U.S. health officials on Friday ended an 11-day pause on COVID-19 vaccinations using Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose shot, after scientific advisers decided its benefits outweighed the risk of rare blood clots.The government found 15 vaccine recipients who had developed the clots, out of nearly 8 million people given the J&J shot. All were women, most under age 50. Three died; seven are still in hospitals.In the end, however, the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided that J&J’s vaccine was a key to fighting the pandemic, and that the clot risk could be addressed with warnings to help younger women decide which shot to choose.The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ meeting on Friday followed an emergency meeting last week, the day after the announcement of the pause. At that time, members of the panel said they had too little time to make a recommendation.On Friday, members voted 10-4 for the resumption of the use of the vaccine. The panel debated imposing age restrictions on the vaccine but decided against it.On April 13, the CDC, in a joint statement with the FDA, recommended pausing use of the vaccine “out of an abundance of caution” to give experts an opportunity to examine six cases of blood clots and to see if any additional cases were found.CDC officials later said that “a handful” of other cases were being investigated and that they were encouraged by the relatively small number of them.Earlier this week, Europe’s drug watchdog group, the European Medicines Agency, said that while it found a possible link between the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and the rare blood clots, the vaccine’s benefits outweighed its risks.It said it would recommend its use with an additional warning included in the information about the vaccine.European regulators already had uncovered similar rare blood clots among recipients of another COVID-19 vaccine, from AstraZeneca. The AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, while not identical, are made with similar technology.
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Day: April 23, 2021
The coronavirus has conquered the world’s highest mountain.
A Norwegian climber became the first to be tested for COVID-19 in Mount Everest base camp and was flown by helicopter to Kathmandu, where he was hospitalized.
Erlend Ness told The Associated Press in a message Friday that he tested positive on April 15. He said another test on Thursday was negative and he was now staying with a local family in Nepal.
An ace mountain guide, Austrian Lukas Furtenbach, warned that the virus could spread among the hundreds of other climbers, guides and helpers who are now camped on the base of Everest if all of them are not checked immediately and safety measures are taken.
Any outbreak could prematurely end the climbing season, just ahead of a window of good weather in May, he said.
“We would need now most urgently mass testing in base camp, with everyone tested and every team being isolated, no contact between teams,” said Furtenbach. “That needs to be done now, otherwise it is too late.”
Furtenbach, leading a team of 18 climbers to Mount Everest and its sister peak Mount Lhotse, said there could be more than just one case on the mountain as the Norwegian had lived with several others for weeks.
A Nepalese mountaineering official denied there were any active cases on the mountains at the moment.
Mira Acharya, director at the Department of Mountaineering, said she had no official information about the COVID-19 cases and only reports of illnesses like pneumonia and altitude sickness.
Mountaineering was closed last year due to the pandemic and climbers returned to Everest this year for the first time since May 2019.
The popular spring climbing season in Nepal, which has eight of the highest peaks in the world, began in March and ends in May.
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Immunization Committee is meeting Friday to consider lifting a pause on use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.
The pause was widely implemented last week following the discovery of six U.S. cases of a rare and severe type of blood clots in people who had received the shot.
On April 13, the CDC, in a joint statement with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, recommended a pause on use of the vaccine, “out of an abundance of caution” and to give experts an opportunity to examine the blood clot cases and see if any additional cases were found.
CDC officials have said since that “a handful” of other cases were being investigated, but offered no details, except to say they were encouraged there was a relatively small number of them.
The six cases of blood clots previously identified – out of seven million doses of the vaccine delivered – occurred in women between the ages of 18 and 48. They developed symptoms, most often headaches, six to 13 days after vaccination. One vaccine recipient, a Virginia woman, died in March.
The Washington Post reports authorities are leaning toward lifting the pause. Earlier this week, Europe’s drug watchdog group, the European Medicines Agency, said that while it found a possible link between the vaccine and the rare blood clots, the vaccine’s benefits outweigh its risks.
It said it would recommend its use with an additional warning included in the information about the vaccine.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting Friday follows an emergency meeting held last week, the day after the announcement of the pause. At that time, members of the panel said they had too little time to make a recommendation.
Advisors to the committee tell ABC News it is expected to make a final recommendation on the vaccine later Friday.
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In an exclusive interview with VOA, the director of Oxford University’s Jenner Institute says their new malaria vaccine, tested in Burkina Faso, has shown a preliminary efficacy rate of 77%, which could help prevent over 400,000 deaths a year, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Henry Wilkins looks at the burden of malaria on families in the region and the potential impact of the new vaccine in this report from Kaya, Burkina Faso.
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Old machines are transformed into new robots in an exhibition that makes viewers think twice about the machines they use. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details.
Camera: Roy Kim Producer: Elizabeth Lee
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How long does protection from COVID-19 vaccines last?
Experts don’t know yet because they’re still studying vaccinated people to see when protection might wear off. How well the vaccines work against emerging variants will also determine if, when and how often additional shots might be needed.
“We only have information for as long as the vaccines have been studied,” said Deborah Fuller, a vaccine researcher at the University of Washington. “We have to study the vaccinated population and start to see, at what point do people become vulnerable again to the virus?”
So far, Pfizer’s ongoing trial indicates the company’s two-dose vaccine remains highly effective for at least six months, and likely longer. People who got Moderna’s vaccine also still had notable levels of virus-fighting antibodies six months after the second required shot.
Antibodies also don’t tell the whole story. To fight off intruders like viruses, our immune systems also have another line of defense called B and T cells, some of which can hang around long after antibody levels dwindle. If they encounter the same virus in the future, those battle-tested cells could potentially spring into action more quickly.
Even if they don’t prevent illness entirely, they could help blunt its severity. But exactly what role such “memory” cells might play with the coronavirus — and for how long — isn’t yet known.
While the current COVID-19 vaccines will likely last for at least about a year, they probably won’t offer lifelong protection, as with measles shots, said Dr. Kathleen Neuzil, a vaccine expert at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
“It’s going to be somewhere in the middle of that very wide range,” she said.
Variants are another reason we might need an additional shot.
The current vaccines are designed to work against a particular spike protein on the coronavirus, said Mehul Suthar of the Emory Vaccine Center. If the virus mutates enough over time, vaccines might need to be updated to boost their effectiveness.
So far, the vaccines appear protective against the notable variants that have emerged, though somewhat less so on the one first detected in South Africa.
If it turns out we need another shot, a single dose could extend protection of the current shots or contain vaccination for one or more variants.
The need for follow-up shots will also depend partly on the success of the vaccination push globally, and tamping down transmission of the virus and emerging variants.
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COVID-19 is surging at an astounding rate in India. The South Asian nation’s health ministry said Friday it had counted a record-breaking 332,730 new infections in the previous 24-hour period. The new tally surpasses Thursday’s record daily toll of 314,835 new infections.At least six hospitals in New Delhi, the capital, have run out of, or are on the verge of running out of, oxygen for their patients.The oxygen shortage is so acute that the high court in the capital ordered the national government to divert oxygen from industrial use to hospitals.In western India on Friday, a fire at the Vijay Vallabh Hospital killed at least 13 COVID patients.Prime Minister Narendra Modi is holding meetings with the country’s chief ministers Friday to determine how best to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reports that India has nearly 16 million COVID-19 cases. Only the U.S., with almost 32 million cases, has more infections than India.Agence France-Presse is reporting that Japan is set to declare a state of emergency because of a surge in COVID infections, just three months before the opening of the Olympic Games in Tokyo.“We have a strong sense of crisis,” Yasutoshi Nishimura, Japan’s minister for virus response, said Friday, according to AFP.Japan has more than 550,000 COVID-19 cases, according to Johns Hopkins.Syria’s government and the country’s last opposition-held enclave received their first doses of COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday.UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the GAVI vaccine alliance announced in a joint statement the delivery of 200,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to the Syrian government, and 53,800 doses to the rebel-controlled region in the northwest.While fighting has mostly subsided since a cease-fire was implemented a year ago, Syria’s civil war has complicated the delivery of the vaccines, forcing most of them to be transported through Damascus for government-controlled areas while the others are shipped through the border with Turkey.Western nongovernmental organizations have said that Syria’s logistical challenges in coordinating vaccinations in combat zones are worsened by the international financial sanctions that have been imposed on the country. Johns Hopkins reports there are nearly 145 million worldwide COVID-19 infections and more than 3 million people have died.
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Old machines are transformed into new robots in an exhibition that makes viewers think twice about the machines they use. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details.
Camera: Roy Kim Producer: Elizabeth Lee
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Since coronavirus pandemic began many Americans have gotten more used to make their own meals at home. But that doesn’t mean people do not want a great restaurant meal from time to time. Karina Bafradzhian reports.
Camera: Andrey Degtyarev and Artyom Kokhan
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Russian Olympic medal winners in Tokyo this year and at the 2022 Beijing Games will be serenaded by Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s music, the country’s Olympic committee said on Thursday, as their national anthem is banned because of doping offenses.Russian athletes are barred from competing at major international events, including the Olympics, under the country’s flag and with their anthem until 2022 following a ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) late last year.Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at a gala concert of the winners of the 15th International Tchaikovsky Competition in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in Moscow, July 2, 2015.The ban was designed to punish Moscow for providing global anti-doping authorities with doctored laboratory data that could have helped identify drug cheats.Stanislav Pozdnyakov, president of Russia’s Olympic Committee (ROC), said in a statement that the music used at medal ceremonies for Russians competing as representatives of ROC will be a fragment of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.”As of today, our Olympic team has all the elements of its identity,” said Pozdnyakov, a five-time Olympic medalist in fencing.”We have the flag of the Russian Olympic Committee with the colors of our tricolor, our official equipment — easily recognizable for both our compatriots and fans from other countries — without any inscriptions. And now we have a musical accompaniment.”In its guidelines on the implementation of the CAS ruling, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) confirmed that Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 will be played for all ceremonies.Many Russian athletes were sidelined from the past two Olympics, and the country’s flag was banned at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games as punishment for state-sponsored doping at the 2014 Sochi Games.Russia, which has in the past acknowledged some shortcomings in its implementation of anti-doping policies, denies running a state-sponsored doping program.
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Drought conditions now cover 85% of Mexico, and residents of the nation’s central region said Thursday that lakes and reservoirs are simply drying up, including the country’s second-largest body of fresh water.The mayor of Mexico City said the drought was the worst in 30 years, and the problem can be seen at the reservoirs that store water from other states to supply the capital.Some of them, like the Villa Victoria reservoir west of the capital, are at one-third of their normal capacity, with a month and a half to go before any significant rain is expected.Isais Salgado, 60, was trying to fill his water tank truck at Villa Victoria, a task that normally takes him just half an hour. On Thursday he estimated it was taking 3½ hours to pump water into his 10,000-liter tanker.”The reservoir is drying up,” Salgado said. “If they keep pumping water out, by May it will be completely dry, and the fish will die.”Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said that as the drought worsened, more people tended to water their lawns and gardens, which worsens the problem.The capital’s 9 million inhabitants rely on reservoirs such as Villa Victoria and two others — which together are at about 44% capacity — for a quarter of their water; most of the rest comes from wells within city limits. But the city’s own water table is dropping, and leaky pipes waste much of what is brought into the city.Rogelio Angeles Hernandez, 61, has been fishing the waters of Villa Victoria for the past 30 years. He isn’t so much worried about his own catch; in past dry seasons, residents could cart fish off in wheelbarrows as water levels receded.But tourism at reservoirs, such as Valle de Bravo further to the west, has been hit by falling water levels.In the end, it is the capital that is really going to suffer.”Fishing is the same, but the real impact will be on the people in Mexico City, who are going to get less water,” Angeles Hernandez said.Further to the west, in Michoacan state, the country is at risk of losing its second-largest lake, Lake Cuitzeo, where about 70% of the lake bed is now dry. The main culprit is drought, but residents say that roads built across the shallow lake and diversion of water for human use have also played a role.Michoacan Governor Silvano Aureoles said so much of the lake has dried up that shoreline communities now suffer dust storms. He said communities might have to start planting vegetation on the lake bed to prevent them.In a petition to the government, residents of communities around the lake said only six of 19 fish species once present in Cuitzeo now remain. They said the dust storms had caused tens of thousands of respiratory and intestinal infections among residents.
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