Charley Pride, country music’s first Black star whose rich baritone on such hits as “Kiss an Angel Good Morning” helped sell millions of records and made him the first Black member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, has died. He was 86.Pride died Saturday in Dallas of complications from COVID-19, according to Jeremy Westby of the public relations firm 2911 Media.”I’m so heartbroken that one of my dearest and oldest friends, Charley Pride, has passed away. It’s even worse to know that he passed away from COVID-19. What a horrible, horrible virus. Charley, we will always love you,” Dolly Parton tweeted.Pride released dozens of albums and sold more than 25 million records during a career that began in the mid-1960s. Hits besides “Kiss an Angel Good Morning” in 1971 included “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone,” “Burgers and Fries,” “Mountain of Love” and “Someone Loves You Honey.”FILE – Charley Pride poses with the Pioneer Award he received at the 29th Academy of Country Music Awards show in Universal City, Calif., May 3, 1994. In 2000, Pride was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.He received three Grammy Awards, had more than 30 No. 1 hits between 1969 and 1984, won the Country Music Association’s Top Male Vocalist and Entertainer of the Year awards in 1972 and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000.The Smithsonian in Washington acquired memorabilia from Pride, including a pair of boots and one of his guitars, for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.Singer Ronnie Milsap called him a pioneer and said that without his encouragement, Milsap might never gone to Nashville.”To hear this news tears out a piece of my heart,” he said in a statement.Until the early 1990s, when Cleve Francis came along, Pride was the only Black country singer signed to a major label.In 1993, he joined the Grand Ole Opry cast in Nashville.’Skin hang-ups'”They used to ask me how it feels to be the ‘first colored country singer,’ ” he told The Dallas Morning News in 1992. “Then it was ‘first Negro country singer,’ then ‘first Black country singer.’ Now I’m the ‘first African-American country singer.’ That’s about the only thing that’s changed. This country is so race-conscious, so ate up with colors and pigments. I call it ‘skin hang-ups’ — it’s a disease.”Pride was raised in Sledge, Mississippi, the son of a sharecropper. He had seven brothers and three sisters.In 2008 while accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award as part of the Mississippi Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts, Pride said he never focused on race.”My older sister one time said, ‘Why are you singing THEIR music?’ ” Pride said. “But we all understand what the y’all-and-us-syndrome has been. See, I never as an individual accepted that, and I truly believe that’s why I am where I am today.”As a young man before launching his singing career, he was a pitcher and outfielder in the Negro American League with the Memphis Red Sox and in the Pioneer League in Montana.FILE – Brad Paisley and Charley Pride perform “Kiss an Angel Good Morning” at the 50th annual CMA Awards at the Bridgestone Arena, Nov. 2, 2016, in Nashville, Tenn.After playing minor league baseball a couple of years, he ended up in Helena, Montana, where he worked in a zinc smelting plant by day and played country music in clubs at night.After a tryout with the New York Mets, he visited Nashville and broke into country music when Chet Atkins, head of RCA Records, heard two of his demo tapes and signed him.To ensure that Pride was judged on his music and not his race, his first few singles were sent to radio stations without a publicity photo. After his identity became known, a few country radio stations refused to play his music.WelcomedFor the most part, though, Pride said he was well-received. Early in his career, he would put white audiences at ease when he joked about his “permanent tan.””Music is the greatest communicator on the planet Earth,” he said in 1992. “Once people heard the sincerity in my voice and heard me project and watched my delivery, it just dissipated any apprehension or bad feeling they might have had.”Throughout his career, he sang positive songs instead of sad ones often associated with country music.”Music is a beautiful way of expressing oneself and I truly believe music should not be taken as a protest,” he told The Associated Press in 1985. “You can go too far in anything — singing, acting, whatever — and become politicized to the point you cease to be an entertainer.”In 1994, he wrote his autobiography, “Pride: The Charley Pride Story,” in which he disclosed he was mildly manic depressive.He had surgery in 1997 to remove a tumor from his right vocal cord.He received the Living Legend award from The Nashville Network/Music City News, recognizing 30 years of achievement, in 1997.”I’d like to be remembered as a good person who tried to be a good entertainer and made people happy, was a good American who paid his taxes and made a good living,” he said in 1985. “I tried to do my best and contribute my part.”
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Day: December 12, 2020
Mexico approved the emergency use of a coronavirus vaccine late Friday, bringing to six the number of countries that are inoculating or plan to inoculate with shots produced by U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech.Britain, Bahrain, Canada, Saudi Arabia and the United States have also approved the vaccine.Mexican Assistant Health Secretary and epidemiologist Hugo Lopez-Gatell called the vaccine approval “a reason for hope.” Reuters reports Mexico signed an agreement with Pfizer to acquire 34 million doses of the vaccine, with the first batch expected later this month.Mexico has recorded 1.2 million COVID-19 cases and 113,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.The vaccine’s approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Friday came as the United States topped 295,000 fatalities from COVID-19, the world’s highest death toll, according to Johns Hopkins University, which calculates the United States has had 15.8 million of the world’s more than 71 million COVID infections.Hospitalizations are at record levels in America’s most populous state, California. Los Angeles County reported its highest-ever daily number for new COVID-19 cases at more than 12,000 earlier this week. A public health official said the county is “on a very dangerous track to seeing unprecedented and catastrophic suffering and death … if we can’t stop the surge.”Meanwhile, the World Health Organization and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies signed an agreement, the Emergency Medical Team (EMT) Initiative, on Friday to strengthen the delivery of emergency medical and health services during humanitarian crises.“We are very committed to working together with WHO to provide quality emergency health services that communities desperately need in times of crisis.” said IFRC Secretary-General Jagan Chapagain.India said early Saturday that it recorded 30,000 new cases in the past 24 hours. The South Asian nation follows the U.S. in the number of COVID cases with 9.8 million infections. Brazil comes in third with more than 6 million COVID infections.
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U.S. President Donald Trump late Friday hailed what he termed “a medical miracle” – the immediate but extremely limited availability of a coronavirus vaccine less than a year after the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in the United States.In a video message posted on Twitter, Trump said the first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved for emergency use will be administered “within 24 hours” and will be “free [of charge] for all Americans.”The president said the vaccine “will save millions of lives and soon end the pandemic once and for all.” The assertion contradicted health officials who note that it will be months before many Americans can be inoculated and that eradication of COVID-19 is far from assured.There was no immediate reaction from President-elect Joe Biden, who earlier this week promised that 100 million vaccine doses would be administered in the first 100 days of his administration. Biden will be sworn in Jan. 20.The top Democrat in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said “Americans should have full confidence in this vaccine knowing that it has been reviewed and recommended by the independent experts of the FDA’s advisory panel.”In a statement, Pelosi urged federal action to accelerate vaccine manufacturing, adding, “We must ensure that the vaccine will be free and distributed in a fair and equitable manner to as many Americans as possible as soon as possible.”Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, meanwhile, said millions of vaccine doses are being shipped but that, despite the good news, Americans must “double down” on public health measures.“As Americans get vaccinated, we need to continue taking steps like washing our hands, social distancing, and wearing face coverings to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities,” Azar said in a statement.The chairman of the Senate Health Committee, Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander, tweeted that the American public should be “grateful to the scientists in pharmaceutical companies and the federal government who produced this result, both the Trump Administration for leading it and Congress for funding it.”
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Brazil, which is second to the U.S. in deaths from COVID-19 and third in the world in positive cases, is approaching 180,000 deaths as it suffers through its second wave of the disease caused by the coronavirus.In the past day, more than 53,000 cases and 770 deaths have been reported, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Since the start of the pandemic, Brazil has recorded more than 6.7 million cases.Brazil, with a population of 212 million, is entering its summer, when beaches fill with weekend crowds.”The situation is likely to worsen with the summer, because people will move around more, without any control, most of the restriction measures having already been lifted,” Christovam Barcellos, a researcher at the Fiocruz institute, told AFP.The coronavirus crisis in the U.S. continued to intensify Friday, as more than 2,700 people died of COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins data, down from the record toll of 3,124 set Wednesday. The country’s deaths now stand at more than 292,000, the most in the world.The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized Friday the emergency use of a vaccine produced by U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech.An FDA advisory panel voted to recommend approval of the vaccine late Thursday.And the U.S. purchased 100 million more doses of another vaccine, one by Moderna. Friday’s agreement brings the number of Moderna doses to 200 million, enough shots for 100 million people. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two shots.”Securing another 100 million doses from Moderna by June 2021 further expands our supply of doses across the Operation Warp Speed portfolio of vaccines,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.With the U.S. on the verge of its inoculation program, human rights group Amnesty International’s director of economic and social justice issued a warning. Steve Cockburn told The New York Times, “Rich countries have clear human rights obligations not only to refrain from actions that could harm access to vaccines elsewhere, but also to cooperate and provide assistance to countries that need it.”The Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center said Friday night there are 70 million coronavirus infections worldwide, with nearly 1.6 million deaths.The U.S. continues to lead the world in the number of cases with more than 15.8 million infections, followed by India with almost 9.8 million and Brazil with nearly 6.8 million.
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The head of the European Union’s medical agency confirmed Friday it had been the subject of a cyberattack for the past two weeks but said it will not impact its ongoing evaluation of COVID-19 vaccines.The cyberattack was originally announced Wednesday, with the agency providing few details. During an online meeting with the European Parliament, European Medicines Agency (EMA) executive director, Emer Cooke, said the agency had “launched a full investigation in close cooperation with the law enforcement officials and other relevant entities.”In a brief statement on its website, Pfizer partner BioNTech said it had been informed that some of the documents related to regulatory submission for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, which has been stored on an EMA server, had been “unlawfully accessed.” The company said it did not believe any personal data of trial participants had been compromised.Cooke said Friday, “We can assure you that the timelines for the evaluation of the COVID-19 vaccines and treatments are not impacted. And the agency as you see today continues to be fully functional.”The Amsterdam–based agency is evaluating the Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine already approved by Britain and Canada, as well as the vaccine candidate from Moderna. The agency said it will make a decision on conditional approval at a meeting to be held by December 29, while a decision on Moderna’s version should follow by January 12.Cooke said based on the data for the two vaccines so far, “the safety and efficacy look very promising, and we have not seen the adverse events coming up that would be a concern.”Earlier this week, Cooke said the vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca is also being considered but complete data for that vaccine has not yet been submitted.
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The U.S. gave the final go-ahead Friday to the nation’s first COVID-19 vaccine, marking what could be the beginning of the end of an outbreak that has killed nearly 300,000 Americans, according to a person familiar with the decision but not authorized to discuss it publicly.Shots for health workers and nursing home residents are expected to begin in the coming days after the Food and Drug Administration authorized an emergency rollout of what promises to be a strongly protective vaccine from Pfizer Inc. and its German partner BioNTech.Initial doses are scarce and will be rationed as the U.S. joins Britain and several other countries in scrambling to vaccinate as many people as possible ahead of winter. It will take months of work to tamp down the coronavirus that has surged to catastrophic levels in recent weeks and already claimed 1.5 million lives globally.While the FDA decision came only after public review of data from a huge, ongoing study, it has also been dogged by intense political pressure from the Trump administration, which has accused the agency of being too slow and even threatened to remove FDA chief Stephen Hahn if a ruling did not come Friday.The move sets off what will be the largest vaccination campaign in U.S. history — but it also has global ramifications because it’s a role model to many other countries facing the same decision.The world desperately needs multiple vaccines for enough to go around, and the Pfizer-BioNTech shot is the first based on rigorous scientific testing to emerge from that worldwide race — a record-setting scientific achievement that shaved years off the usual process.”I don’t think you would have found a scientist on this planet that would have predicted this 11 months ago,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who advises the FDA.Second vaccineThe U.S. is considering a second vaccine, made by Moderna Inc., that could roll out in another week. In early January, Johnson & Johnson expects to learn if its vaccine is working in final testing.Europe is set to make its own decision on the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots later this month, an important step as some other candidates that multiple countries were anxiously awaiting have hit roadblocks. Friday, Sanofi and GSK announced a monthslong delay after early tests showed their vaccine didn’t work well enough in older adults.FILE – A medic at a regional hospital receives Russia’s “Sputnik-V” vaccine shot against the COVID-19 disease in Tver, Russia, Oct. 12, 2020.And China and Russia didn’t wait for final-stage tests before beginning vaccinations with some homegrown shots.About 3 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are expected in the first shipments around the country, according to officials with Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s vaccine development program. A similar amount is to be held in reserve for those recipients’ second dose.A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee is poised to recommend who’s first in line. Expected to follow health workers and those in nursing homes are other essential workers, older adults and people at high risk because of other health problems. U.S. authorities don’t expect enough for the general population before spring, and that’s assuming there are no manufacturing glitches.In a still unfinished study of nearly 44,000 people, the FDA found the vaccine was safe and more than 90% effective across recipients of different ages, including older adults, races and those with health problems that put them at high risk from the coronavirus.FILE – A health care worker at LAC USC Medical Center swabs a person at a drive-through testing center during the coronavirus outbreak, in Los Angeles, Dec. 10, 2020.Emergency use means the vaccine still is experimental. Most important for would-be recipients to know: — Some protection begins after the first dose, but it takes a second dose three weeks later for full protection. It’s unclear how long protection lasts.— The vaccine protects against COVID-19 illness, but no one yet knows if it can stop the silent, symptomless spread that accounts for roughly half of all cases. The ongoing study will attempt to answer that, but for now, the vaccinated still will need to wear masks and keep their distance.— Expect a sore arm and some flu-like symptoms such as fever, fatigue, headache and chills after the second dose. While uncomfortable, those reactions last only about a day. “That’s just your immune system working. It’s a good thing,” Offit said.— Authorities are investigating several allergic reactions reported in Britain by people with a history of severe allergies. Offit said it is routine in the U.S. for the vaccinated to stick around for a half-hour so they could get prompt treatment if such reactions appear.If emergency use of Moderna’s vaccine also is authorized, the U.S. expects to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of December. They hope to have enough for another 30 million people in January and 50 million in February.ReluctanceGetting shots into arms is the big challenge, especially as a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found only half of Americans want the vaccine when it’s their turn. About a quarter say they won’t get it and the rest aren’t sure.Political interference has complicated health authorities’ message that the testing was rigorous and cut no corners.President Donald Trump bashed the FDA, again, Friday for taking too long, complaining that the agency “is still a big, old, slow turtle.” One of his deputies even pressed Hahn to clear the shots by the end of the day or face possible firing, two administration officials said.The FDA is unique in analyzing drugmakers’ raw data, a process that takes longer than many other countries’ regulatory reviews. In addition, the FDA insisted that large COVID-19 vaccine studies track at least half the participants for two months to look for side effects, a time period when historically any vaccine problems appear.
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