Month: March 2022

Three companies have lodged a complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft, accusing the U.S. technology giant of anti-competitive practices in its cloud services, sources told AFP on Saturday, confirming media reports.

Microsoft is “undermining fair competition and limiting the choice of consumers” in the computing cloud services market, said one of the three, French company OVHcloud, in a statement to AFP.

The companies complain that under certain clauses in Microsoft’s licensing contracts for Office 365 services, tariffs are higher when the software is not run on Azure cloud infrastructure, which is owned by the U.S. group.

They also say the user experience is worse and that there are incompatibilities with certain other Microsoft products when not running on Azure. 

In a statement to AFP, Microsoft said, “European cloud service providers have built successful business models on Microsoft software and services” and had many options on how to use that software.

“We continually evaluate how best to support all of our partners and make Microsoft software available to all customers in all environments, including those with other cloud service providers,” it continued.

The complaint, first reported this week by The Wall Street Journal, was lodged last summer with the EU Commission’s competition authority.

Microsoft is also the subject of an earlier 2021 complaint to the European Commission by a different set of companies led by the German Nextcloud.

It denounced the “ever-stronger integration” of Microsoft’s cloud services, which it said complicated the development of competing offers.

Microsoft has already been heavily fined multiple times by Brussels for anti-competitive practices regarding its Internet Explorer browser, Windows operating system and software licensing rules. 
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The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic saw more Americans drinking heavily or using illicit drugs — but apparently not smoking.

U.S. cigarette smoking dropped to a new all-time low in 2020, with 1 in 8 adults saying they were current smokers, according to survey data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Adult e-cigarette use also dropped, the CDC reported.

CDC officials credited public health campaigns and policies for the decline, but outside experts said tobacco company price hikes and pandemic lifestyle changes likely played roles.

“People who were mainly social smokers just didn’t have that going on any more,” said Megan Roberts, an Ohio State University researcher focused on tobacco product use among young adults and adolescents.

What’s more, parents who suddenly were home with their kids full-time may have cut back. And some people may have quit following reports that smokers were more likely to develop severe illness after a coronavirus infection, Roberts added.

The CDC report, based on a survey of more than 31,000 U.S. adults, found that 19% of Americans used at least one tobacco product in 2020, down from about 21% in 2019.

Use of cigars, smokeless tobacco and pipes was flat. Current use of electronic cigarettes dropped to 3.7%, down from 4.5% the year before.

Cigarettes were the most commonly used tobacco product, with 12.5% of adults using them, down from 14%.

Health officials have long considered cigarette smoking — a risk factor for lung cancer, heart disease and stroke — to be the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.

In 1965, 42% of U.S. adults were smokers.

The rate has been gradually dropping for decades for a number of reasons, including taxes and smoking bans in workplaces and restaurants. But a big part of the recent decline has to be recent price hikes, some experts said.

For example, British American Tobacco — the company that makes brands including Camel, Lucky Strike and Newport — increased prices four times in 2020, by a total of about 50 cents a pack.

Interestingly, the number of cigarettes sold in the U.S. actually went up in 2020 — the first such increase in two decades, the Federal Trade Commission reported last year.

It’s possible that fewer people smoked, but those who did were consuming more cigarettes.

“That’s a viable hypothesis — that you had people with more smoking opportunities because they weren’t going to work,” said University of Ottawa’s David Sweanor, a global tobacco policy expert at the University of Ottawa.

It’s also possible that the CDC survey underestimated how many people are smoking, either because some respondents weren’t honest or because the survey missed too many smokers, he said.

Other surveys have suggested that for many people, alcohol consumption and illicit drug use increased in the first year of the pandemic.
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The world is at a ‘dangerous moment’ in the fight against diseases like polio, a senior World Health Organization official said, as efforts begin to immunize 23 million children across five African countries after an outbreak in Malawi.

In February, Malawi declared its first case of wild poliovirus in 30 years, when a 3-year old girl in the Lilongwe district was paralyzed as a result of her infection.

The case raised alarm because Africa was declared free of wild polio in 2020 and there are only two countries in the world where it is endemic: Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan marked a year without cases in January 2022.

“This is a dangerous moment,” Modjirom Ndoutabe, polio coordinator for WHO Africa, told Reuters in a phone interview from Brazzaville, the Republic of Congo.

“Even if there is one country in the world with polio, all the other countries are in big trouble.”

Ndoutabe said the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns had slowed efforts to vaccinate children against other diseases such as polio, and also hit surveillance.

According to the Gavi vaccine alliance, childhood immunization services in the 68 countries it supports dropped by 4% in 2020, representing 3.1 million more “zero-dose” children likely unprotected from childhood diseases like polio, diphtheria and measles, and 3 million more under-immunized children than in 2019.

“This is a tragedy,” Seth Berkley, chief executive of Gavi, said in an interview with Reuters. “The challenge is getting that back up.”

In Malawi, where polio vaccine coverage is high – above 90% in most districts – rates during the pandemic fell by 2%, according to Janet Kayita, WHO Malawi head. She said the child who was paralyzed had one dose of the polio vaccine at birth, but not the other doses needed for full protection.

Kayita said surveillance had been more significantly impacted. The case is linked to a strain circulating in Pakistan’s Sindh province in 2019, which means it does not impact Africa’s polio-free status. But teams are now scrambling to answer how it arrived in Malawi, and how long it spread undetected.

Polio, a highly infectious disease spread mainly through contamination by fecal matter, used to kill and paralyze thousands of children annually. There is no cure, but vaccination brought the world close to ending the wild form of the disease.

Mass rollout

In a bid to prevent renewed spread in Africa, almost 70,000 vaccinators will go door-to-door in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, to give all children under 5 the oral polio vaccine in a $15.7 million campaign funded by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, the WHO said in a statement on Friday.

The first round, beginning Monday, will target more than 9 million children, followed by three further rounds aiming to reach all under-5-year-olds, regardless of their vaccination status, to boost immunity, Kayita said.

Efforts have also been stepped up to track any cases linked to the Malawi outbreak and to monitor transmission in wastewater. So far, no other linked cases have been found.

Vaccine-derived polio, a form of the disease stemming from incomplete vaccination coverage, is more widespread globally, and recent outbreaks have sparked concerns about how the coronavirus pandemic may have hit vaccination coverage.

Israel is battling an outbreak of vaccine-derived polio, its first since the 1980s, after a case was discovered in Jerusalem last week. Almost 12,000 children have since been vaccinated.

Ukraine reported its first vaccine-derived polio case in five years last year, but urgent efforts to curb the outbreak were halted after the Russian invasion on Feb. 24.

Complete vaccination protects against both forms of the disease, and a focus on that will halt both the outbreak in Malawi in months and all forms of polio in Africa by 2023, said Ndoutabe, who described his sorrow when he first heard of the Malawi case setback.

“But we did not stay in this sadness. We had to act quickly,” he said.
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The Biden administration is in danger of cutting short its efforts to help vaccinate the world because U.S. lawmakers had slashed global pandemic response funds from the omnibus spending bill that President Joe Biden signed into law earlier this week.

The $1.5 trillion spending bill did not include $15.6 billion requested for COVID-19 response, of which $5 billion had been marked by the White House to fight the coronavirus around the world.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told VOA during a briefing Friday that the administration did not have an alternative plan for delivering the 700 million doses of vaccines remaining from the 1.2 billion doses it had pledged.

“We need additional funding to continue to be the arsenal of vaccines,” she said. “There is not a secret fund that we have not told you about to continue to provide the type of free programs we have in the United States or to provide the level of international assistance that we would like to continue to provide.”

A White House official confirmed that the 1.2 billion doses of vaccines had been purchased. The lack of funding, however, will devastate America’s ability to ensure recipient countries can effectively deploy them, and to provide tests, therapeutics, oxygen and humanitarian aid to countries still struggling to manage the pandemic.

The pandemic response fund was stripped following Republican lawmakers’ refusal to add new coronavirus spending unless it was offset by spending cuts elsewhere.

In early March, 36 Republican senators sent a letter (( )) to Biden saying that before they would consider additional COVID-19 requests, they wanted an accounting of how the federal government had allocated taxpayer funds to combat the pandemic. “Congress must receive a full accounting of how the government has already spent the first $6 trillion,” the letter said.

House Democrats have introduced a standalone COVID-19 relief bill, but it does not yet have the votes to pass both chambers of Congress.

Strategy pivot curtailed

Just last month, the administration said it would adjust its global pandemic response strategy, pivoting away from boosting vaccine supply and toward increasing delivery capacity. But now it can no longer finance Global Vax, its international initiative launched in December.

“Without additional funding to support getting shots into arms, USAID will have to curtail our growing efforts to turn vaccines into vaccinations — just as countries are finally gaining access to the vaccine supplies needed to protect their citizens,” said Samantha Power, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in a statement.

Humanitarian organizations criticized the removal of COVID-19 funding from the omnibus bill.

The U.S. will not be able to “keep up the fight against COVID at home and around the world — a serious concern given the rising surges in Asia and Europe,” said Tom Hart, president of the ONE Campaign, in a statement to VOA.

Hart said that if large parts of the world remain vulnerable to the virus and its variants, Americans’ own health and economic recovery are at risk. “What should be a no-brainer after two years of a pandemic has proven impossible for world leaders and lawmakers to grasp: We will not end the pandemic anywhere until we end it everywhere. Congress can and must fix this,” Hart said.

Only 14.1% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose, according to Our World in Data.

While the U.S. remains the biggest vaccine donor (( )) by far, public health officials called the lack of global pandemic response funding “self-defeating.”

“American leadership for a robust and effective global response is the best pathway to end the pandemic, build resilient health systems, and be better prepared for future health security threats,” said Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.

“We can’t fully protect the health and economic prosperity of Americans without doing more around the world,” Udayakumar told VOA.

The cut to pandemic response funding came as lawmakers agreed to $13.6 billion in assistance for Ukraine, including $6.5 billion to supply Kyiv with weapons as it battles Russia’s invasion and $6.7 billion for economic and humanitarian aid for the country.  
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A trio of Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, the first new faces in space since the start of the Russian war in Ukraine.

Russian space corporation Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev and Sergey Korsakov blasted off successfully from the Russia-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan in their Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft at 8:55 p.m. Friday (11:55 a.m. EDT). They smoothly docked at the station just over three hours later, joining two Russians, four Americans and a German on the orbiting outpost.

The blastoff marked the first space crew launch since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

The war has resulted in canceled spacecraft launches and broken contracts. Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin has warned that the U.S. would have to use “broomsticks” to fly into space after Russia said it would stop supplying rocket engines to U.S. companies. Many worry, however, that Rogozin is putting decades of a peaceful off-planet partnership at risk, most notably at the International Space Station.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson played down Rogozin’s comments, telling The Associated Press: “That’s just Dmitry Rogozin. He spouts off every now and then. But at the end of the day, he’s worked with us,”

“The other people that work in the Russian civilian space program, they’re professional,” Nelson told the AP on Friday. “They don’t miss a beat with us, American astronauts and American mission control. Despite all of that, up in space, we can have a cooperation with our Russian friends, our colleagues.”

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei — who on Tuesday broke the U.S. single spaceflight record of 340 days — is due to leave the International Space Station with two Russians aboard a Soyuz capsule for a touchdown in Kazakhstan on March 30.

In April, another three NASA and one Italian astronaut are set to blast off for the space station.

 
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As COVID-19 infection and death rates begin to increase in some countries that have begun to relax their COVID-related restrictions, the director-general of the World Health Organization issued a reminder of what the pandemic has taught the world so far.

Speaking Thursday at the Thailand International Health Expo, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “The COVID-19 pandemic is a powerful demonstration that health is not a luxury, but a human right; not a cost, but an investment; not simply an outcome of development, but the foundation of social, economic and political stability and security.”

Tedros called on “all countries, manufacturers and partners to work with” the United Nations agency “on enhancing vaccine manufacturing, knowledge sharing and technology transfer.”

And the WHO leader said that “Although several countries have lifted restrictions, the pandemic is far from over – and it will not be over anywhere until it’s over everywhere.”

Meanwhile, according to China’s official Xinhua news agency, President Xi Jinping has urged the Politburo Standing Committee, the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party to, “Strive to achieve the greatest prevention and control effect with the smallest cost and minimize the impact of the pandemic on economic and social development.”

China is currently experiencing its biggest wave of COVID-19 infections since the outbreak in Wuhan, where the pandemic is reported to have begun in late 2019.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Friday that there are more than 465 million global COVID cases and more than 6 million global COVID deaths.

Johns Hopkins said that nearly 11 billion vaccine doses have been administered.   
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Conservative Republican lawmakers on Thursday revived a proposal to weaken Kansas’ vaccination requirements for children enrolling in school and day care and to make it easier for people to get potentially dangerous treatments for COVID-19.

The Senate health committee approved a bill that would allow parents to get a no-questions-asked religious exemption from requirements to vaccinate their children against more than a dozen diseases, including measles, whooping cough, polio and chickenpox.

The measure also would limit pharmacists’ ability to refuse to fill prescriptions for the anti-worm treatment ivermectin and other drugs for off-label uses as COVID-19 treatments.

The bill goes next to the full Senate for debate. The Republican majority there also is considering a proposal to greatly limit the power of the state’s public health administrator to deal with infectious diseases and another to ban all mask mandates during future pandemics.

“When you put them all together, it’s a lot of negative bills,” said Democratic Sen. Cindy Holscher, of Overland Park.

The measure approved Thursday would require schools to grant an exemption to parents who say vaccinations violate their religious or strongly held moral or ethical beliefs without investigating those beliefs.

A law enacted in November granted a similar, broad exemption to workers seeking to avoid COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

“It allows the day care-aged kids’ parents and school-aged kids’ parents to enjoy the same freedom of religion that everyone else would,” said Sen. Mark Steffen, a Hutchinson Republican.

But Sen. Kristen O’Shea, of Topeka, broke with fellow Republicans in opposing the measure and noted Thursday that the committee didn’t have a hearing on weakening childhood vaccination requirements.

She said during a meeting earlier this month: “It’s really scary to think that we’re in a society that’s going to bring back measles and polio and whooping cough, et cetera.”

The committee approved a version of the bill early last month, but it became tangled in a dispute over congressional redistricting that involved Steffen. Senate President Ty Masterson, an Andover Republican, sent it back to the committee for what a spokesperson called “some tweaks.”

The measure also is shadowed by a state medical board investigation of Steffen, an anesthesiologist and pain-management specialist from Hutchinson. While Steffen disclosed the investigation and acknowledged trying to prescribe ivermectin, he has said the probe deals with his public statements about COVID-19 and not patient care.

Steffen pushed the previous version of the bill, which would have required pharmacists to fill all prescriptions of drugs for off-label uses in treating COVID-19. Kansas law allows pharmacists not to fill prescriptions they deem inappropriate or potentially harmful.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved ivermectin to treat infections of lice, roundworms and other tiny parasites in humans. The FDA has tried to debunk claims that animal-strength versions of the drug can help fight COVID-19, warning that large doses can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, seizures, delirium and even death.

The new version of the bill says pharmacists still can refuse to fill drugs for off-label COVID-19 treatments, unless they object only because it’s for treating the novel coronavirus.

The measure prohibits the state medical board from disciplining doctors over such prescriptions, but the committee dropped a provision that would have made that ban apply at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020.

Steffen said Thursday that he believes doctors who prescribe ivermectin and other drugs to treat COVID-19 can show that they’re doing what other reasonable physicians would do in similar circumstances. That’s the standard the state medical board uses to determine whether a doctor is providing adequate care.
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Moderna Inc sought emergency use authorization with U.S. health regulators for a second COVID-19 booster shot late Thursday, as a surge in cases in some parts of the world fuels fears of another wave of the pandemic.

The U.S. biotechnology company said its request covered all adults over the age of 18 so that the appropriate use of an additional booster dose of its vaccine, including for those at higher risk of COVID-19 due to age or comorbidities, could be determined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and health care providers.

Moderna’s request is significantly broader than Pfizer Inc and its German partner BioNTech SE’s application that was filed earlier this week with U.S. regulators for a second booster shot for people aged 65 and older.

Moderna, without specifically commenting on the effectiveness of a fourth shot, said its submission was partly based on data recently published in the United States and Israel following the emergence of the omicron variant.

FDA did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

U.S. health officials, including top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, have raised the prospect of a fourth shot, especially for older people and to prepare for the possibility of another surge in cases.

CDC data has shown that vaccine efficacy wanes over time and a third shot helps restore it. It, however, has not released comprehensive data based on age or health status to back the case.

The news was first reported by The New York Times.

While COVID-19 cases are falling in the United States and much of the world, infections are rising in China. In the UK and Europe, there has been a reversal in the downward trend of COVID cases as economies have opened up and a second variant of  omicron circulates.
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NASA’s new eye in the sky snapped a pic of a star and its ancient galactic buddies.  Plus, a spacewalk amid another week of heightened global tensions, and rolling out the next lunar rover.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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African health groups have warned that the COVID pandemic has led to a rise in drug and alcohol abuse on the continent, but a gap in data is making it hard to monitor. In South Africa, a Soweto-based nonprofit is scrambling to help youth to stay clean and sober.

Substance abuse — particularly alcohol consumption — has been on the rise in Africa for years, according to the World Health Organization.

The coronavirus pandemic that resulted in job losses and school closures has now amplified the problem.

The Ikageng children’s charity in Soweto says as many as 10 young people contact them daily suffering from addiction. Lydia Motloung, the acting program manager says that “during the lockdowns, they used to go and drink and some they were left in the houses alone, the parents are at work. And they start having the house parties and introduced to the alcohol, end up into crystal meth, which is very common around here, especially with schoolchildren.”

While Ikageng monitors the rise of addiction in the young people they’re helping, Motloung says national statistics on drug and alcohol abuse are sorely lacking.

“We normally get the statistics for COVID, you get the statistics for HIV, but we will never had any statistics for drugs and substance. I think if we can have that plan, the government can have that plan. … And then start funding the organization that are working with drugs and substance so that they fight it as they’re fighting for HIV and AIDS as they’re fighting for COVID,” she noted.

It’s not just South Africa that is lacking data on substance abuse, but the continent as a whole.

Florence Baingana is the African regional advisor on substance abuse for the World Health Organization.

“We may not count the exact numbers in each and every country. We know we have a problem. We also know that the services are inadequate, that one we know for a fact. Very often the alcohol treatment centers in the government facilities are underfunded. But I think if we were to begin by investing resources into building up the services, then we would be able to collect the data,” Baingana expressed.

She says investing in prevention would also be beneficial and less costly than treating addiction later on.

Ikageng’s caregivers like Nomali Monareng look for warning signs among the children they support.

She knows them first-hand, having struggled with addiction herself.

“Sometimes we need to start with parents. Most of children don’t, you don’t know how to talk about their feelings, don’t know how to express. Children need to be, to be taking care in all of their life, in all areas, like talking, having the conversation, even if it’s deep, even if it’s uncomfortable, you need to give the child a chance to talk,” she pointed out.

For those looking to get clean, the organization refers them to support groups that help people transition in and out of rehab.

They’re trying to offer skills training as well, so recoverees can find jobs and a purpose.

Vusi Nzimande is a project manager for the support program called Still We Rise.

“Where you find people idling, they don’t do nothing with their lives. That’s one of those things that causes us because of the mind is playing around. You started thinking too much. You don’t have a job; you don’t have anything to do. And then suddenly you see yourself going back to your old ways,” Nzimande said.

For the young people he’s helped, getting clean has been the first step. But experts say they’ll need opportunities and jobs to give them hope and keep them out of trouble in the long run.
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Before Russia invaded Ukraine, the groundwork had already begun — online. Russian disinformation is a key part of what many are calling a hybrid war.  VOA’s Tina Trinh explains.
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