Day: May 6, 2022

The U.N. Children’s Fund, UNICEF, reports the war in Ukraine is having a devastating impact on children, with tens of thousands requiring psychological and social care.

Millions of children in Ukraine have suffered from more than two months of relentless bombing and shelling, a lack of food, the inability to go to school, and the loss of other essential services. 

This psychological trauma, says UNICEF, has created a child protection crisis of extraordinary proportions.

U.N. agencies report more than 6,800 civilian casualties, including more than 3,300 killed. Some 7.7 million people have been displaced inside Ukraine and more than 5.7 million others have sought refuge in neighboring countries, including nearly two-thirds of all children in Ukraine.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine February 24, more than 90,000 children were living in institutions, orphanages, boarding schools, and other care facilities—nearly half of them are children with disabilities.

Speaking from the western city of Lviv, Aaron Greenberg, UNICEF’s Regional Child Protection Adviser for Europe and Central Asia Region, said tens of thousands of these children have been returned to families. Unfortunately, he said, many children are not receiving the care and protection they require, especially children with disabilities.

“The war has impacted all children’s psychosocial well-being. All of them,” he said. “Children have been uprooted from their homes, separated from caregivers, and directly exposed to war. Children have been shaken by bomb explosions and the blaring sirens of missile alert systems…. And, most importantly, many children have witnessed or experienced physical and sexual violence.”

Greenberg said UNICEF and partners are working to help these traumatized children. Since the war started, he said more than 140,000 children and their caregivers have received mental health and psychosocial services. He said UNICEF currently has 56 mobile units operating across the country, including in the east where fighting is most intense.

“Over 7,000 women and children have been reached by violence prevention, risk mitigation and violence response services, including GBV, gender-based violence, including in the eastern areas of the country,” he said. “But it is not enough. And although we are all working in overdrive, I think we must be prepared with more specialized services for child survivors of physical and sexual violence.”

Greenberg noted that children with disabilities have suffered disproportionately in this war and must receive urgent support. He added that the government, UNICEF, and partners are scaling up more services to these very vulnerable children.
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The third long-duration astronaut team launched by SpaceX to the International Space Station (ISS) safely returned to Earth early Friday, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida to end months of orbital research ranging from space-grown chilies to robots.

The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying three U.S. NASA astronauts and a European Space Agency (ESA) crewmate from Germany parachuted into calm seas in darkness at the conclusion of a 23-hour-plus autonomous flight home from the ISS.

The splashdown, at about 12:45 a.m. EDT (0445 GMT) was carried live by a joint NASA-SpaceX webcast.

The Endurance crew, which began its stay in orbit on Nov. 11, consisted of American spaceflight veteran Tom Marshburn, 61, and three first-time astronauts — NASA’s Raja Chari, 44, and Kayla Barron, 34, and their ESA colleague Matthias Maurer, 52.

Camera shots from inside the crew compartment showed the astronauts strapped into their seats, garbed in helmeted white-and-black spacesuits.

It took splashdown-response teams less an hour to reach the capsule bobbing in the water, hoist it onto the deck of a recovery vessel and open the hatch to let the astronauts out for their first breath of fresh air in nearly six months.

The return from orbit followed a fiery re-entry plunge through Earth’s atmosphere generating frictional heat that sent temperatures outside the capsule soaring to 1,930 degrees Celsius.

Two sets of parachutes billowed open above the capsule in the final stage of descent, slowing its fall to about 24 kph before the craft hit the water off the coast of Tampa, Florida.

Applause from the SpaceX flight control center in suburban Los Angeles was heard over the webcast, which showed infrared images of the capsule on its final descent.

The newly returned astronauts were officially designated as NASA’s “Commercial Crew 3,” the third full-fledged, long-duration team of four that SpaceX has flown to the space station under contract for the U.S. space agency.

SpaceX, founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of electric carmaker Tesla Inc. who recently clinched a deal to buy Twitter, supplies the Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon capsules now flying NASA astronauts to orbit from U.S. soil.

The company also controls those flights and handles the splashdown recoveries, while NASA furnishes the crews and launch facilities at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and manages U.S. space station operations.

Microgravity cotton & combustion

California-based SpaceX has launched seven human spaceflights in all over the past two years — five for NASA and two for private ventures — as well as dozens of cargo and satellite payload missions since 2012.

Crew 3 returned to Earth with some 250 kilograms of cargo, including loads of ISS research samples.

Aside from carrying out routine maintenance while in orbit some 400 kilometers above Earth, the astronauts contributed to hundreds of science experiments and technology demonstrations.

Highlights included studies of the genetic expression in cotton cells cultured in space, gaseous flame combustion in microgravity and the DNA sequences of bacteria inside the station. Crew members also tested new robot devices, harvested chili peppers grown in orbit and conducted experiments in space physics and materials science.

Barron and Chari performed a spacewalk to prepare the station for another in a series of new lightweight roll-out solar arrays, to be used eventually on the planned Gateway outpost that will orbit the moon.

Crew 3’s return comes about a week after they welcomed their replacement team, Crew 4, aboard the space station. One of the three Russian cosmonauts also now inhabiting the station, Oleg Artemyev, assumed command of the ISS from Marshburn in a handover before Endurance departed early Thursday.
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With the coronavirus killing an estimated 15 million people worldwide, including nearly 1 million in the United States, the Biden administration, despite a lack of funding for domestic and international pandemic response, is set to mobilize a global effort to end the acute phase of COVID-19.

The move comes as the World Health Organization announced that the COVID-19 pandemic directly or indirectly caused 14.9 million deaths worldwide from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021.

The U.S. will co-host the second Global COVID-19 Summit on May 12, following the first in September 2021. The virtual summit will mark a shift from a crisis management strategy to the more sustainable approach of building resilient public health systems.

“The virus — after omicron particularly — has shown us that we have to evolve our strategy,” a senior administration official told VOA. The goal, the official said, is to reduce transmission, deaths and hospitalizations rather than eradicate the virus.

The summit will focus on “supporting locally led solutions” toward global goals, which include getting shots into arms, enhancing access to tests and treatments, and generating sustainable financing for future pandemic preparedness.

“We cannot have just one solution, which might fit all of these different situations,” Dr. Thierno Baldé of the World Health Organization’s Africa regional office told VOA. “The reality is to try to understand that, and therefore to have the most appropriate solution constructed commonly, with different countries, with different partners.”

To galvanize international support, the U.S. will co-host the event together with CARICOM (Caribbean Community) chair Belize; Group of Seven president Germany; Group of 20 President Indonesia, and African Union chair Senegal.

No pandemic funding

The U.S., however, will bring no new pledges to the summit table. The administration’s request for $22.5 billion in additional COVID-19 response money, including $5 billion for global pandemic funding, has been stuck for weeks largely because of Republican lawmakers who insist they won’t pass it unless the administration brings back Title 42. The Trump-era order allows authorities at the Mexican border to turn away migrants during a pandemic emergency.

The lack of funding jeopardizes the administration’s global pandemic response, including Global Vax, an international initiative launched in December to turn vaccines into vaccinations in 11 African countries, and which is set to run out of money in September. It could also undermine the administration’s ability to galvanize other countries’ commitments, particularly at an event that has been designed with a “step up to speak up” approach, meaning that countries can secure a speaking role only if they bring either financial pledges or policy commitments to support summit goals.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told VOA the summit would highlight to Congress the need for more funding so that the U.S. “can continue to be the arsenal of vaccines for the world.” She noted that even without the additional funding, the U.S. remains the largest contributor to the global fight against the pandemic.

Lack of global coordination

The first two years of the pandemic were marked by rich countries stockpiling more doses than they needed for boosters and protection against new variants, which threatened supplies to lower-income countries, where vaccination rates were low.

Now, with 2 billion doses of vaccine being produced each month, the problem is not a lack of supply but slowing demand and poor delivery capacity — problems that activists argue also stem from lack of coordination.

“If we’d had a coordinated global plan to end the pandemic, we wouldn’t now be in the situation where there’s quite a lot of vaccine doses but not enough money to actually distribute them in countries that need them,” Tom Hart told VOA. Hart is president of the ONE Campaign, an advocacy organization that fights preventable disease.

Beyond vaccines, the summit will also seek to improve access to testing and treatment, including by scaling up production and diversifying local and regional manufacturing capacity. Current efforts to achieve that include technology transfer agreements and the so-called TRIPS (Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) waiver proposal by South Africa and India at the World Trade Organization that called for intellectual property waivers on COVID-19 therapeutics and diagnostics. While the proposal is supported by more than 100 member countries, negotiations have been gridlocked for months.

Test to treat

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has recently rolled out a national “test to treat” program that tests people for COVID-19 and immediately treats them with the Pfizer antiviral drug Paxlovid if results are positive. It now aims to introduce similar pilot projects in other countries.

“The exact model may be different because the health systems are different,” the administration official said, noting that additional hurdles need to be addressed, including securing supplies of the generic drugs nirmatrelvir and ritonavir, which make up Paxlovid — a drug that is prohibitively expensive for lower- to middle-income countries.

Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, told VOA that it would be up to Pfizer, Merck and other companies that already have antivirals on the market to work with countries and existing multilateral systems to get these “test to treat” pilot projects in place so when the money and the supply ramp up, countries can scale up quickly.

In March, the Medicines Patent Pool, a United Nations-backed organization, signed agreements with 35 manufacturers in 12 countries to produce nirmatrelvir and ritonavir, but these are unlikely to be on the market until 2023. Udayakumar said the U.S. was working to make an affordable generic version of Paxlovid available within several months.

The Global COVID-19 Summit aims to secure pledges to help close the gap of about $15 billion in funding that the WHO says the world needs. While those pledges will be made, advocates are pessimistic.

“It’s not clear whether that’s being coordinated, whether one country or one region will have more than it needs and another region will go without,” Hart said. “That’s the problem with no coordination and no global plan.”
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With the U.S. entering a new COVID-19 phase marked by more testing, prevention and treatment options, President Joe Biden will next week convene another summit of global leaders to discuss next steps in the battle against the pandemic — but without the funding he says he needs to continue to fight it overseas. VOA’s White House correspondent Anita Powell and White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara report from Washington.
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There is renewed interest nuclear energy in Europe driven in part by climate goals but also the war in Ukraine – especially as the European Union moves to cut all energy ties with Russia. But tapping nuclear power remains expensive, time consuming and deeply controversial. For VOA, Lisa Bryant takes a look at the debate from Paris. Camera: Lisa Bryant
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It took two trips over state lines, navigating icy roads and a patchwork of state laws, for a 32-year-old South Dakota woman to get abortion pills last year.

For abortion-seekers like her, such journeys, along with pills sent through the mail, will grow in importance if the Supreme Court follows through with its leaked draft opinion that would overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision and allow individual states to ban the procedure.

The woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was concerned for her family’s safety, said the abortion pills allowed her to end an unexpected and high-risk pregnancy and remain devoted to her two children.

But anti-abortion activists and politicians say those cross-border trips, remote doctors’ consultations and pill deliveries are what they will try to stop next.

“Medication abortion will be where access to abortion is decided,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at Florida State University College of Law who specializes in reproductive rights. “That’s going to be the battleground that decides how enforceable abortion bans are.”

Use of abortion pills has been rising in the U.S. since 2000 when the Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone — the main drug used in medication abortions. More than half of U.S. abortions are now done with pills, rather than surgery, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

Two drugs are required. The first, mifepristone, blocks a hormone needed to maintain a pregnancy. A second drug, misoprostol, taken one to two days later, empties the uterus. Both drugs are available as generics and are also used to treat other conditions.

The FDA last year lifted a long-standing requirement that women pick up abortion pills in person. Federal regulations now also allow mail delivery nationwide. Even so, 19 states have passed laws requiring a medical clinician to be physically present when abortion pills are administered to a patient.

South Dakota is among them, joining several states, including Texas, Kentucky, Arkansas, Ohio, Tennessee and Oklahoma, where Republicans have moved to further restrict access to abortion pills in recent months.

Those moves have spurred online services that offer information on getting abortion pills and consultations to get a prescription. After the woman in South Dakota found that the state’s only abortion clinic could not schedule her in time for a medication abortion, she found an online service, called Just The Pill, that advised her to drive to Minnesota for a phone consultation with a doctor. A week later, she came back to Minnesota for the pills.

She took the first one almost immediately in her car, then cried as she drove home.

“I felt like I lost a pregnancy,” she said. “I love my husband and I love my children and I knew exactly what I had to say goodbye to and that was a really horrible thing to have to do.”

Besides crossing state lines, women can also turn to international online pharmacies, said Greer Donley, a professor specializing in reproductive health care at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. Some women also are having prescribed pills forwarded through states without restrictions.

“It allows for someone to have an abortion without a direct role of a provider. It’s going to be much harder for states to control abortion access,” she said, adding, “The question is how is it going to be enforced?”

Abortion law experts say it’s an unsettled question whether states can restrict access to abortion pills in the wake of the FDA’s decision.

“The general rule is that federal law preempts conflicting state law,” said Laura Hermer, a professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota. “There is no question that the FDA has proper authority to regulate the drugs used in medication abortions. The question is whether a state can make a viable, winning argument that, for public health purposes, it needs to further regulate access to the relevant medications.”

Hermer said she doesn’t think there is a valid public health reason because the published evidence is that the drugs are “exceptionally safe.” But if the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade and a state gives embryos and fetuses full rights as people “then all bets would be off.”

The Planned Parenthood regional organization that includes South Dakota doesn’t believe it can legally mail abortion pills to patients there.

Telemedicine providers have to abide by the laws of the state where the patient is, said Dr. Sarah Traxler, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood North Central States in St. Paul. She acknowledged that some organizations disagree.

“But,” she added, “we don’t feel like we have liberty to mail pills from Minnesota to other places in the country where it’s illegal to provide medication abortion.”

Sue Leibel, the state policy director for Susan B. Anthony List, a prominent organization opposed to abortion, acknowledged that medication abortions have “crept up” on Republican state lawmakers.

“This is a new frontier and states are grappling with enforcement mechanisms,” she said, adding, “The advice that I always give — if you shut the front door, the pills are going to come in the back door.”

Leibel maintained women should not be prosecuted for seeking abortions, keeping with a long-standing principle of many abortion opponents. She suggested the next target for state enforcement should be the pharmacies, organizations and clinics that provide the abortion pills. She also said abortion-rights opponents should focus on electing a presidential candidate who would work to reverse the FDA’s decision.

The FDA said a scientific review supported broadening access to the drugs and found complications were rare. The agency has reported 26 deaths associated with the drug since 2000, though not all of those can be directly attributed to the medication because of existing health conditions and other factors.

However, with new legal battles on the horizon and abortion seekers going to greater lengths to obtain the procedure, Donley, the law school professor, worried that state lawmakers will turn their attention toward the women who get the pills.

Indeed, a Louisiana House committee advanced a bill Wednesday that would make abortion a crime of homicide for which a woman ending her pregnancy could be charged, along with anyone helping her.

“Many anti-abortion legislators might realize the only way to enforce these laws is to prosecute the pregnant person themselves,” Donley said. 
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