The U.N. secretary-general and the head of the World Health Organization launched an ambitious strategy Thursday to have 40% of the world’s population vaccinated against COVID-19 by the end of this year, and 70% by mid-2022.

“With vaccine production now at nearly 1.5 billion doses per month, we can reach 40% of people in all countries by year’s end — if we can mobilize some $8 billion to ensure that distribution is equitable,” U.N. chief Antonio Guterres told a news conference.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said 6.5 billion doses have already been administered worldwide. Another 5 billion are needed to meet the 70% benchmark, which Tedros said current vaccine manufacturing rates can handle.

“This is not a supply problem, it is an allocation problem,” he said, adding it is critical that the elderly, health care workers and other at-risk groups are prioritized.

An earlier goal to vaccinate 10% of every country’s population by the end of September fell short, with 56 countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, unable to meet the target. WHO said 200 million doses are needed to get those countries to meet the 10% target.

“That’s a week’s worth of the global supply,” said Katherine O’Brien, WHO’s director of immunization vaccines and biologicals. “If that can’t be achieved, there really needs to be a fine point put on that.”

To get to the 40% benchmark, Tedros urged countries which have already achieved high coverage to swap their place in the vaccine distribution line with countries that have had less access.

“We can only achieve our targets if countries and companies put contracts for COVAX and the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust (AVAT) first for deliveries and donated doses,” Tedros said. “We have the tools to bring the pandemic under control if we use them properly and share them fairly.”

WHO officials said that achieving the 40% vaccination target would essentially end the acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic, but if the targets can’t be reached, the risk continues of new variants emerging that may be vaccine resistant.

“It is ambitious, but it is very doable,” said Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to Tedros. He said the doses are paid for, but that the issue is getting them prioritized for distribution through the COVAX facility and AVAT, so they reach the countries that are lagging.

The strategy also urges vaccine-producing countries to share technology and licensing to help other nations scale up production of doses. It also calls on vaccine manufacturers to prioritize fulfilling contracts with COVAX and AVAT, so doses go to the neediest countries. There is a role for international financial institutions, as well, in assisting countries in accessing the funding needed for domestic delivery of doses.

WHO said a three-step approach to vaccination should be taken, targeting the elderly, health care workers and high-risk groups first, followed by all adults and lastly, adolescents.

There have been more than 236.67 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and at least 4.8 million deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, which tracks global data on the infection. 
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German Health Minister Jens Spahn said Thursday the nation has vaccinated millions more people than previously thought, thanks to some unreported vaccination numbers discovered by the Robert Koch Institute for Disease Control.

The institute says nearly 80% of adults in Germany are fully vaccinated, and about 84% have received at least one shot. Previous official reports were about 5% lower — meaning there are about 3.5 million more people vaccinated than had been reported. 

Speaking to reporters in Berlin, Spahn said the discrepancy was discovered in surveys conducted by the RKI that revealed additional vaccinations. He believes some big companies’ employee vaccination programs and mobile vaccination teams in nursing centers and elsewhere may account for those initially unreported.

The new RKI figures are based on surveys and do not include people under the age of 18, which is why the agency has yet to give a new overall number of vaccinated people in Germany.

Spahn said these new numbers are good news in terms of any new COVID-19 restrictions that might be contemplated in the coming months, barring any unforeseen new variants or surges of cases.  

“From today’s perspective, we will not need any further restrictions in autumn and winter to get through this time well without overburdening the health system,” he said.

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters.
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More than 260,000 African children under the age of five die from malaria each year, including more than 10,000 in Kenya, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO’s backing of a malaria vaccine, Mosquirix, for children in sub-Saharan Africa has raised hopes of preventing those deaths. The vaccine proved effective in a pilot program in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization gave the green light for the use of the vaccine for children between five and 24 months of age in Africa and other regions prone to a high level of malaria transmission.

This follows trials of the vaccine in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. The four-dose shot was administered to 800,000 African children.

Thirty-year-old Salome Awuor allowed her son, now three years old, to take part in the malaria vaccine trials in Kisumu County, western Kenya.

The mother of four said previously she would visit her nearest clinic four times a month to get malaria treatment for him. At the time, he was 12 months old.

“My son was given three jabs, and malaria went down. I never went back to the clinic seeking malaria treatment. I feel so good my children no longer get sick most of the time. That’s why whenever I hear about vaccines, I run to get them because it helps a lot,” she said.

WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus described the malaria vaccine breakthrough as historic and one that could save the lives of tens of thousands of young people each year.

According to the WHO, malaria affects more than 229 million people each year and kills more than 400,000.

In Africa, more than a quarter of a million children die from the mosquito-borne disease.

Earlier trials in 2015 showed the vaccine could prevent 40 percent of malaria cases and about 30 percent of severe cases.

Bernhards Ogutu is a chief researcher at Kenya Medical Research Institute. He said Kenya’s participation in the study proves the vaccine will work on the country’s population.

“If it’s safe you know it was done in your population and you know it’s good for you. You are not relying on data from another population but from your own population. So that you can confidently advise the government this is safe for us, it works and its approved and it was done by us and we contributed to this development,” he said.

The first three vaccine doses are given a month apart when children are babies, and a final booster is given when the child is one-and-a-half years old.

Ogutu has voiced confidence that Kenyan parents will vaccinate their children from malaria.

“People have been asking where it is now that we have been given the go ahead, we can now go for the rollout. I think it’s time to get to our people and tell them now it’s available and now it’s a matter of procuring the vaccine and ensuring it’s available and start getting it to those who need it,” said Ogutu.

So far, there is no word on when the vaccine will become available to the general public.
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Americans are being warned to beware of potentially deadly fake prescription pills that are laced with the powerful opioid fentanyl and the highly addictive stimulant methamphetamine. The counterfeit tablets are linked to a wave of drug overdoses killing unsuspecting users.

In its first warning in six years, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said international and domestic criminal networks were mass-producing fake pills and falsely marketing them as legitimate prescription medication.

“Counterfeit pills that contain these dangerous and extremely addictive drugs are more lethal and more accessible than ever before,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram at a news conference in Washington.

The notification was issued last week after the DEA announced it had seized more than 1.8 million fake pills during a two-month undercover operation and had arrested more than 810 people. In a statement, the agency said it had confiscated more than 9.5 million potentially lethal pills in the last year.

“Illicit fentanyl was responsible for nearly three-quarters of the more than 93,000 fatal drug overdoses in the United States in 2020,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. Health officials report fentanyl was responsible for nearly 70,000 of the overdose deaths.

Powerful pills

U.S. law enforcement investigators say the majority of counterfeit medication found in America is being made in labs in Mexico using chemicals imported from China. The DEA believes Chinese traffickers have switched from primarily manufacturing finished fentanyl to exporting precursors of the synthetic opioid to Mexican cartels, which then manufacture illicit fentanyl. U.S. officials are now seeking greater cooperation from Mexican law enforcement agencies to disrupt trafficking in the country.

DEA laboratory testing revealed that two out of five fentanyl-laced fake pills seized contained a potentially deadly dose of just 2 milligrams. Fentanyl can be 100 times more powerful than morphine. Drug researchers say a deadly dose of fentanyl is small enough to fit on the tip of a pencil.

“The fake pills seized were capable of killing more than 700,000 people,” Milgram noted, adding that law enforcement agencies have sought to shut down criminal distribution networks selling tablets that look exactly like name-brand prescription medications. “We are alerting the public to this danger so that people have the information they need to protect themselves and their children.”

The DEA alert said medications prescribed by doctors and dispensed by licensed pharmacists were safe, but pills acquired by other avenues were potentially deadly.

Decades of death 

Since 1999, more than 500,000 Americans have died of opioid overdoses, both prescription and nonprescription. Deaths rose in nearly all states, with the highest increases in California, Kentucky, Vermont, South Carolina and West Virginia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The more than 9.5 million fake tablets seized this year represented 430% more than the number seized in 2019. The DEA also confiscated ingredients used to make tens of millions of pills, including more than 4,000 kilograms of methamphetamine.

“The pervasiveness of these illicit drugs, and the fatal overdoses that too often result, is a problem that cuts across America from small towns to big cities and everything in between,” said Monaco.

The most common counterfeit pills are being made to look identical to prescription medications such as Oxycontin, Xanax, Vicodin or stimulants like amphetamines. Investigators say the fake medications are widely available and sold on social media platforms as well as on the streets.

“The illicit drug supply introduces even greater uncertainty about what people are taking, and that contributes to overdoses.” Dr. Caleb Alexander, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, told VOA. “If someone combines fentanyl with heroin or methamphetamine or another illicit product, it can be deadly.”
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The World Health Organization recommended Wednesday that children in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions on the continent with moderate-to-high malaria transmission receive a malaria vaccine.

The vaccine, known as Mosquirix, proved effective in a pilot program in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi that has reached more than 800,000 children since 2019. 

The WHO said malaria is a top killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa, causing the deaths of more than 260,000 children under age 5 every year. 

The vaccine, which requires four doses, counters P. falciparum, “the most deadly malaria parasite globally, and the most prevalent in Africa,” WHO said in a press release. 

“For centuries, malaria has stalked sub-Saharan Africa, causing immense personal suffering,” Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, said in a statement. “We have long hoped for an effective malaria vaccine and now for the first time ever, we have such a vaccine recommended for widespread use. Today’s recommendation offers a glimmer of hope for the continent which shoulders the heaviest burden of the disease and we expect many more African children to be protected from malaria and grow into healthy adults.” 

Substantial benefit

According to WHO, pilot program data showed that more than two-thirds of children who were not sleeping under bed nets were benefiting from the vaccine, and that there was a 30% reduction in “deadly severe malaria, even when introduced in areas where insecticide-treated nets are widely used and there is good access to diagnosis and treatment.”

The pilot program also found that the vaccine had a “favorable safety profile” and was “cost effective.” 

According to The Wall Street Journal, it could still be years until the vaccine is widely available. 

The vaccine has been under development for 30 years by GlaxoSmithKline, a global pharmaceutical company; PATH, a global nonprofit focused on health issues; and some African research organizations, WHO said. 

The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation provided late-stage development funding for the vaccine, WHO said. 
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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Wednesday awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to two scientists for their work – independently – in developing a new way of building molecules, a process with applications throughout industry.

Speaking in Stockholm, academy Secretary General Goran Hansson said chemists Benjamin List of Germany’s Max Planck Institute and David MacMillan of Princeton University will split this year’s prize.

In presenting the award, the academy explained the two chemists developed new, organic catalysts to help build molecules.

Catalysts are substances that control and accelerate chemical reactions, without becoming part of the final product, and are essential to constructing molecules for research and industry.

The academy said previously, it was believed there were just two types of catalysts available: metals and enzymes. But over the last 20 years, List and MacMillan, working independently of each other, have developed a third type of catalyst, known as asymmetric organocatalysis.

In the words of the academy, “Organic catalysts have a stable framework of carbon atoms, to which more active chemical groups can attach. These often contain common elements such as oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur or phosphorus. This means that these catalysts are both environmentally friendly and cheap to produce.”

Using these reactions, researchers can build molecules that can form elastic and durable materials, store energy in batteries or inhibit the progression of disease.

The Nobel Prizes for medicine and physics were awarded earlier this week. The prizes for literature, peace and economics to be awarded over the next week.

Some information for this report comes from AP. 
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The crew of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft was welcomed aboard the International Space Station Tuesday, though a communications glitch during their final approach delayed their eventual boarding.

The Soyuz spacecraft was launched Tuesday from the Russian spaceport in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The ship was carrying a history-making crew, as it included film director Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild, who will be filming a feature film during their stay at the station.

After the spacecraft orbited the earth twice and made a final approach to the ISS, mission control reported the Soyuz craft experienced some communication issues. Those issues resulted in the crew abandoning automated docking procedures. Veteran Cosmonaut Shkaplerov, the other crew member on the Soyuz craft, manually guided the spacecraft into place without a problem.

The manual docking set back the scheduled opening of the hatch between the spacecraft and the station by an hour.

Once they were welcomed on board the ISS, Shipenko and Peresild will spend the next 12 days filming segments of a new feature film called “Challenge” — the first to actually be shot in outer space.  

NASA says filming will begin almost immediately. Pereslid will play a doctor who is launched to the orbital outpost to save an ailing cosmonaut. Shkaplerov and two fellow cosmonauts already on board the ISS, Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, will all have speaking roles in the film.

Shipenko and Pereslid will return to Earth on October 17 with Novitskiy.

The historic mission beats out a similar plan announced last year by Hollywood superstar actor Tom Cruise, the U.S. space agency NASA and Elon Musk’s privately-owned SpaceX company, which ferries crews and cargo to the ISS.  

Russian space officials are hoping the film will restore some luster to the program, which has fallen from its glory days of the 1950s and `60s, when it launched the first man-made satellite as well as the first man and woman, into orbit, but has been plagued by delays, accidents and corruption scandals in recent years.

Tuesday’s launch comes nearly a month after four Americans became the first all-civilian crew to orbit the Earth, spending three days in space aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press.
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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Tuesday announced the Nobel prize in physics goes to three scientists for their work in helping to understand complex physical systems, work that has proved valuable in quantifying and predicting climate.  

At a Stockholm news conference, the academy’s Secretary General Goran K. Hansson and a panel of Nobel jurors presented one half of the physics prize to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.”

Hansson said the other half of the prize has been awarded to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.” 

The panel said the work of Manabe and Hasselmann “laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it.”

Born in Japan and now a senior meteorologist at Princeton University, Manabe pioneered studies in how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth. 

A professor of meteorology at Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg, Germany, Hasselmann created a model that links together weather and climate, thus answering the question of why climate models can be reliable despite weather being changeable and chaotic.

And Sapienza University of Rome physicist Parisi, over the course of his career, discovered hidden patterns in disordered complex materials, making it possible to understand and describe many different and apparently entirely random materials and phenomena in all areas of science and mathematics.

The three scientists will split the $1.1 million cash prize.  The Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded Monday, with prizes for chemistry, literature, peace and economics to be awarded later this week and early next week.

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence-France Presse.
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Researchers in Australia have shown a bacteria can sterilize and eradicate a disease-carrying mosquito that is responsible for spreading dengue, yellow fever and Zika.

Three million male Aedes aegypti, or yellow fever mosquitoes, were released in the trial at three sites in Northern Queensland state. They were reared at James Cook University in Cairns and sterilized with a naturally-occurring bacteria called Wolbachia. 

Researchers say the bacteria appears to have changed part of the male insects’ reproductive biology, so that female mosquitoes that mate with them lay eggs that do not hatch. 

The flying insects were released over a 20-week period in 2018. Mosquito numbers subsequently fell by more than 80%. When scientists returned the following year, they found one of the trial areas had almost no mosquitoes.

Nigel Beebe is an associate professor at the University of Queensland and research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO. He hopes the sterilization method will eventually be used in developing countries. 

“We wanted to show in a developed country that the technology was robust, we could mass rear mosquitoes. It is not very expensive to mass rear mosquitoes and it is really the separation of the males from the females,” he said. 

The Australian team plans to use a similar technique to suppress the virus-spreading Asian Tiger mosquito that has become established in the Torres Strait in northern Australia.

“At the moment we have to use relatively sophisticated technology to do that. But we are now trying to build something that is much more robust and can be used in tropical countries and will be relatively cheap to actually be able separate the males from the females. The mass rearing of the mosquitoes is actually pretty cheap to do. So, I think, absolutely we will have application in developing countries,” saId Beebe. 

Researchers elsewhere are looking at ways to use sterile male mosquitos to curb the spread of malaria, but associate professor Beebe has said it was a “complicated” challenge. 

More than 40% of people worldwide suffer from mosquito-borne diseases. The Australian team hopes its “environmentally-friendly mosquito control” method will help tackle current and future outbreaks of dengue and other debilitating diseases. 

 
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A new study reveals the two-dose COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech is 90% effective at keeping someone from being hospitalized from the virus up to six months after receiving the second dose.   

Researchers from Pfizer and U.S.-based health care consortium Kaiser Permanente observed the records of about 3.4 million people who were members of Kaiser’s Southern California health insurer and provider program between December 2020 and August of this year.   

The study, published Monday in The Lancet medical journal, also revealed the vaccine was 93% effective against the highly contagious Delta variant for at least six months after the second shot.   

But the researchers also found that the vaccine’s effectiveness against infection dropped from 88% one month after completing the regimen to 47% after six months.   

The new study was published on the same day the European Union’s drug regulator  approved the use of booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for those aged 18 years and older, but left it to individual countries to decide whether or not to recommend the shots for widespread use.      

The European Medicines Agency said in a statement Monday that a booster dose of the Pfizer vaccine “may be considered at least 6 months after the second dose for people aged 18 years and older.”

The agency said people with a severely weakened immune system should be given a third dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine at least 28 days after they have received their second shot.  

The guidance comes as some EU member states have already begun administering booster shots, while others are still debating how broadly to use boosters in their populations.   

Meanwhile, the New York Times newspaper said Monday that Johnson & Johnson will ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve a booster shot of its single-dose COVID-19 vaccine.   

The U.S. drugmaker announced last month that clinical trials show a second shot of its vaccine increased its effectiveness against the virus to 94% about two months after the first dose, which provided about 70% effectiveness.   

Johnson & Johnson said the company is submitting the results of its studies to the FDA, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the European Medicines Agency  and other health authorities for potential use of the vaccine as a booster eight months or later after the primary single-dose vaccination. 

Johnson & Johnson’s request comes less than two weeks after the FDA authorized a third shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech two-dose COVID-19 vaccine for Americans 65 years old and above and adults at high risk of severe illness. The FDA is currently considering whether to approve a third shot of the two-dose Moderna vaccine.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters. 
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Workers continue to clean up a massive oil spill off the coast of California as divers try to learn why an underwater pipeline started leaking late last week. Mike O’Sullivan reports from Los Angeles. 
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The U.N. Children’s Fund says children are likely to suffer most from the monthslong COVID-related restrictions, school closures, and separation from family and friends.

The latest estimates show more than one in seven adolescents aged 10 to 19 suffer from mental health disorders globally, while nearly 46,000 adolescents commit suicide every year.

UNICEF spokesman James Elder told VOA most of these conditions are not being addressed because of the stigma attached to mental illness and the lack of government investment. Only about two percent of government health budgets are allocated to mental health spending globally, he said. 

“Twenty percent … of young people are saying that they are feeling depressed and have very little interest in things,” he said. “That again is a clear indication of the impact COVID’s been having. … There is a whole range of mental disorders — anxiety and depression and bipolar — that young people are suffering from.”

UNICEF reports more than 1.6 billion children have suffered some loss of education because of pandemic lockdowns. Elder said children’s mental health often deteriorates when there is a disruption to their daily routines, such as not attending school, not engaging in recreational activities, and not socializing with friends. These problems, he said, affect children all over the world, in rich and poor countries alike. 

“Of course, if you are from a country where you do not have connectivity, you do not have a laptop or one of your parents is on $200 a month, then, of course, those stresses, that anxiety, that risk of slipping into a mental health disorder is much greater,” he said. “And in some of the world’s poorest countries, governments are spending less than a dollar per person treating mental health conditions.”

The cost of ignoring mental disorders is enormous, UNICEF warned. It cited a new analysis by the London School of Economics, which indicates nearly $390 billion in human capital is lost every year due to mental disorders among young people.

 
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