Another highly effective vaccine is poised to join the fight against COVID-19.  But its impact may be blunted by supply issues. The manufacturer expected to produce the bulk of the doses is in India, where the government has banned vaccine exports.  FILE – A car drives past the sign for vaccine developer Novavax at the company’s headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Nov. 30, 2020.”Many of our first doses will go to … low- and middle-income countries, and that was the goal to begin with,” Novavax CEO Stanley Erck told The Associated Press. The vaccine does not have the special cold storage requirements of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines. That means low- and middle-income countries “can use the cold chain that they have already set up for routine childhood vaccines,” said William Moss, executive director of the Johns Hopkins University International Vaccine Access Center. “They don’t need to make modifications to handle the cold chain requirements” of the Pfizer and Moderna shots. Doses in limbo Novavax also has a deal with the Serum Institute of India (SII) to manufacture an additional 750 million doses of the vaccine.  SII is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer and the main supplier of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to COVAX. But the Indian government has barred the company from exporting those doses as the country suffers through a devastating wave of COVID-19 infections.  People register their names to receive a coronavirus vaccine at a free camp in Kolkata, India, June 14, 2021.”Considering the situation in India, there are still a lot of questions about timing and volume (of Novavax vaccine) that would actually be available to the rest of the world,” said Kate Elder, senior vaccines policy adviser to the Doctors Without Borders Access Campaign. “It’s really just a testament to how poorly we as a global community have diversified production sites,” she added. “Whatever candidate produces successful vaccines, that technology (and) that know-how needs to be made available to whoever can produce it.” The company does have manufacturing capacity in other countries, Moss noted, and as regulators authorize the vaccine, there need to be “efforts to scale up manufacturing at those other sites outside of India so that we can get that vaccine to the populations that need them.” “It just shows the trouble with perhaps putting a lot of eggs in one basket,” he added. “For the next few months, we’re really short on vaccine globally,” said former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Tom Frieden, who currently heads the global health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives.  “Redistributing (vaccine doses), as the U.S. and others are doing, will be somewhat helpful, but not for many months,” he said. Over the weekend, the G-7 group of industrialized nations pledged 870 million vaccine doses to COVAX.  Questions about variants The results from the Novavax vaccine trial are impressive, but “what we still don’t have enough information on is how it will do against variants,” Frieden said.  Novavax reported that the vaccine was 93.2% effective against variants in the clinical trial, but it did not specify which variants.  The alpha variant, first identified in Britain and known to scientists as B.1.1.7, is the dominant viral strain in the United States. But in an earlier, smaller trial in South Africa, the vaccine was 51% effective against the dominant variant there, now known as beta.  
 
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The World Health Organization said Monday that while the number of new COVID-19 cases has fallen steadily for seven straight weeks, the virus continues to spread and kill people in Africa, a region with little or no access to vaccines and treatments.Speaking from the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the overall decline in new cases, the longest since the pandemic began, was certainly welcome news. But he said deaths overall were not falling as quickly and declined only slightly last week.Tedros said the decline in cases also masks the fact that the virus continues to spread and kill in regions such as Africa, which has limited access to vaccines and treatments such as oxygen and diagnostic equipment.FILE – A medical team rolls a coronavirus patient from a bed onto a stretcher in the COVID-19 intensive care unit at Kenyatta National Hospital, in Nairobi, Kenya, April 14, 2021.He cited a recent study in the British medical journal The Lancet showing Africa with the highest global mortality rate among critically ill COVID-19 patients, despite it having fewer reported cases than most other regions. Tedros said that available evidence suggests new variants have substantially increased transmission globally, especially in areas with low vaccination rates. The risks have increased for people who are not protected, which is most of the world’s population, he said. “Right now, the virus is moving faster than the global distribution of vaccines.”The WHO chief expressed his gratitude to the leaders at the G-7 summit last week, who pledged 870 million doses of vaccine through the WHO-administered global vaccine cooperative, COVAX.He said while those donations would be a big help, the world needed more vaccines, and faster. Tedros said to end the pandemic, the shared goal must be to vaccinate at least 70% of the world’s population in the next year. That will take 11 billion doses of vaccine, and “the G-7 and G-20 can make this happen.” 
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Medical authorities in Cameroon marked World Blood Donor Day on Monday with continued pleas for blood donors, after a dramatic drop in donations over the past year. Donations fell by half in 2020, then by nearly half again so far this year, worsening the country’s blood shortage.Officials in Cameroon point to 32-year-old Alphonse Suh Chia as a good example of a determined, voluntary blood donor. 
Chia says he became a blood donor in February, after he watched as a 6-year-old boy died of severe anemia in the Central Hospital in Yaounde. He says the medical staff members on duty told him that the blood bank was dry and there was no one to donate blood to save the child’s life. Chia says he was being treated for malaria at the hospital and could not donate blood at the time.But since then, he says, he has joined an association called Green Hearts that donate blood to people in need. Cameroon says it needs 400,000 pints of blood each year to meet the medical needs of its 25 million people. But in 2020, people donated just 48,000 units of blood, down from 103,000 units in 2019. The central African state says blood donations have fallen again so far this year. Dora Ngum Suh Mbanya, director general of Cameroon’s National Blood Transfusion Center, says COVID-19 scares people away from donating blood.”With the COVID pandemic in 2020, there was a deficit of 44 percent in blood donation,” Mbanya said. “What we gathered is that COVID had a huge impact on blood donation. WHO set out criteria whereby, if you are a recovered person from COVID-19, you are allowed a month or so after recovery before you could be eligible to donate.”Mbyana says popular myths surrounding blood donation and transfusion are also an obstacle. “There are those who think that you take their blood and do witchcraft with it and so they cannot donate their blood. There are those with religious beliefs that you cannot take blood from one person and give to the next person. Those kinds of people will not want to donate blood since they would not even receive it. And so, we want to encourage our young people to step forward and take leadership roles in promoting health in our nation through blood donation,” Mbyana said. With Cameroon battling a separatist crisis in two western regions, Boko Haram attacks in the north and occasional spillover of violence from the Central African Republic, the government says the need for blood to treat wounded civilians and fighters is higher than ever. 
 
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Elizabeth Sherr had always had a passion for the ocean since she was young so trying to clean up the trash that litters beaches and the sea seemed a natural move. When she moved to live next to the sea in Barcelona, the native New Yorker posted some videos on TikTok encouraging others to help rid the beach of cigarette butts and plastic bottles but did not hold out much hope it would catch on. This undated handout photograph released on Jan. 14, 2021 by the University of Barcelona shows an underwater view of a Posidonia Oceanica seagrass meadow in the Mediterranean Sea. (AFP photo / University of Barcelona / Jordi Regas)To her surprise, after one video went viral, Sherr became the face of a global cleanup operation that removed almost 800,000 pieces from public spaces worldwide in ten days. The FILE – Two Belgian fans, wearing the Belgian colors, walk through plastic cups and other garbage after taking part in a celebration in Antwerp, Belgium, June 18, 2016.Single-use plastics are responsible for 49% of all marine pollution, while 27% is caused by plastics linked to fishing, according to data from the European Parliament. The 24-year-old campaigner said people from 33 countries from Peru to Honduras and Jordan to Cyprus joined in. “Many people got in touch to tell me that their attitude to sea pollution has completely changed since taking part in this challenge,” she said.  Sherr, who grew up in a Manhattan suburb, revealed the success of the challenge was due, in part, to a literary mistake which caught the imagination of other TikTok users. “In one video I wrote ‘Every follower is a piece of trash’. People on TikTok thought it was very funny.  That was the video which went viral with 1.3 million views,” said Sherr, who works for a nonprofit organization that works to combat deforestation.   “I never imagined it would take off like this. It has taken me aback but it has been good. I have always loved the ocean. It has always been my passion.” The European Commission’s directive will oblige all 27 member states to ban the use of plates, glasses and paper packaging covered with a single-use plastic film from July 3. Opposition The measure has met with opposition from some countries like Italy, which produces large quantities of these products. Frederique Ries, the European Parliament lawmaker who led the campaign to ban single-use plastics across the bloc, recently told an Instagram conference on trashchallenge:  “There were people who were hard to convince but we brought them on board for the ban on single-use plastics.” FILE – French skipper Catherine Chabaud stands on her boat as visitors pass by at Les Sables D’Olonne harbor on France’s Atlantic coast on Nov. 2, 2000.Catherine Chabaud, the first woman to travel solo around the world by boat, is a European Parliament lawmaker who has compiled a report on how to combat single-use plastics. “We must strengthen knowledge of nano-plastics, integrate the land-sea link as 80% of pollution in the seas comes from the land and we must launch an action plan to collect litter in rivers and estuaries,” Chabaud told an Instagram conference about #trashchallenge.   Holding a masters graduate in marine conservation, Sherr was inspired by the pioneering marine biologists Jacques Cousteau and Sylvie Earle. FILE – Captain Jacques Yves Cousteau poses on the French Riviera, April 9, 1995.She said Cousteau’s book “Silent World” and Earle’s “Sea Challenge” put her on the path to trying to save the oceans. “Cousteau opened my eyes but I would say that Dr. Earle was my real inspiration,” Sherr said. Earle was the first female chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Cousteau, who died in 1997 at 87, was a former French naval officer who wrote a series of influential books and films about marine conservation, the most notable being “The Silent World.”Carolina Sevilla, founder of the conservation group 5 Minute Beach Clean-Up was also involved in the European Parliament’s #trashchallenge. She said that her country, Costa Rica, hopes to become the first in the world where cleaning up the ocean will be part of the educational curriculum for 7 to 11-year-olds.   “We really hope that Costa Rica will become the first in the world mandatory program for students about cleaning up the ocean,” she said. 
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U.S.-based biotech company Novavax announced Monday that Phase 3 clinical trials of its COVID-19 vaccine show it to be more than 90 percent effective at preventing the disease and provide good protection against variants.
A release from the company said the study enrolled 29,960 participants across 119 sites in the United States and Mexico with an emphasis on recruiting a representative population of communities and demographic groups most impacted by the disease.
While demand for COVID-19 shots in the U.S. has dropped off dramatically, the need for more vaccines around the world remains critical as many developing nations are just getting vaccine programs going or have yet to start.
The Novavax vaccine, which is easy to store and transport, is expected to play an important role in boosting vaccine supplies in the developing world. In an interview with the Associated Press news agency, Novavax Chief Executive Stanley Erck said, “Many of our first doses will go to … low-and middle-income countries, and that was the goal to begin with.”  
The White House’s top adviser on the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told The Washington Post the vaccine is “really very impressive,” saying it is on par with the most effective shots developed during the pandemic. “It’s very important for the world’s population to have, yet again, another highly efficacious vaccine that looks in its trial to have a good safety profile.”
The company intends to file for regulatory authorizations in the third quarter, upon completion of the final phases of process qualification and assay validation needed to meet chemistry, manufacturing and controls (CMC) requirements.  
Upon regulatory approvals, Novamax says it is on track to reach manufacturing capacity of 100 million doses per month by the end of the third quarter and 150 million doses per month by the end of the fourth quarter of 2021.
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Scientists who have been challenging the theory that the coronavirus emerged naturally and couldn’t have leaked from a Chinese lab are calling for an inquiry into the role played during the pandemic by leading Western science and medical journals, including Nature and The Lancet. They say the editors of the influential journals rebuffed dozens of critical articles which raised at least the possibility of the coronavirus being engineered and that it might have subsequently leaked from a lab in Chinese city of Wuhan.  “The managers of these journals may have wanted to appease the Chinese Communist Party, as China is where an increasing proportion of their revenue comes from, and China has made it clear that those journals it supports must agree to adhere to its policy agendas,” Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor of medicine at Australia’s Flinders University, told VOA. “So many papers questioning the origins were quickly rejected by the journal editors at Nature and Lancet, etc. without even being sent for review. This early rejection was therefore presumably largely not on scientific grounds but on political or other grounds determined at a high level within those journals,” he says.  The editors of The Lancet and Nature reject the complaints, saying scientific merit determines the submissions they pick to publish and not politics. FILE – Workers in PPE spray the ground with desinfectant in Baishazhou market during a visit of World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, in WuhanA World Health Organization-led team earlier this year ruled the lab-leak theory “extremely unlikely,” and favored the prevailing standard narrative that the coronavirus most likely originated in a Wuhan wet market, jumping from an animal, likely a bat or pangolin, to humans. But the WHO inquiry has come under increasing criticism from some prominent Western scientists — as well as Western governments — who say the Chinese authorities blocked the WHO team during a four-week visit to Wuhan in January making the international probe worthless. Petrovsky is one of dozens of scientists skeptical of the natural-spillover theory who say their efforts to point out inconsistencies in the quickly established standard narrative was met with silence, rejection and hostility by the editors of major Western science journals.  Day of reckoning Another, Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, says there should be a “day of reckoning.” In an email exchange with VOA he said: “Untruthful statements and improper actions by scientists and science journalists who established and enforced the false narrative extended far beyond refusing to consider papers challenging the false narrative.”  Ebright and others allege some non-peer-reviewed were rushed into print, if they supported the conventional narrative. Those articles in turn set the tone for general media coverage, they add. “Starting in January 2020 and continuing through early 2021, a small group of scientists, and a larger group of science journalists, established and enforced the false narrative that scientific evidence supported natural spillover and a false narrative that this was the scientific consensus,” says Ebright.  But Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of Nature, says this is not so. “I would like to be very clear that Nature has never rejected a paper on the basis that it does not fit with a particular narrative or conventional wisdom; certainly not on my watch,” she told VOA. In an email exchange, she added: “We make decisions based solely on whether research meets our criteria for publication — robust original scientific research (where conclusions are sufficiently supported by the available evidence), of outstanding scientific importance, which reaches a conclusion of interest to a multidisciplinary readership; and we remain completely independent. All editors consider all submissions on the basis of their scientific merits alone and no subject is ever excluded from publication because the conclusions may be controversial.” US inquiry Last month, U.S. President Joe Biden instructed American intelligence agencies to investigate whether the virus may have been engineered and leaked from a Chinese lab. Biden has given the agencies three months to report back.Biden Orders Fresh Intelligence Report on COVID-19 OriginAmid growing speculation that COVID-19 might have leaked from Chinese laboratory, president tells US intelligence community to report back to him in 90 daysThe central focus of the investigation is on the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China as suspicions mount that the novel bat-derived virus roiling the world, and which has led to at least four million deaths, may have leaked from its lab, a claim Beijing has furiously denied.  Biden’s order came after U.S. intelligence discovered more details about three researchers at the Wuhan lab who fell ill in November 2019, several weeks before the first identified case of the outbreak — and more than a month before China informed WHO of “cases of pneumonia” of an “unknown cause” had been detected.  The researchers were hospitalized with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, but also with common respiratory illnesses, according to the intelligence report first publicly disclosed by The Wall Street Journal. Britain’s intelligence agencies — along with other Western European security services — are assisting the new American-led probe, according to officials on both sides of the Atlantic.   China’s authorities have denied there was any leak from the Wuhan lab, which conducts research on viruses and receives some funding from the U.S. government. Last year, Chinese propagandists blamed the coronavirus outbreak on an American Army sports delegation, which visited Wuhan just before the outbreak, and have also touted several other theories, which have been subsequently discredited by prominent virologists and epidemiologists. Scientists skeptical from the start of the natural-spillover theory, including Petrovsky, Ebright and a so-called Paris Group of scientists, which drafted two open letters on the origins of coronavirus, say an inquiry into the role of major science journals is in order. Much of the focus has been on The Lancet and Nature but other leading  journals have come under criticism, including Science, an academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “This pandemic has exposed just how vulnerable our scientific institutions including our academies, universities and scientific journals are to politicization and covert influence,” says Petrovsky. “At the same time as exerting undue influence over Western journals, China is launching hundreds of its own journals over which it will have direct control and are offering easy routes to publication and incentives for scientists to publish in them,” he adds.  “An inquiry by Congress into this might be a good first step although this is also a much broader international issue, that should ultimately involve an international effort to fix these problems,” he told VOA. Petrovsky says he and others faced tremendous hurdles in getting published papers casting doubt on the natural-spillover theory. He says if a rare paper was initially accepted for consideration, it fell at the second stage when it was sent to reviewers to consider its merits and would then be rejected. “Almost all the scientific community, from which reviewers are selected, had been indoctrinated by the misleading and heavily manipulative early Lancet and Nature Medicine commentaries that suggested any questioning of the origins should be seen as an attack by conspiracy theorists from the extreme right,” he says. Magdalena Skipper, the British geneticist and the first woman to edit Nature in its 150-year history, says editorial decision-making is kept strictly separate from the wider commercial interests of Springer Nature, the German-British academic publisher that owns Nature.  “We have always been and continue to be scrupulous in keeping any business commercial interests Springer Nature may have, in China or anywhere else, totally separate from our editorial processes,” she said. Nature and its sister titles have sought to reflect “the science of the pandemic, as new evidence has come to light,” Skipper adds. Springer Nature has offices spread across the world and publishes around 3,000 journals, including Nature and Scientific American. Four years ago following a Financial Times report, the company acknowledged it had been blocking access in China to hundreds of academic articles touching on subjects seen as sensitive by the Chinese Communist government. The company said less than one percent of its content available online in global markets had been impacted.  Springer Nature has dozens of cooperation and sponsorship agreements with Chinese educational and government institutions. So, too, does the owner of The Lancet, Elsevier, a Netherlands-based publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content.   The Lancet also told VOA that neither politics nor commerce play any part in shaping editorial policies. In a statement it said: “The Lancet is an editorially independent journal. Scientific discussion and debate are an important part of the scientific process, and the Lancet journals welcome responses from readers and the wider scientific community to content published in the journals. The Lancet journals set extremely high standards and papers are selected for publication based on the strength of the science and the credibility of the scientific argument.” 
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Conservationists have praised efforts by Australian authorities to drastically reduce the amount of plastic waste and eliminate some disposable coffee cups. The New South Wales state government wants to ban many common plastic items, including straws, drinks stirrers and cutlery, as well as polystyrene cups in a bid to protect the environment and reduce waste.    Lightweight plastic shopping bags could be eliminated within six months of new laws being passed.  The reforms could be approved by lawmakers this year. Other products will be phased out at different times depending on the availability of, for example, paper and bamboo alternatives.    Officials have estimated the measures will stop about 2.7 billion items of plastic from ending up in the environment and oceans over the next 20 years.    New South Wales Environment Minister Matt Kean has warned that the world is on track to have more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050.    He told Australian television that the changes would help protect the community.  “No-one wants to be wading through plastics when they go to the beach, let alone be consuming it in their food and water, and that is what we are doing at the moment. Every day in New South Wales people are consuming over 2,000 bits of plastic. That is the equivalent of a credit card of plastic they are ingesting every week and it is largely because of the pervasiveness of single-use plastics across our environment. So, we believe that we can do something about that. Do something about it where there are alternatives available and when it does not add to cost and that is what I am looking to see,” Kean said.  In Western Australia, the state government has also announced ambitious plans to tackle waste. By the end of this year, it will ban a range of items, including single-use plastic bowls, plates, straws, polystyrene food containers and thick plastic shopping bags.  Polystyrene packaging and takeaway plastic coffee cups and their lids will be outlawed in 2022.  It is estimated that Australians throw out about a billion coffee cups each year.  The World Wildlife Fund Australia said the state governments in New South Wales and Western Australia are in a “race to the top” in waste measures and that the reforms were “a terrific outcome for the environment.”   But conservationists have warned that Tasmania and the Northern Territory were the only Australian jurisdictions “without a plan to ban problem single-use plastics.” Also, in a few weeks, it will be illegal for companies to export certain waste plastics from Australia under tough new rules. 
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A report published in The New England Journal of Medicine shows the potentially lifesaving results of lab-grown mosquitos. Infected with bacteria, the insects may no longer have the ability to transmit dengue. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi has more. 
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Saudi Arabia announced Saturday this year’s Hajj pilgrimage will be limited to no more than 60,000 people, all of them from within the kingdom, due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.The announcement by the kingdom comes after it ran an incredibly pared-down pilgrimage last year over the virus, but still allowed a small number of the faithful to take part in the annual ceremony.A statement on the state-run Saudi Press Agency quoted the kingdom’s Hajj and Umrah Ministry making the announcement. It said this year’s Hajj, which will begin in mid-July, will be limited to those ages 18 to 65.Those taking part must be vaccinated as well, the ministry said.”The kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is honored to host pilgrims every year, confirms that this arrangement comes out of its constant concern for the health, safety and security of pilgrims as well as the safety of their countries,” the statement said.In last year’s Hajj, as few as 1,000 people already residing in Saudi Arabia were selected to take part. Two-thirds were foreign residents from among the 160 different nationalities that would have normally been represented at the Hajj. One-third were Saudi security personnel and medical staff.Each year, up to 2 million Muslims perform the Hajj, a physically demanding and often costly pilgrimage that draws the faithful from around the world. The Hajj, required of all able-bodied Muslims to perform once in their lifetime, is seen as a chance to wipe clean past sins and bring about greater humility and unity among Muslims.The kingdom’s Al Saud ruling family stakes its legitimacy in this oil-rich nation on overseeing and protecting the Hajj sites. Ensuring the Hajj happens has been a priority for them.Disease outbreaks have always been a concern surrounding the Hajj. Pilgrims fought off a malaria outbreak in 632, cholera in 1821 killed an estimated 20,000, and another cholera outbreak in 1865 killed 15,000 before spreading worldwide.More recently, Saudi Arabia faced danger from a different coronavirus, one that causes the Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS. The kingdom increased its public health measures during the Hajj in 2012 and 2013, urging the sick and the elderly not to take part.In recent years, Saudi officials also instituted bans on pilgrims coming from countries affected by the Ebola virus.Saudi Arabia had closed its borders for months to try and stop the spread of the coronavirus. Since the start of the pandemic, the kingdom has reported more than 462,000 cases of the virus with 7,500 deaths. It has administered some 15.4 million doses of coronavirus vaccines, according to the World Health Organization. The kingdom is home to more than 30 million people.
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The recent breakup of an Antarctic ice shelf is speeding up the ocean-bound descent of a glacier holding back at least a meter of sea level rise, Ice front of the ice shelf in front of Pine Island Glacier, a major glacier system of West Antarctica.”The real question is, how fast is that going to happen, and how much time do we have to adapt?” said Pierre Dutrieux, an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey and a co-author of the study. When ice from the ice sheet enters the ocean, it raises sea levels, which will eventually make coastal cities unlivable.The worrying activity prompted researchers at the University of Washington and British Antarctic Survey to study the reasons behind the glacier’s accelerated movement. They shared their results June 11 in Science Advances.”We naively thought that the ocean was going to be the main driver of the retreat and the acceleration,” Dutrieux said. “And maybe at some point the atmosphere, if it continues to warm up, was going to play a role.”The authors first used satellite images to observe changes in how fast the ice was moving. When they ran a computer model to simulate ice flow, the results suggested that the loss of the ice shelves could better explain the glacier’s speedup than warming ocean temperatures.”Ice shelves tend to hold back the flow of ice into the ocean. So if you remove an ice shelf, the glaciers will move faster,” said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center and lead author of the study. “I wasn’t expecting the part that we lost to have such a big impact on the glacier,” Joughin added.Identifying this additional factor that contributes to glacier speedup could help improve models for studying their movements.”That is fundamental physics knowledge for us to be able to predict what’s going to happen in the future,” said Andrea Dutton, who studies sea level rise at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was not involved in the study.Initially, researchers expected oceans warmed by climate change to gradually melt the glacier over centuries. But if the rapid collapse continues, the glacier could disappear faster than coastal communities could prepare for rising sea levels.”Based on these results, I want to look more into taking the model and seeing what happens if we remove larger parts of that ice shelf,” Joughin said.For now, the study concludes that Pine Island Glacier’s ice shelf could be entering another long phase of stability. Or the edge could begin retreating even more abruptly than before. Either scenario will still warrant close observation.Human-caused warming of the ocean will also continue to thin the underside of the glacier, potentially destabilizing it more.”We have enough knowledge to understand that we need to do everything in our power to reduce emissions and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to prevent this from becoming an unstoppable sea-level rise scenario,” Dutton said.
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An auction for a ride into space next month alongside Jeff Bezos and his brother ended Saturday with a winning $28 million bid.The Amazon founder’s rocket company, Blue Origin, did not disclose the winner’s name following the live online auction. The identity will be revealed in a couple weeks — closer to the brief up-and-down flight from West Texas on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s moon landing.It will be the first launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket with people on board, kicking off the company’s space tourism business. Fifteen previous test flights of the reusable rocket and capsule since 2015 — short hops lasting about 10 minutes — were all successful.Saturday’s auction followed more than a month of online bidding that had reached $4.8 million by Friday. More than 7,500 people from 159 countries registered to bid, according to Blue Origin. More than 20 bidders — the high rollers — took part in Saturday’s auction.Bezos announced Monday that he and his younger brother, Mark, would be on board New Shepard’s first crew flight; the news quickly boosted bidding. The winning amount is being donated to Blue Origin’s Club for the Future, an educational effort to promote science and tech among young people.The completely automated capsule can carry up to six passengers, each of whom gets a big window. Blue Origin’s top sales director, Ariane Cornell, said following the auction that the fourth and final seat on the debut crew flight would be announced soon.Blue Origin has yet to open ticket sales to the public or divulge prices.
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Moscow’s mayor on Saturday ordered a week off for some workplaces and imposed restrictions on many businesses to fight coronavirus infections that have more than doubled in the past week.The national coronavirus task force reported 6,701 new confirmed cases in Moscow, compared with 2,936 on June 6. Nationally, the daily tally has spiked by nearly half over the past week, to 13,510.After several weeks of lockdown as the pandemic spread in the spring of 2020, the Russian capital eased restrictions and did not reimpose any during subsequent case increases. But because of the recent sharp rise, “it is impossible not to react to such a situation,” Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.He ordered enterprises that do not normally work on weekends to remain closed for the next week while continuing to pay employees. Food courts and children’s play areas in shopping centers also are to close for a week beginning Sunday, and restaurants and bars must limit their service.People wearing face masks to help curb the spread of the coronavirus ride a subway car in Moscow, Russia, June 10, 2021.Mask, glove enforcementEarlier in the week, city authorities said enforcement of mask- and glove-wearing requirements on mass transit, in stores and in other public places would be strengthened and that violators could face fines of up to 5,000 rubles ($70).Although Russia was the first country to deploy a coronavirus vaccine, its use has been relatively low; many Russians are reluctant to get vaccinated.President Vladimir Putin on Saturday said 18 million Russians had received the vaccine — about 12% of the population.For the entire pandemic period, the task force has reported nearly 5.2 million infections in the country of about 146 million people and 126,000 deaths. However, a report from Russian state statistics agency Rosstat on Friday found more than 144,000 virus-related deaths last year alone.The statistics agency, unlike the task force, counts fatalities in which coronavirus infection was present or suspected but was not the main cause of death.The agency’s report found about 340,000 more people died in 2020 than in 2019; it did not give details of the causes of the higher year-on-year death toll.The higher death toll and a lower number of births combined to make an overall population decline of 702,000, about twice the decline in 2019, Rosstat said.
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Concerns about the safety of the COVID vaccine are common especially when it comes to inoculating very young children. A new study suggests that some moms may be passing along antibodies to their infants. VOA’s Dilge Timocin has more.  Camera: Tezcan Taskiran
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Top U.S. and Chinese diplomats appear to have had another sharply worded exchange, with Beijing saying it told the U.S. to cease interfering in its internal affairs and accusing Washington of politicizing the search for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.Senior Chinese foreign policy adviser Yang Jiechi and Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a phone call Friday that revealed wide divisions in several contentious areas, including the curtailing of freedoms in Hong Kong and the mass detention of Muslims in the northwestern Xinjiang region.Calls for a more thorough investigation into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 are particularly sensitive for China because of suggestions that it might have have escaped from a laboratory in the central city of Wuhan, where cases were first discovered.Yang said China was “gravely concerned” over what he called “absurd” stories that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab.China “firmly opposes any despicable acts that use the epidemic as an excuse to slander China and to shift blames,” Yang was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.“Some people in the United States have fabricated and peddled absurd stories claiming Wuhan lab leak, which China is gravely concerned about,” Yang said. “China urges the United States to respect facts and science, refrain from politicizing COVID-19 origin tracing and concentrate on international anti-pandemic cooperation.”The State Department said Blinken “stressed the importance of cooperation and transparency regarding the origin of the virus, including the need for (World Health Organization) Phase 2 expert-led studies in China.”The U.S. and others have accused China of failing to provide the raw data and access to sites that would allow a more thorough investigation into where the virus sprung from and how it initially spread.Equally contentious were the issues of Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan and accusations that China has arbitrarily detained two Canadian citizens in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of an executive of Chinese communications technology giant Huawei, who is wanted by U.S. law enforcement.The U.S. has “fabricated various lies about Xinjiang in an attempt to sabotage the stability and unity in Xinjiang, which confuse right and wrong and are extremely absurd. China is firmly opposed to such actions,” Yang said.FILE – People walk by a billboard reading ‘All people participate in building a line of defense against the epidemic, please get the vaccine in time’ in Beijing, May 24, 2021.“Hong Kong affairs are purely China’s internal affairs,” and those found in violation of a sweeping national security law imposed on the former British colony “must be punished,” Yang said.Blinken, on the other hand, underscored U.S. concern over the deterioration of democratic norms in Hong Kong and the ongoing “genocide and crimes against humanity against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” the State Department said.He also urged Beijing to ease pressure against Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy China claims as its own territory, to be annexed by force if necessary.According to Xinhua, Yang said Taiwan involves China’s “core interests” and that Beijing “firmly defends its national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”The tone of the phone call seemed to echo contentious talks in March in Alaska, when the sides traded sharp and unusually public barbs over vastly different views of each other and the world in their first face-to-face meeting since President Joe Biden took office.At that meeting, the U.S. accused the Chinese delegation of “grandstanding,” while Beijing fired back, saying there was a “strong smell of gunpowder and drama” that was entirely the fault of the Americans.Relations between them have deteriorated to their lowest level in decades, with the Biden administration showing no signs of deviating from the established U.S. hardline against China over trade, technology, human rights and China’s claim to the South China Sea.Beijing, meanwhile, has fought back doggedly against what it sees as attempts to smear its reputation and restrain its development.On Thursday, its ceremonial legislature passed a law to retaliate against sanctions imposed on Chinese politicians and organizations, threatening to deny entry to and freeze the Chinese assets of anyone who formulates or implements such measures, potentially placing new pressure on foreign companies operating in the country.  
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COVID-19 vaccines for children are moving closer to availability, but access remains limited.Moderna announced late this week that it was submitting its vaccine to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization in children age 12 and older.The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has already received the go-ahead for this age group.The companies are testing their vaccines on younger age groups, down to 6 months. Results are expected in the fall.The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are moving into pediatric populations ahead of those from Johnson & Johnson and the University of Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership.The AstraZeneca vaccine makes up the bulk of the doses delivered through COVAX, the WHO-backed program delivering shots to low- and middle-income countries.Rare but serious blood clotting issues have slowed down the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. A study this week in the journal Nature Medicine found a rate of about one case per every 100,000 people who received the AstraZeneca shot.The vaccine’s benefits still far outweigh the risks, according to regulators in the United States and Europe and the World Health Organization. These kinds of blood clots can also be a complication of COVID-19, the Scottish study noted. They are also a rare side effect of other common vaccines, including those for influenza, hepatitis B and measles, mumps and rubella.As to whether this side effect will affect children, “we don’t yet know the answer to that,” said William Moss, head of the Johns Hopkins University International Vaccine Access Center. “It’s possible either way. The risk could be very similar to (that for) older adults, or the risk could be decreased.”Oxford said it has stopped enrolling children in its vaccine trial while it evaluates the blood clotting issues.Though the delay will push back availability for children, the WHO says children are not the top priority for vaccination currently.”Though they can get infected with COVID-19 and they can transmit the infection to others, they are at much lower risk of getting severe disease compared to older adults,” WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan told the organization’s Science in 5 podcast.”Except for (the) very few children who are at a high risk, (they are) not considered to be a high priority right now because we have limited doses of vaccines. We need to use them to protect the most vulnerable,” including health care workers and the elderly, she said.The G-7 group of industrialized countries this week pledged 1 billion doses to global vaccination efforts, including 500 million Pfizer-BioNTech shots donated by the United States.That falls billions of doses short of what is needed, critics note, and most of the doses are not expected until next year.While the Pfizer and Moderna shots have not had the same blood clotting issues as the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, officials have raised concerns about their possible link to swelling of the heart or the heart’s lining.A few more patients than expected developed this side effect after receiving these vaccines, according to reports from the United States and Israel, but regulators have not determined whether the vaccines are responsible.Most recovered without incident.  
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