into his mic: “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?”His capsule, Freedom 7, soared to an altitude of 116 miles (186 kilometers) before parachuting into the Atlantic.Twenty days later, President John F. Kennedy committed to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely by decade’s end, a promise made good in July 1969 by Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Shepard, who died in 1998, went on to command Apollo 14 in 1971, becoming the fifth moonwalker — and lone lunar golfer.Since Gagarin and Shepard’s pioneering flights, 579 people have rocketed into space or reached its fringes, according to NASA. Nearly two-thirds are American and just over 20% Soviet or Russian. About 90% are male and most are white, although NASA’s crews have been more diverse in recent decades. A Black community college educator from Tempe, Arizona, sees her spot on SpaceX’s upcoming private flight as a symbol. Sian Proctor uses the acronym J.E.D.I. for “a just, equitable, diverse and inclusive space.”NASA wasn’t always on board with space tourism, but is today.”Our goal is one day that everyone’s a space person,” NASA’s human spaceflight chief, Kathy Lueders said following Sunday’s splashdown of a SpaceX capsule with four astronauts. “We’re very excited to see it starting to take off.” Twenty years ago, NASA clashed with Russian space officials over the flight of the world’s first space tourist.California businessman Dennis Tito paid $20 million to visit the space station, launching atop a Russian rocket. Virginia-based Space Adventures arranged Tito’s weeklong trip, which ended May 6, 2001, as well as seven more tourist flights that followed.”By opening up his checkbook, he kicked off an industry 20 yrs ago,” Space Adventures co-founder Eric Anderson tweeted last week. “Space is opening up more than it ever has, and for all.”There’s already a line.A Russian actress and movie director are supposed to launch from Kazakhstan in the fall. They’ll be followed in December by Space Adventures’ two newest clients, also launching on a Russian Soyuz rocket. SpaceX will be next up in January with the three businessmen; the flight from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center was arranged by Axiom Space, a Houston company run by former NASA employees. And as early as 2023, SpaceX is supposed to take a Japanese entrepreneur and his guests around the moon and back.While no fan of human spaceflight — he prefers robotic explorers — Duke University emeritus history professor Alex Roland acknowledges the emergence of spaceflight companies might be “the most significant change in the last 60 years.” Yet he wonders whether there will be much interest once the novelty wears off and the inevitable fatalities occur.Then there’s the high price of admission.The U.S., Canadian and Israeli entrepreneurs flying SpaceX early next year are paying $55 million — each — for their 1 1/2-week mission.Virgin Galactic’s tickets cost considerably less for minutes versus days of weightlessness. Initially $250,000, the price is expected to go up once Branson’s company starts accepting reservations again.Blue Origin declined Wednesday to give a ticket price for future sales and would not comment on who else — besides the auction winner — will be on board the capsule in July. A couple more crew flights, each lasting minutes, would follow by year’s end.As for SpaceX’s private flight on a fully automated Dragon capsule, tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman won’t say what he’s paying. He considers his three-day flight a “great responsibility” and is taking no shortcuts in training; he took his crewmates hiking up Mount Rainier last weekend to toughen them up.”If something does go wrong, it will set back every other person’s ambition to go and become a commercial astronaut,” Isaacman said recently.John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University, where he founded the Space Policy Institute, has mixed feelings about this shift from space exploration to adventure tourism.”It takes the romance and excitement out of going to space,” Logsdon said in an email this week. Instead of the dawn of a new era like so many have proclaimed, it’s “more like the end of the era when space flight was special. I guess that is progress.”
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The Biden administration has agreed to support waiving intellectual property (IP) restrictions on COVID-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organization (WTO), a breakthrough in the global fight against the pandemic that can empower governments to tackle vaccine scarcity and inequity.U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced the administration’s position in a FILE – A logo is seen at the headquarters of the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, June 2, 2020.Biden agrees; now what?Now that Biden has agreed to support the waiver, it doesn’t mean U.S. pharmaceutical companies must start giving away vaccine recipes so developing countries can make their own.The WTO is a consensus-based organization and cannot move forward unless the European Union, which is against the waiver, and everyone else agrees. Once all WTO members agree, the next steps would be for countries to implement it at the national level by removing legal risks that hinder production and supply by alternative producers. To clarify these implementation options, countries must start text-based negotiations at the WTO, going through each item of the complex and multilayered IP legal requirements — a process that could take months, or even years.”I’m not going to put odds on how likely it is to find an agreement,” said WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell, summarizing the WTO closed-door General Council meeting on the TRIPS waiver Wednesday.But he said there was consensus on the need for wider access to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.”When people begin to voice very clearly their share objectives, it makes it easier to get to ‘yes,’ ” Rockwell said.There is not a single “recipe” for a COVID-19 vaccine — the vaccines are complex in terms of ingredients, manufacturing technology, delivery vehicles, etc., and each vaccine has dozens, if not hundreds, of IPs attached, many of them under patent pending litigation, making the granting of waivers an even more complicated and lengthy process.FILE – Boxes of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine are seen at the McKesson Corp., amid the coronavirus disease outbreak, in Shepherdsville, Ky., March 1, 2021.There are many complex challenges in scaling up COVID-19 vaccine production. The waiver is just one tool and does not offer a blanket solution, said Yuanqiong Hu, a senior legal and policy adviser with Doctors Without Borders, one of the organizations that support the TRIPS waiver.But as an important enabler, Hu added, “the earlier the waiver can be adopted, the sooner its impact can be realized.”If countries are given the permission and know-how to produce vaccines, waiver proponents say, they don’t have to wait in line while pharmaceutical companies fulfill orders from rich countries who have the resources to do so.But even if a full waiver is not approved, proponents are hoping the pressure will become leverage to force vaccine producers to ramp up global manufacturing capacity via additional licensing agreements, or donate or sell doses at a reduced cost.TRIPS waiver opponentsDrug manufacturers, including Pfizer and Moderna, oppose the waiver, saying that easing patent rules FILE – Microsoft founder Bill Gates holds a vaccine for meningitis during a news conference at U.N. headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, May 17, 2011.Another big opponent is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — the driving force behind COVAX, the U.N. mechanism to improve low- and middle-income countries’ access to vaccines. Despite more than two decades of philanthropic work to immunize the world’s poor, Gates is a fierce defender of IP protection.On Wednesday, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala spoke to representatives from developing and developed countries and again urged them to quickly agree on this issue, over which countries have been at odds for six months.The ‘third way’Opponents insist a waiver would not help accelerate vaccine access or address supply chain and logistical constraints. It would still take a long time for governments to set up factories, train staff and procure materials to make vaccines.They say the faster and better way to do it is through technology transfer partnerships and licensing agreements, such as the one between AstraZeneca and the Serum Institute of India, which produced doses for COVAX. The agreement has been halted by the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which wants to prioritize doses for its own populations as it deals with another wave of COVID-19 cases.Licensing agreements, including those between Britain’s AstraZeneca and Brazil’s Fiocruz, or the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech and the Indonesian firm Bio Farma, have shown that middle-income countries have the capacity to produce vaccine doses within months after technology transfer.These licensing agreements and other means of technology transfer have been praised by Okonjo-Iweala as the “third way,” an alternative to vaccine protectionism and waiving IP rights.However, these agreements can include restrictions — for example, geographical limitations on where, when and to whom the doses can be sold. Most bilateral agreements on COVID-19 vaccine production are contract manufacturing agreements through which the contracted entity manufactures on behalf of a licenser that maintains full control over the use of its technology, the volume of production, and where and at what prices vaccines may be supplied.The Biden administration said it would continue to ramp up efforts, working with the private sector and all possible partners to expand vaccine manufacturing and distribution, and increase the raw materials needed to produce the vaccines.VOA’s Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.
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A senior Indian government scientific adviser warned Wednesday that a third wave of coronavirus infections would sweep the country as it struggles with the devastating effects of the current wave that officially claimed nearly 4,000 lives in the course of one day.The government’s principal scientific adviser, K. Vijay Raghavan, issued the warning as the World Health Organization said in its weekly report that India accounted for almost half the cases reported globally last week and about a quarter of all fatalities.“Phase 3 is inevitable, given the high levels of circulating virus,” Raghavan told a news briefing in New Delhi. “But it is not clear on what timescale this phase 3 will occur … We should prepare for new waves.”India’s crisis is aggravated by a critical lack of oxygen needed to treat critically ill patients, along with the raw materials needed to manufacture doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. While India is home to the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, only 2% of the country’s 1.3 billion people have been vaccinated, according to local reports. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the coronavirus.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 10 MB480p | 15 MB540p | 20 MB720p | 38 MB1080p | 81 MBOriginal | 243 MB Embed” />Copy Download AudioTo help address the oxygen shortage, India’s Supreme Court ordered the government Wednesday to submit a plan to meet oxygen needs in New Dehli hospitals within one day.Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party have been roundly criticized over the last several weeks for holding massive election rallies in West Bengal. Health experts have suggested the rallies may have contributed to a record surge in the state.Other political parties also held rallies there.Award-winning author Arundhati Roy called for Modi to resign in an opinion piece that was published Tuesday by the independent news website Scroll.in.“This is a crisis of your making,” she wrote. “You cannot solve it. You can only make it worse … So please go.”In a related development, Agence France-Presse reported that India’s Reserve Bank has pledged to provide $6.7 billion in cheap financing for the country’s vaccine makers, hospitals and other health firms.
  
The United Nations Children’s Fund announced shipments of medical supplies to India Wednesday, including 2 million face shields and 200,000 surgical masks. UNICEF also said it is supporting other endeavors in India, such as the acquisition of 25 oxygen plants for hospitals in the northeast and in the western state of Maharashtra.  India’s Health Ministry reported another 382,315 new cases of coronavirus cases on Wednesday, including 3,780 COVID-related deaths. The South Asian nation has more than 20 million total coronavirus infections, second only behind the United States, and 226,188 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 4 MB480p | 5 MB540p | 8 MB720p | 16 MB1080p | 32 MBOriginal | 163 MB Embed” />Copy Download AudioIntellectual property rights
 
Member nations of the World Trade Organization were wrapping up two days of talks in Geneva Wednesday on waiving intellectual property rights on new COVID-19 vaccines.  
 
Ambassadors from the WTO’s 164 member states had been debating a proposal first floated by South Africa and India last October that would temporarily lift patent rights held by pharmaceutical companies that developed the vaccines. Supporters of the proposal say the waiver will allow for the faster manufacture of vaccines for use by developing countries, where vaccination rates have lagged behind those of wealthier nations.
 
But pharmaceutical companies claim that granting the waiver could hurt future innovation and will not lead to the quick production of vaccines.   
 
Dozens of civil society groups and former heads of state, including former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Mikhail Gorbachev of the former Soviet Union, have urged U.S. President Joe Biden to support the proposed waiver. More than 100 members of the Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives signed a letter to Biden, urging him to support the proposal.   
 
The International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations also urged Biden to support the proposal, saying in a letter it would help “ensure universal and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.”
 
Biden said he has not made a decision on the matter. The proposal must be agreed on by all the WTO member nations.
 Global tracker
 
Also on Wednesday, Germany and the World Health Organization announced plans to establish a global monitoring operation to help prevent future threats like the current pandemic.
 
The Berlin-based “global hub for pandemic and epidemic intelligence” would track and monitor “exposed gaps in the global systems for pandemic and epidemic intelligence,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
 
The monitoring center will get about $36 million from Germany and search for funds from other sources.   
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The head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said current projections see COVID-19 cases remaining low and dropping sharply by July, provided vaccination rates remain high and people continue to observe basic prevention practices.At a briefing, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said the projections are based on a study published Wednesday by the CDC. The study used data taken from recent trends to create models showing what could happen if current vaccination and prevention practices, such as mask use and social distancing, continue.Walensky said nationwide, U.S. COVID-19 statistics continue to trend well, with the daily average of new cases falling by 12%, to 42,494 per day, while average daily hospitalizations dropped by 9.5%. She said daily average deaths also fell by nearly 1%.But she said the wild card in the CDC models is variant coronavirus strains that cause COVID-19. Walensky said data show current vaccines are performing well against the predominant variants, so it is even more imperative to get more people vaccinated.  To that end, White House COVID-19 Response Team Senior Adviser Andy Slavitt announced that anyone in the United States can simply send a mobile text message with their Zip (postal) code to GETVAXED and they will be sent three vaccination locations near them. He said people can also get information on where they might receive a preferred vaccine.  Slavitt said the texts will also provide information on how people can get a free ride to a vaccine location through ride share services. He said those without access to mobile devices or the internet will be provided with telephone numbers they can call to obtain the information.Slavitt said the measures are all part of meeting goals laid out in a speech Tuesday by President Joe Biden. The president said he would like to see 70% of all Americans with at least one vaccination and 160 million Americans fully vaccinated by July 4, the U.S. Independence Day holiday. As of Tuesday, the CDC reports just less than 45% of people in the U.S. have received at least one shot while more than 106 million – 32% – of Americans are fully vaccinated.
 
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In marking World Hand Hygiene Day, the World Health Organization is stressing the importance of good hand hygiene practices in stopping the spread of deadly infections. It says this is especially true at a time when the world is battling the coronavirus, which causes the COVID-19 disease.
 
COVID has dramatically amplified the importance of hand washing. The head of WHO’s infection prevention and control, Benedetta Allegranzi, says this simple action can prevent the risk of transmitting the infection, when used as part of a comprehensive package of public health measures.
    
“Effective hand hygiene also prevents any infection acquired in health care, the spread of antimicrobial resistance and other emerging health threats. Hand hygiene is a simple action that has a central role in contributing to quality care and to the whole of society efforts to prevent infection spread and saves lives,” Allegranzi said.
    
A WHO survey of 88 countries finds low-and-middle-income countries have made significantly lower progress than high-income countries in implementing hand hygiene and infection prevention programs.
 
The report notes one in four health care facilities in poorer countries does not have basic water services and one in three lacks hand hygiene supplies.
 
Allegranzi said the poorer countries lack the money needed to shore up their crumbling health care infrastructure. Consequently, she noted, most do not meet the minimal requirements to make a significant dent in reducing often life-threatening infections.
    
“For example, in some low-and-middle-income countries, only one in 10 have workers who practice proper hand hygiene while caring for patients at high-risk of health care susceptibility infection in intensive care units.  While, also in high-income countries, hand hygiene compliance rarely exceeds 60% to 70%.”
 
WHO reports every year, health care-acquired infections affect millions of patients and health workers globally. Europe alone, it says, records nearly nine million infections yearly. The U.N. agency says highly effective and low-cost hand hygiene strategies are available that could reduce these infections by half.
 
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Relentless wind and rain keeps pummeling much of the southeastern United States, spawning tornadoes, sparking a flash flood emergency in Alabama and damaging homes from Texas to Virginia. The storms have prompted boat rescues and toppled trees and power lines.
Crews were preparing to continue cleaning up debris and assessing destruction across the region early Wednesday, as some schools canceled classes or moved them online due to damage on campuses and surrounding areas.
The National Weather Service’s prediction center warned Wednesday morning that flash flooding also could now affect the Central Gulf Coast with storms shifting southeast and rain continuing to soak much of the region.
The storms have been responsible for at least three deaths and dozens of injuries this week, and more than 200,000 customers were without power from Arkansas to Maryland early Wednesday, including about 75,000 in Alabama, about 66,000 in Mississippi, about 13,800 in Georgia and about 25,700 in Virginia, according to the website poweroutage.us.
Torrential rains Tuesday near Birmingham, Alabama, dumped more than 7 inches (17.7 centimeters) of water in a few afternoon hours, causing flooding problems across much of the state’s most populous areas.
Emergency Management officials in the area urged residents to stay off roads because so many were flooded, including some downtown. In the Birmingham suburb of Homewood, fire department rescuers in a small boat paddled past submerged cars in a parking lot, slowly removing more than a dozen people from the waters surrounding an apartment complex.
Strong winds blowing behind a line of storms were toppling trees across central Alabama, where soil was saturated with water, and lightning struck a church in central Alabama, causing extensive damage from a fire. The National Weather Service in Birmingham said late Tuesday it planned to send two crews to Greene and Tuscaloosa Counties to assess wind and possible tornado damage from storms that started Sunday.
Strong winds and heavy rain whipped through Mississippi’s capital city of Jackson late Tuesday while thunder rattled windows. The high winds cracked some limbs off trees and sent them onto nearby houses. The storms left streets littered with branches and leaves.
At least eight people were injured when storms that brought tornadoes to Texas flipped tractor-trailers on an interstate and damaged structures.
In Tennessee, at least 11 counties were hit by possible EF-0 tornadoes, according to an official with the National Weather Service in Nashville. A tornado that struck Virginia’s Northumberland County near the Chesapeake Bay destroyed one home and severely damaged a few others Monday.
On Monday, tornadoes also touched down in South Carolina and southern Kentucky while a possible tornado hit West Virginia.
In Mississippi, forecasters confirmed 12 tornadoes Sunday evening and night, including the Yazoo City twister, which stretched for 30 miles (50 kilometers), and another tornado that moved through suburbs south of Jackson, producing a damage track 910 meters (1,000 yards) wide.
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Member nations of the World Trade Organization are wrapping up two days of talks in  Geneva Wednesday focused on waiving intellectual property rights on new COVID-19 vaccines.  Ambassadors from the WTO’s 164 member states have been debating a proposal first proposed by South Africa and India back in October that would temporarily lift patent rights held by pharmaceutical companies that developed the vaccines.  Supporters of the proposal say the waiver will allow for the faster manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines for use by developing countries, where vaccination rates have lagged behind those of wealthier nations. But pharmaceutical companies claim that granting the waiver could hurt future innovation and will not lead to the quick production of coronavirus vaccines.   Dozens of civil society groups and former heads of state, including former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Mikhail Gorbachev of the former Soviet Union have urged U.S. President Joe Biden to support the proposed waiver. More than 100 members of the Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives signed a letter to President Biden also urging him to support the proposal.   Biden says he has not made a decision on the matter.  The proposal must be agreed on by all 164 WTO member nations. India
In a related development, Agence France-Presse is reporting that India’s Reserve Bank has pledged to provide $6.7 billion in cheap financing for the country’s vaccine makers, hospitals and other health firms as the world’s second-most populous country is mired in a catastrophic surge of the virus. Workers load empty oxygen cylinders onto a supply truck for refilling, at the Medical College and Hospital, amid the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Kolkata, India, May 5, 2021.”The devastating speed with which the virus affects different regions of the country has to be matched by swift and wide-ranging actions,” said Reserve Bank of India governor Shaktikanta Das in making the announcement.   India’s Health Ministry reported another 382,315 new cases of coronavirus cases on Wednesday, including 3,780 COVID-related deaths. The South Asian nation has more than 20 million total coronavirus infections, second only behind the United States, and 226,188 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. 
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Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven wealthy democracies turn their attention to issues of global interest including coronavirus vaccines, climate change and education for girls on Wednesday as they close three days of talks in London. “I think COVAX and the ability to fund it, get vaccines to the most vulnerable countries, what we do about the surplus domestic supply, all of those issues again, really good opportunity with the G-7, together with our Indo-Pacific partners, to talk all of that through and come up with positive answers,” British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Tuesday. With Britain hosting the ministerial talks, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose office highlighted the importance of global access to COVID-19 vaccines. “The Prime Minister and Secretary Blinken agreed that the global roll out of vaccines will be key to defeating the coronavirus pandemic. They underlined the importance of G-7 work in this area, including efforts to increase international manufacturing capability,” a Downing Street spokesman said.Trilateral meeting with Japan and South Korea on the sidelines of the G7 foreign ministers meeting in London, May 5, 2021.Tuesday’s G-7 meetings included a focus on China. A senior U.S. State Department official told reporters there was broad agreement among the ministers, “both the fact that we all want China to be an integral member of the international order, but to do that, it has to play by the rules of that international order.” The official cited concern about China’s human rights record and its “threatening and aggressive behavior in the South China Sea and other areas around its border.” Blinken also said Tuesday the G-7 nations want to end the 10-year civil war in Syria. “My @G7 counterparts and I reaffirmed our commitment to a political resolution for ending the conflict in Syria and support to the reauthorization of the U.N. cross-border aid mechanism,” Blinken tweeted.My @G7 counterparts and I reaffirmed our commitment to a political resolution for ending the conflict in Syria and support to the reauthorization of the UN cross-border aid mechanism. We’ll continue working to advance all aspects of UNSCR 2254 and end the suffering of Syrians.— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) May 4, 2021He said the group would work to advance all parts of a 2015 U.N. Security Council resolution that calls for a cease-fire in Syria, along with a Syrian-led political process with a new constitution and elections. The G-7 ministerial talks are laying the foundation for a summit of leaders from those countries in June, also in Britain.       In addition to Britain and the United States, the G-7 includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. Australia, India, South Africa, South Korea and Brunei are also taking part in this week’s talks.          After the G-7 meetings, Blinken is scheduled to travel to Ukraine to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other senior government officials.          State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement that Blinken will “reaffirm unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression.”
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