Three 2021 Nobel Prize laureates said Monday that climate change is the biggest threat facing the world — yet they remain optimistic — as this year’s winners began receiving their awards at scaled-down local ceremonies adapted for pandemic times. 

For a second year, COVID-19 has scuttled the traditional formal banquet in Stockholm attended by winners of the prizes in chemistry, physics, medicine, literature and economics, which were announced in October. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded separately in Oslo, Norway. 

Literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah was first to get his prize in a lunchtime ceremony Monday at the Swedish ambassador’s grand Georgian residence in central London.

Ambassador Mikaela Kumlin Granit said the U.K.-based Tanzanian author had been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” 

“Customarily you would receive the prize from the hands of His Majesty, the king of Sweden,” she told Gurnah at the ceremony attended by friends, family and colleagues. “However, this year you will be celebrated with a distance forced upon us because of the pandemic.” 

Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar and arrived in England as an 18-year-old refugee in the 1960s, has drawn on his experiences for 10 novels, including “Memory of Departure,” “Pilgrims Way,” “Afterlives” and “Paradise.” He has said migration is “not just my story — it’s a phenomenon of our times.” 

Italian physics laureate Giorgio Parisi was receiving his prize at a ceremony in Rome. U.S.-based physics laureate Syukuro Manabe, chemistry laureate David W.C. MacMillan and economic sciences laureate Joshua D. Angrist will be given their medals and diplomas in Washington. 

MacMillan, German physics prize winner Klaus Hasselmann and economics prize winner Guido Imbens, who is Dutch but lives in the United States, had a joint virtual news conference Monday where they were asked what they consider the biggest problem facing humanity and what they worry about most. All three answered climate change, with Imbens calling it the world’s “overarching problem.” 

“Climate change is something which is clearly going to have a large impact on society,” MacMillan said. “But at the same time given the science, given the call to arms amongst scientists, I really feel more optimism. And I feel there’s a real moment happening with scientists moving towards trying to solve this problem.” 

“I would bet on that fact that we would solve this problem,” MacMillan said. 

Hasselmann, whose work on climate change won him the prize, said he’s more hopeful because the world’s youth and movements like Fridays for the Future “have picked up the challenge and are getting across the message to the public that we have to act and respond to the problem.”

Hasselmann said he’s more optimistic now about climate change than 20 or 30 years ago. 

Imbens said he also is disturbed that misinformation, especially about COVID-19 and vaccines, is splitting society apart. He recalled growing up in the Netherlands and nearly everyone agreed on the need for the polio vaccine. 

“And yet, here we don’t seem to have found a way of making these decisions that we can all live with,” Imbens said. “And that’s clearly made it much harder to deal with the pandemic.” 

More ceremonies will be held throughout the week in Germany and the United States. On Friday — the anniversary of the death of prize founder Albert Nobel — there will be a celebratory ceremony at Stockholm City Hall for a local audience, including King Carl XVI Gustav and senior Swedish royals. 

A Nobel Prize comes with a diploma, a gold medal and a $1.5 million (10-million krona) cash award, which is shared if there are multiple winners. 

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo because Nobel wanted it that way, for reasons he kept to himself. A ceremony is due to be held there Friday for the winners — journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia. 

The Norwegian news agency NTB said the festivities would be scaled down, with fewer guests and participants required to wear face masks. Norway has seen an uptick in cases of the new omicron variant, and a spokesman for the Norwegian Nobel Committee told NTB it was “in constant contact with the health authorities in Oslo.” 

 
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The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the U.S. space agency, NASA, says it has new software that will allow its Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) to better assess potential threats posed by asteroids that can come close to Earth. 

In a press release on Monday, NASA astronomers said they have upgraded their impact software, called Sentry, with its next generation, Sentry-II, to better evaluate near-Earth asteroid (NEA) impact probabilities. 

NASA said to date, almost 28,000 NEAs have been found by survey telescopes that continuously scan the sky, making about 3,000 new discoveries per year. But with better technology and newer, bigger telescopes scheduled to come online, that number is expected to multiply quickly, necessitating the software upgrade. 

Contrary to what some might believe, asteroids are extremely predictable celestial bodies that obey the laws of physics and follow knowable orbital paths around the sun, NASA scientists say. Sometimes, when those paths bring those objects closer to Earth’s future position in space, uncertainties in the asteroids’ path raise the possibility of a collision with Earth. 

Navigation engineer Javier Roa Vicens, who had led the development of Sentry-II while working at JPL and recently moved to SpaceX, said the first generation of Sentry was “very capable.” He said that in less than an hour, it could produce the impact probability for a newly discovered asteroid for the next 100 years, what he called “an incredible feat.” 

But JPL scientists say the Sentry-II software can rapidly calculate impact probabilities for all known NEAs, including some special cases not captured by the original Sentry. For example, its calculations consider how the sun’s heat and Earth’s own gravity affect the trajectory of asteroids. 

The scientists say that by systematically calculating impact probabilities in this new way, the impact monitoring system is more robust, enabling NASA to confidently assess all potential impacts with odds as low as a few chances in 10 million. 

Since 2002, the JPL-managed CNEOS, at its headquarters in Southern California, has calculated every known NEA orbit to improve impact hazard assessments in support of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

 
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Rick Levin is trying to keep the waters of Chesapeake Bay clean by building oyster reefs. VOA’s Zdenko Novacki visits him in Pasadena, Maryland, to learn how oysters filter water and about the benefits of oyster reefs for the environment and other marine life. 

Camera: Philip Alexiou, Zdenko Novacki  Produced by: Zdenko Novacki
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In early 2020, a team of scientists from the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University took stem cells from African clawed frog embryos and turned them into tiny living robots. As if that isn’t amazing enough, then something unexpected happened. Maxim Moskalkov has the story.
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The World Health Organization reports a significant rise in malaria cases and deaths in 2020 due to COVID-19 disruptions in malaria services.

Over the past two decades, global malaria death rates have been cut in half, saving the lives of 10.6 million people. New data gathered by the WHO show COVID-19 has stopped and even reversed the progress made in reducing deaths from this preventable, treatable disease.

The WHO’s World Malaria Report estimates 241 million malaria cases and 627,000 malaria deaths globally have occurred in 2020.This represents an increase of 14 million cases and 69,000 deaths compared to the previous year. WHO links the increase to disruptions of malaria prevention, diagnosis, and treatment services during the pandemic.

Director of WHO’s Global Malaria Program, Pedro Alonso, said the situation could have been far worse. The good news, he said is that the predicted doomsday scenario did not transpire. He notes gloomy projections made in March 2020 of a huge spike in malaria have not materialized.

“One worst case scenario implied a doubling of malaria deaths. So, let me reiterate this, that is not the case. We can call this a success story, even though an extra 47,000 people have died as a consequence of the disruptions,” said Alonso.

The report finds progress in the global fight against malaria remains uneven.

Between 2000 and 2020, WHO has certified 12 countries as being malaria-free. Two countries, China and El Salvador, have achieved this status in 2021, despite the ongoing pandemic.

Since 2015, both cases and deaths have stalled in most of the world’s 93 endemic countries and territories. However, other figures show malaria cases have increased in 32 countries, most in Sub-Saharan Africa and some in South America.

Alonso said the situation remains especially precarious in Africa, where the malaria burden remains unacceptably high. He notes Africa accounts for about 96 percent of global deaths, 80 percent among children under age five.

“At the same time, the pandemic is not over, and the pace of economic recovery is uncertain. Without immediate and accelerated action key 2030 targets of the WHO Global technical strategy will be missed, and additional ground may be lost,” he said.

WHO’s strategy calls for a 90-percent reduction in malaria cases and deaths by 2030.It also presses for the elimination of malaria in at least 35 countries and for the prevention of disease resurgence in all countries that are malaria-free. 
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America’s winter wonderland is starting out this season as anything but traditional. 

The calendar says December, but for much of the country, temperatures beckon for sandals. Umbrellas, if not arks, are needed in the Pacific Northwest, while snow shovels are gathering cobwebs in the Rockies. 

Meteorologists attribute the latest batch of record-shattering weather extremes to a stuck jet stream and the effects of a La Nina weather pattern from cooling waters in the equatorial Pacific.

It’s still fall astronomically, but winter starts December 1 for meteorologists. This year, no one told the weather that. 

On Thursday, 65 weather stations across the nation set record high temperature marks for December 2, including Springfield, Missouri, hitting 24 Celsius (75 degrees Fahrenheit) and Roanoke, Virginia, 22 Celsius (72 degrees Fahrenheit). Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Billings, Montana, broke long-time high-temperature records by 6 degrees. 

Parts of Canada and Montana have seen their highest December temperatures in recorded history. On Friday, parts of South Carolina and Georgia hit record highs. 

In Washington state, Seattle, Bellingham and Quillayute all set 90-day fall records for rainfall. Bellingham was doused by nearly 60 centimeters (nearly 24 inches) of rain. The Olympic and Cascade mountains got hit harder, with more than 127 centimeters (50 inches) in three months, according to the National Weather Service. Forks, Washington, received more rain in 90 days than Las Vegas gets in 13 years.

On top of that, there is a blizzard warning on Hawaii’s Big Island summits with up to 30.5 centimeters (12 inches) of snow expected and wind gusts of more than 161 kilometers per hour (100 miles per hour). 

Meantime, snow has gone missing in Colorado. Before this year, the latest first measurable snowfall on record in Denver was November 21, in 1934. There’s a slight possibility of snow Monday night, according to the weather service. Yet, with no snow since April 22, this is the third-longest stretch the city has gone without it.

Stationary stream

One big factor: The jet stream — the river of air that moves weather from west to east on a roller coaster-like path — has just been stuck. That means low pressure on one part of the stream is bringing rain to the Pacific Northwest, while high pressure hovering over about two-thirds of the nation produces dry and warmer weather, said Brian Hurley, a senior meteorologist at the weather service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland. 

If the jet stream moves more or bends differently, rain and other extreme weather won’t be as concentrated, Hurley said.

This is a typical weather pattern with a natural La Nina weather oscillation, he said. The flip side of El Nino, a La Nina is a cooling of parts of the central Pacific Ocean that changes weather patterns across the globe. La Ninas tend to bring more rain to the Pacific Northwest and make the South drier and warmer. 

These bouts of extreme weather happen more frequently as the world warms, said meteorologist Jeff Masters, founder of Weather Underground who now works at Yale Climate Connections.

In Boulder, Colorado, meteorologist Bob Henson enjoyed a rare December bike ride on Thursday.

Still, “there’s a lot of angst about the lack of snow,” he said. “It puts you in a psychic quandary. You enjoy the warm weather while keeping in mind it’s not good for Earth to be warming.” 
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Cameroon has begun a measles vaccination drive on its northern border with Nigeria after several dozen children were found with the infection at a demobilization center. Cameroon says most of those infected are children of former fighters fleeing Boko Haram terrorism.

A mother comforts her 13-month-old baby in Kanuri, a language spoken in Meri, a commercial town on Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria. The 24-year-old mother says she hopes her child’s life will be saved after inoculation against measles, as promised by vaccination agents deployed to her town.

Prosper Essomba is the Cameroon government’s chief medical officer in Meri. He is supervising a vaccination campaign launched Friday against measles.

Essomba says he first inoculated his 1-year-old son to convince people that vaccination will protect their children from a measles outbreak. He says about 100 vaccination teams have been deployed in all villages around Meri to vaccinate all children with ages from 6 months to 9 years against measles and rubella. Essomba says about 67,000 children are targeted in the weeklong free vaccination campaign.  

Essomba said vaccination teams have been sent to the Disarmament and Demobilization center in Meri. He said children of all people fleeing from Boko Haram strongholds on the border with Nigeria should be inoculated.

Yaya Ali, the highest government official in Meri says he asked the government of Cameroon to immediately organize vaccinations when more than a dozen cases of measles were detected in Meri within a week. He says the first measles case was reported in a 4-year-old child at the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Center at Meri. He says it is imperative for everyone to make sure that all children in Meri are protected by receiving the measles, mumps and rubella or MMR vaccine.    

Ali said besides vaccinating children against measles and rubella, inoculation teams verify vaccination cards to make sure parents are keeping up with the vaccination schedules of their children. Essomba said it is important to administer all missed vaccine doses as soon as it is feasible. 

Cameroon says several dozen measles infections have been reported within the past two weeks in nine other hospitals in Cameroon’s Far North region, where Meri is located. The government says many more people may be infected, since less than 30% of the population visits conventional health facilities.  

Cameroon reports that 79 of its 190 district hospitals were affected by measles epidemics in 2020, with about 1,500 confirmed measle infections. The country’s Public Health Ministry  says 74% of the confirmed cases were in people who were not vaccinated.

Health officials say when COVID-19 was reported in the central African state in March 2020 parents were afraid to take their children to hospitals for vaccinations since hospitals are also COVID-19 test and treatment centers.

Measles is a disease caused by a highly contagious virus that is spread through the air by breathing, coughing, or sneezing.

However, the World Health Organization says two injections of vaccine can prevent measles. The WHO says the vaccine is safe and effective and has been in use since the 1960s. 

Cameroon’s last major measles outbreak was reported from February 2010 to July 2011. 
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White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci said Friday it should be about two weeks before scientists fully understand how transmissible and severe the omicron variant of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 truly is, and until then, people need to get vaccinations and booster shots. 

During a briefing by the White House COVID-19 Response Team, Fauci said South African researchers are leading the way but even their studies will take another week or two to get clinical data. The omicron variant was first identified in South Africa and there are more and longer-term cases to study there, he said. 

The White House response team repeated a message delivered earlier this week by President Joe Biden, that omicron is a variant of concern. Fauci presented new data showing both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are markedly boosting antibodies and stressed the need for people to get vaccinated. 

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said her agency is working with health departments across the United States to help them quickly conduct the genome sequencing necessary to isolate and identify the omicron variant. She said the CDC is far more effective at this process than it was earlier this year. 

Walensky stressed that while the focus is on the omicron variant, the delta variant of the virus is dominant in the U.S. and responsible for 99.9 percent of all cases in the country, especially among the unvaccinated.

White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters that 2.2 million vaccinations – including more than one million boosters – were administered in the U.S. on Thursday, the highest single-day total since May.

Zients said Biden has outlined areas where his administration is taking action to address the potential threat posed by the omicron variant, including vaccinations and boosters for adults, getting kids vaccinated, providing free home testing kits, strengthening travel rules and getting the rest of the world vaccinated.

To the last point, Zients said the U.S. has donated 1.2 billion doses of vaccine for global distribution, more than all other nations combined. Friday alone, he said, the U.S. shipped 11 million doses of vaccine, nine million of which were designated for Africa. 

 
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The World Health Organization has recognized Botswana for its efforts to prevent the transmission of HIV from expectant mothers to unborn children. Officials say no children born to HIV-positive mothers this year had the virus.

WHO awarded Botswana the ‘silver tier’ status this week; The silver tier certification is given to countries that have lowered the mother-to-child HIV transmission rate to under five percent and provided prenatal care and anti-retroviral treatment to more than 90 percent of pregnant women.

Botswana has achieved the WHO’s target of an HIV case rate of fewer than 500 per 100,000 live births.

WHO regional director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti, in awarding the certificate in Gaborone on Thursday, said Botswana has demonstrated that an AIDS free generation is possible.

“I want to applaud, this is huge accomplishment by Botswana, which we know has one of the most severe HIV epidemics. This achievement demonstrates that an HIV/AIDS free generation is possible. It also marks an important step towards ending AIDS across the entire continent. Perhaps most importantly, it illustrates the remarkable progress that can be achieved when the needs of mothers living with HIV and their children, are prioritized.”

Botswana has the world’s fourth highest HIV prevalence but has made strides in fighting the virus.

President Mokgweetsi Masisi says the award recognizes the country’s progress towards an HIV-free generation.

“The award is given to Botswana and Batswana as testimony for the success of our efforts as a country in the path to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV. We are excited by this development because we have been battling the HIV/AIDS pandemic for many years. The award therefore, which is the first to be awarded to an African country, demonstrates that our efforts have not been in vain,” Masisi said. Also noting that HIV rate significantly decreased from 37.4 percent in 2003 to 18.4 percent in 2019.

HIV-positive young women, like Tlotlo Moilwa, say the country is on a reassuring path.

“The reasons that drive this change is that the moment a woman is pregnant, they are also tested for HIV and if the result is positive, at that very moment, they enroll for prevention of mother-to-child transmission. This means they cannot infect the unborn baby or even during birth,” Moilwa expressed.

With the country making strides in preventing mother-to-child HIV transmissions, Moilwa says the future is much brighter for her and other HIV-positive women.

“I see a huge change for our future. If you look at the youth living with HIV at the moment, a lot of them got infected at birth. If right now babies are born HIV negative, it means that there will not be HIV positive young people in the future if we are to take care of ourselves.”

According to WHO, 15 countries globally, have been certified for eliminating mother-to-child HIV transmission, but none had an epidemic as large as Botswana. 
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New Zealand will adopt what is being called a “traffic light” system to curb the spread of COVID-19 and limit the use of lockdowns.

New Zealand’s planned traffic light system has red, amber and green categories, and gives more freedoms to the fully vaccinated. The biggest city, Auckland, is a red zone, mainly because of its high number of COVID-19 cases. Residents there are allowed into cafes, gyms and hairdressers, but there are limits on capacity and proof of vaccination is mandatory.

Much of the country is under the less stringent amber traffic light. The settings will be reviewed in two weeks.

Michael Baker, a public health and epidemiology professor at the University of Otago in Wellington, said the new system is designed to boost vaccination rates.

“There is a band across the central North Island of districts with relatively low vaccine coverage,” he said. “They are automatically going into the red-light classification. This system has two main purposes. One is really to limit transmission of the virus, so it means that if you are indoors, you are indoors with other vaccinated people. But the other thing it does it is sending a very strong message to the unvaccinated, a very strong nudge — you need to get vaccinated. So, I think it will be effective at doing that.”

New Zealand’s Health Ministry estimates that about 86% of the eligible population has received two vaccine doses.

New Zealand has had some of the world’s toughest pandemic controls.

The country’s international borders are expected to remain closed to most foreign nationals until well into next year.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the omicron variant is a reminder of why New Zealand needs to maintain its “careful approach” to the virus.

With 5 million people, the South Pacific country has recorded 12,000 coronavirus cases and 44 deaths since the pandemic began.

The traffic light system replaces previous coronavirus alert levels. A recent delta variant outbreak forced New Zealand government to abandon its COVID-zero strategy in favor of a strategy that prioritizes containment. The previous approach was designed to eliminate the virus in New Zealand through border closures and strict lockdowns. 

 
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Multiple cases of the omicron coronavirus variant have been detected in New York, health officials said Thursday, including a man who attended an anime convention in Manhattan in late November and tested positive for the variant when he returned home to Minnesota.

In addition to the conventioneer, tests showed five other people recently infected with COVID-19 had the variant, health officials said. They included a person in the city’s Long Island suburbs who had recently traveled to South Africa, residents of Brooklyn and Queens, and another case possibly linked to travel.

“No cause for alarm. We just want to make sure that the public is aware of information when we receive it,” said Governor Kathy Hochul.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the geographic spread of the positive tests suggested the variant was undergoing “community spread” in the city and wasn’t linked to any one event.

The news came a day after the U.S. announced its first case of the variant had been detected in California, in a person who had recently traveled to South Africa.

Officials reported another case Thursday in a Colorado woman who had recently traveled to southern Africa.

The Anime NYC 2021 convention Nov. 19-21 drew about 50,000 people, according to event organizers, and attendees were required to wear masks and show proof of having received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Officials in New York said they were working to trace attendees of the convention, which was held at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center as New York City prepared to host the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and braced for throngs of tourists to return after the U.S. opened up to vaccinated international travelers.

Infections were expected

Officials in the city of 8.8 million said they expected it would be only a matter of time before the new variant was reported in the city. City Health Commissioner Dave Chokshi urged people who attended the event to get tested.

“We should assume there is community spread of the variant in our city,” de Blasio said in a statement.

The Minnesota man began experiencing mild symptoms Nov. 22. He had been vaccinated and received a booster shot in early November, according to health officials in his home state. He sought COVID-19 testing Nov. 24, and his symptoms have subsided, officials said.

Minnesota Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said the man had not traveled outside the U.S. recently.

“Just given the timing … it seems quite possible, perhaps the most likely, that this transmission happened at the arena convention in New York City, but that’s not definitive,” Malcolm said.

Nov. 22 was the same day the person infected in the California case returned to the U.S. from South Africa. The California traveler, who was vaccinated, developed mild symptoms and tested positive Monday.

Much remains unknown about the new variant, including whether it is more contagious, as some health authorities suspect, whether it makes people more seriously ill, and whether it can thwart the vaccine.

Omicron is classified by the World Health Organization as a “variant of concern” as scientists work to determine how it may compare with the predominant delta variant in terms of transmissibility and severity. Scientists also are studying the degree to which existing vaccines and therapies protect against omicron.

Scientists in South Africa first reported it, but the samples came from several countries in southern Africa. And health officials in the Netherlands now say it was found there prior to the South Africa detection.

‘Get vaccinated’

As comfort over air travel returns, it’s inevitable that new variants like omicron will spread from country to country and state to state, said professor Danielle Ompad, an epidemiologist at New York University’s School of Global Public Health.

“We shouldn’t panic, but we should be concerned,” she said.

Hochul said the case involving the Minnesota visitor underlined the need for everyone who is eligible to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or receive a booster shot if they have not already.

“There is one way to address this — New Yorkers, get vaccinated, get boosted, and get ready,” the Democrat said.

Japan’s consul general in New York, Kanji Yamanouchi, delivered the opening remarks at the convention.

A spokesperson for the consulate said Yamanouchi was vaccinated and received a booster shot about three weeks ago. He said staffers at the consulate underwent testing as a precaution.

“He had absolutely no problem in his health condition,” said the consulate’s spokesperson, Kenju Murakami, noting Thursday it had been nearly two weeks.

A website for the convention says that Anime NYC is mounted by Leftfield Media, an event company based in Shelton, Connecticut. A company spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

Peter Tatara, its founder and event director, referred questions to company spokespeople. He said he had been tested “multiple times” since the event.

New York City Council Ben Kallos, who appeared at the event with the Japanese ambassador, said a rapid antigen test taken Thursday showed he was negative for the virus.

“I can attest to the fact that my vaccine was checked and I got a wristband, and the person who tested positive for omicron was also fully vaccinated,” Kallos said, urging his “fellow anime fans” to get tested. “So it goes to show you, even when you follow all the precautions, we’re still seeing breakthrough cases.” 
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Omicron is unlikely to have completely outsmarted the vaccines, experts say, even with its unusual array of mutations. 

There are a lot of unknowns, but they expect that the shots will still do what they do best: Keep people out of the hospital and out of the grave.

Omicron raised alarms when it was first identified during a sharp spike in cases in South Africa. The World Health Organization added it to its list of variants of concern last week.

The virus contains dozens of mutations, including several that are thought to make it more infectious and others that appear to help it evade the immune system.

“But I think it’s still very possible that vaccines will hold up against severe disease, even with those mutations,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, a professor of medicine at Emory University and president-elect of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

That’s what has happened with every variant so far. With delta, he noted, “breakthrough” infections among vaccinated people have increased, but those cases are mostly mild.

Omicron seems to be better able than other variants to infect people who have already had COVID-19, according to early data from South Africa. But people with reinfections generally have not been seriously ill.

Experts are recommending boosters for people who can get them. U.S. officials have authorized them for everyone age 18 and older. 

Open questions 

Researchers will have more questions than answers about omicron for the next few weeks while they study the variant. They don’t yet know for sure how the virus stacks up against other variants in terms of how easily it infects or how sick it makes its victims.

Hospitalizations have increased in South Africa during the omicron surge, but it’s not clear if that’s because the virus causes more severe infections or because more people are getting infected. Most of the country is not vaccinated. 

Scientists need to figure out whether the rise in infections is “vaccine failure or failure to vaccinate,” said Dr. Walter Orenstein, associate director of the Emory University Vaccine Center.

“If it’s vaccine failure, is it a problem of time since the last dose and waning immunity?” Orenstein said. 

Though it does not yet seem to be necessary, some companies are working on modifying their vaccines to better protect against the new variant.

Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech partners say they can have a new vaccine ready in about three months. Johnson & Johnson says it is working on a new version but did not give a timeline. Oxford University told Reuters news agency that the vaccine it produces with AstraZeneca is still highly effective but that it can quickly update it if necessary. 

Many companies have started developing modified vaccines against previous variants, but none has gone to regulators for approval.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it will not require drugmakers seeking approval for their updated vaccines to go through a process as lengthy as the one for the original versions. Much like with the annual flu vaccine, a few tests for safety and immune response will do. 

 
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Two astronauts with the U.S. space agency, NASA, left the International Space Station (ISS) Thursday to conduct a spacewalk to replace a broken antenna system, two days after the walk was postponed over concerns about space debris.

NASA astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron stepped out of the ISS airlock early Thursday to replace the faulty antenna, used to communicate voice and data to ground control. The operation was expected to last six-and-a-half hours.

The spacewalk had originally been scheduled for Tuesday but was postponed late Monday after NASA said it had received a notification of space debris that it needed to assess. The space agency said once it determined the debris did not pose a risk, the operation was rescheduled for Thursday.

It was not immediately clear whether the debris field that prompted the spacewalk to be postponed was related to a Russian anti-satellite missile test two weeks ago. That event created a debris field that forced ISS crew members to seek shelter in their escape capsules as a precaution.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. 
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