Month: November 2024

New Delhi — The electric vehicle industry is closely watching to see how Tesla boss Elon Musk, who played a key role in the victory of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, will use his influence with the incoming president to steer the industry’s future.

At stake are several issues including the new administration’s approach to tariffs on Chinese EVs and tax credits. In anticipation of decisions favorable to Tesla, shares in the company rose 27% after the election result was announced, taking its market capitalization to $1 trillion.

During the campaign, Trump said he would increase tariffs on Chinese goods and roll back tax credits available to EV buyers in the U.S. He also vowed to reduce or eliminate many vehicle emissions standards under the Environmental Protection Agency, which support the EV industry.

Industry analysts are divided on whether high tariffs on Chinese EVs are advantageous or disadvantageous for Tesla’s business. Some analysts have suggested that Musk could persuade the Trump administration to reduce the tariffs on Chinese EVs and might even temper the overall tariff regime against Chinese goods.

However, Musk is likely to support the elimination of the $7,500 tax credit given to EV buyers in the United States. The absence of tax credits would make it difficult for legacy carmakers to introduce EV versions of their cars in competition with Tesla.

“As Elon Musk played a very important role in funding Trump’s campaign, he will no doubt have the ear of the U.S. president and play a role that will help shape policies that are advantageous to Tesla and his other businesses,” Bill Russo, founder and CEO of Automobility Limited, a Shanghai-based strategic consulting and investment platform, told VOA.

To be sure, Musk opposed U.S. tariffs on China-made EVs last May. “Neither Tesla nor I asked for these tariffs. In fact, I was surprised when they were announced. Things that inhibit freedom of exchange or distort the market are not good,” Musk said after the Biden administration enhanced tariffs on Chinese EVs.

The question is whether he will continue to oppose tariffs on Chinese EVs after Trump enters the White House. A section of analysts has predicted that Musk would continue this line of argument because China accounts for one-third of Tesla sales.

“Tesla is in China because Elon Musk needs the scale and efficient cost structure of the Chinese supply chain to make the company more competitive around the world,” Russo said.

China makes over 70% of the EV batteries in the world and almost two-thirds of all EVs and related components. “Tariffs make accessing this supply chain more costly, and that does not help Tesla,” he said.

Between January and May this year, Tesla sold almost as many cars in China as it did in the United States. Chinese consumers bought one-third of Tesla cars of all models totaling 513,644. In the same period, the company sold 522,444 vehicles in the U.S.

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives argued that higher tariffs would help Tesla compete better with Chinese EVs in the U.S. market.

“Tesla has the scale and scope that is unmatched in the EV industry and this dynamic could give Musk and Tesla a clear competitive advantage in a non-EV subsidy environment, coupled by likely higher China tariffs that would continue to push away cheaper Chinese EV players (BYD, Nio etc.) from flooding the U.S. market over the coming years,” Ives said in a note to clients this week.

Taking a different view, Beatrix C. Keim, director of Germany-based Centre Automotive Research, said the next president is unlikely to listen to arguments for reducing tariffs on Chinese EVs.

“There is a 100% tariff for Chinese EVs in place. I don’t think that Trump will weaken this,” she said. The high tariff does not affect Tesla because it does not export cars from its Shanghai plant for the U.S. market, and builds them in the U.S.

Keim said Musk will do whatever serves Tesla’s business in China. “Chinese people are very likely to react emotionally if he is perceived as acting against China’s interest,” she said. “Chinese customers had once blocked the sales of Tesla cars, and this can happen again.”

Musk said last April that he loved the Chinese people.

“I’m a big fan of China. I also have a lot of fans in China. Well, the feelings are reciprocated,” Musk, who has often been described in Chinese social media as a “friend of China,” said in April.

Tesla is set to introduce a new fully self-driving (FSD – Supervised) car in the coming months, though the vehicle’s safety remains under review. Musk must have sufficient influence in both Washington and Beijing to obtain the regulatory approvals necessary to sell it.

“China is likely to approve FSD as it would like to show goodwill toward foreign technology,” Russo said. However, Tesla’s FSD may have a limited market in China where local manufacturers play a much bigger role.

Keim said Tesla’s FSD might not face regulatory challenges in Europe, but it may be difficult for it to find enough customers in the face of local competition.

One of the questions that is often asked is whether China would retaliate by imposing higher tariffs on American goods, including Tesla.

“This is very unlikely, as Tesla has invested in China and is used as an example of how foreign brands are still welcome in China, and Tesla is held up as a benchmark for Chinese companies to measure against,” Russo said.

“Killing competition is not viewed as healthy for the forward development of the Chinese automakers. This is in stark contrast to the way the U.S. has acted so far.”
…

London — 2024 is likely to be the hottest year ever recorded, with global warming already exceeding the threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, according to scientists, who released the latest data ahead of the COP29 climate summit due to start Monday in Azerbaijan. 

Carlo Buontempo, the director of the European Union’s Copernicus Earth observation program, which produced the data, said it was an important moment for humankind. 

“I call it psychological because it’s something that has been agreed not only among scientists, but between scientists and policymakers and society and nations to use as a reference point. … It is a benchmark with respect to that global discussion,” he told the Associated Press on Thursday. 

Paris Agreement 

Keeping global warming to within 1.5°C of pre-industrial levels was a central pillar of the 2016 Paris Agreement, a deal signed by 196 countries, which forms the basis for the annual COP summits. Scientists say exceeding that threshold will likely have catastrophic impacts. 

“It can be the difference between a country existing, particularly small island developing states, and not. We’re also nearing a lot of Earth system tipping points,” said Ruth Townend, a senior research fellow at Britain’s Chatham House and co-author of its recent report, Azerbaijan’s climate leadership challenge. 

“Our delicate Earth systems are in a fine balance. And once we pass certain thresholds, we can trigger climate impacts that might not be reversible, moving ourselves into new types of systems.” 

Emissions gap 

As for the current trajectory, the United Nations says the world is heading toward around 3°C of warming by the end of this century. 

“We are teetering on a planetary tightrope,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a recorded message ahead of the summit. 

“Either leaders bridge the emissions gap or we plunge headlong into climate disaster, with the poorest and most vulnerable suffering the most. This report shows annual greenhouse gas emissions at an all-time high, rising 1.3% last year. They must fall 9% each year to 2030 to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C and avoid the very worst of climate change,” Guterres said. 

COP29 

Such is the backdrop for the COP29 summit in Baku.  

Over 12 days, hundreds of world leaders and thousands of delegates will enter thorny negotiations on how to cut global greenhouse gas emissions — and, crucially, who should pay for those cuts, along with the adaptation measures necessary to mitigate against climate change caused by past emissions. 

Who pays? 

A key part of COP29 is “to establish the finance in place to help developing countries produce strong new climate plans,” explained Townend.  

“And those climate plans are meant to be delivered ahead of COP30 in Brazil next year. Without the finance domino in that line of dominoes, everything will essentially fall apart a little bit because developing countries won’t have any kind of promise of support from developed countries in order to produce those ambitious new climate plans,” Townend said. 

Fossil fuels 

Some have questioned Azerbaijan’s suitability as host of the summit. It is a major producer of oil and gas — among the fossil fuels that drive climate change.  

“Around 90% of its export revenues come from oil and gas. And it is also a climate vulnerable country — so it gets around 50 to 70% of its water from over its borders, outside its borders,” Townend said. 

“So, it really is between a rock and a hard place on climate action and transition. And as such, it has a really strong interest in getting finance in place to help developing countries such as itself to find a feasible path forward,” she told VOA. 

Trump shadow 

Looming over the summit is Donald Trump’s victory in the Tuesday U.S. presidential election. 

In his first term, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement and could do so again once he assumes the presidency in January. He has also pledged to open vast areas of the U.S. for oil and gas drilling. 

There are also fears that Trump’s proposed import tariffs could lead to a trade war with China. The U.S. and China are the top two emitters of greenhouse gases and together account for around a third of global emissions. 

The world must adapt to such tensions, said Townend. 

“We’re unlikely to be moving towards a world that is more stable with increasing climate impact. So, we do need to learn to manage under these conditions of geopolitical instability, which will only increase going forward.” 

Extreme weather 

From the wildfires currently raging in California to the recent deadly floods in Spain’s Valencia, scientists say extreme weather events are a clear indication of the urgency of curbing global warming.  

“There is very strong evidence suggesting that many of these extreme events have become more intense because of climate change. And there is a good understanding of why,” said Buontempo of the EU Copernicus program, who added it’s vital that COP29 is a success. 

“These multilateral negotiations and discussion is the mechanism we have to find a global solution,” he added.
…

The COP29 climate summit is due to get under way on Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan — a country whose economy is largely based on selling fossil fuels. Over 12 days, world leaders and thousands of delegates will try to negotiate ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, amid warnings that efforts to limit global warming are way off track. Henry Ridgwell reports.
…

When a volcanic eruption buried the ancient city of Pompeii, the last desperate moments of its citizens were preserved in stone for centuries.

Observers see stories in the plaster casts later made of their bodies, like a mother holding a child and two women embracing as they died.

But new DNA evidence suggests things were not as they seem — and these prevailing interpretations come from looking at the ancient world through modern eyes.

“We were able to disprove or challenge some of the previous narratives built upon how these individuals were kind of found in relation to each other,” said Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “It opens up different interpretations for who these people might have been.”

Mittnik and her colleagues discovered that the person thought to be a mother was actually a man unrelated to the child. And at least one of the two people locked in an embrace — long assumed to be sisters or a mother and daughter — was a man. Their research was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

The team, which also includes scientists from Harvard University and the University of Florence in Italy, relied on genetic material preserved for nearly two millennia. After Mount Vesuvius erupted and destroyed the Roman city in 79 A.D., bodies buried in mud and ash eventually decomposed, leaving spaces where they used to be. Casts were created from the voids in the late 1800s.

Researchers focused on 14 casts undergoing restoration, extracting DNA from the fragmented skeletal remains that mixed with them. They hoped to determine the sex, ancestry and genetic relationships between the victims.

There were several surprises in “the house of the golden bracelet,” the dwelling where the assumed mother and child were found. The adult wore an intricate piece of jewelry, for which the house was named, reinforcing the impression that the victim was a woman. Nearby were the bodies of another adult and child thought to be the rest of their nuclear family.

DNA evidence showed the four were male and not related to one another, clearly showing “the story that was long spun around these individuals” was wrong, Mittnik said.

Researchers also confirmed Pompeii citizens came from diverse backgrounds but mainly descended from eastern Mediterranean immigrants – underscoring a broad pattern of movement and cultural exchange in the Roman Empire. Pompeii is located about 241 kilometers from Rome.

The study builds upon research from 2022 when scientists sequenced the genome of a Pompeii victim for the first time and confirmed the possibility of retrieving ancient DNA from the human remains that still exist.

“They have a better overview of what’s happening in Pompeii because they analyzed different samples,” said Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, a co-author of that research who was not involved in the current study. “We actually had one genome, one sample, one shot.”

Though much remains to be learned, Scorrano said, such genetic brushstrokes are slowly painting a truer picture of how people lived in the distant past. 
…

Federal health officials on Thursday called for more testing of employees on farms with bird flu after a new study showed that some dairy workers had signs of infection, even when they didn’t report feeling sick. 

Farmworkers in close contact with infected animals should be tested and offered treatment even if they show no symptoms, said Dr. Nirav Shah, principal director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The new guidance comes after blood tests for 115 farmworkers in Michigan and Colorado showed that eight workers — or 7% — had antibodies that indicated previous infection with the virus known as Type A H5N1 influenza. 

“The purpose of these actions is to keep workers safe, to limit the transmission of H5 to humans and to reduce the possibility of the virus changing,” Shah told reporters. 

The CDC study provides the largest window to date into how the bird virus first detected in March in dairy cows may be spreading to people. It suggests that the virus has infected more humans than the 46 farmworkers identified in the U.S. as of Thursday. Nearly all were in contact with infected dairy cows or infected poultry. 

Outside experts said it’s notable that the study prompted the CDC to take new action. Previous recommendations called for testing and treating workers only when they had symptoms. 

“This is a significant move towards the assessment that these H5N1 viruses are a greater risk than the CDC estimated before,” said Dr. Gregory Gray, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. 

Every additional infection in animals or humans gives the virus the chance to change in potentially dangerous ways, said Angela Rasmussen, a virus expert at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. 

“It shows yet again that we are not responding effectively to the H5N1 cattle outbreak in humans or animals and if we continue to let this virus spread and jump from species to species, our luck will eventually run out,” Rasmussen said in an email. 

The CDC study included 45 workers in Michigan and 70 in Colorado tested between June and August. Of the eight workers with positive blood tests, four reported no symptoms. All eight cleaned milking parlors and none used respiratory protection such as face masks. Three said they used eye protection. 

High levels of the virus have been found in the milk of infected cows, increasing the risk of exposure and infection, researchers said. 

Researchers said that efforts to monitor dairy workers for illness have been hindered by several barriers including the reluctance of farm owners and farmworkers to allow testing. 

The virus has been confirmed in at least 446 cattle herds in 15 states. Last week, the Agriculture Department said a pig at an Oregon farm was confirmed to have bird flu, the first time the virus was detected in U.S. swine. 
…

KINSHASA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO — The spread of mpox has slowed down slightly across Africa, but the epidemic is not over, the African Union’s health watchdog said Thursday.

Fifteen countries across Africa recorded 11,453 mpox cases in the last four weeks, compared with 12,802 in the four weeks prior, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said during an online briefing.

But the head of the Africa CDC, Jean Kaseya, warned the epidemic was not over.

“We are still in the acute phase of the outbreak that is pushing us to double our effort to control mpox in Africa,” Kaseya said.

“Unfortunately, we are still losing a number of people,” he said.

Since the start of the year, authorities have recorded 50,840 mpox cases and 1,083 deaths across Africa.

Central Africa accounts for more than 85% of cases and almost all deaths.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, which has recorded more than 39,000 cases and more than 1,000 deaths since the start of the year, launched a vaccination campaign last month that is still “limited,” according to the Africa CDC.

Some 51,649 people have been vaccinated in six provinces, the Africa CDC said.

“We hope that with these vaccines we can continue to support countries to stop this outbreak,” Kaseya said.

Health agencies across the world have allocated just under 900,000 vaccine doses for nine African countries “hard hit by the current mpox surge,” the Africa CDC said in a statement Tuesday.

The countries include the DRC, Kenya and Uganda.

“The largest number of doses — 85% of the allocation — will go to the Democratic Republic of the Congo as the most affected country, reporting four out of every five laboratory confirmed cases in Africa this year,” the statement said.

Mpox, previously known as monkeypox, is caused by a virus transmitted to humans by infected animals but can also be passed from human to human through close physical contact.

It causes fever, muscular aches and large boil-like skin lesions, and can be deadly.
…

Washington — Researchers at Michigan State University recently discovered that honeybees, with their keen sense of smell, can sniff out lung cancer on a patient’s breath.

“Our world is visual. Insects’ world is all based on smell, so their sense of smell is very, very good,” says Debajit Saha, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan State University, who was part of a team that published research on the discovery last month.

“There is quite a bit of research that shows that when some cancer grows inside our body, our breath actually changes. Our research does show that honeybees can detect lung cancer and possibly other diseases based on the smell of those cells.”

Saha and his team harnessed the bees and attached electrodes to their brains. The insects were then exposed to synthetic compounds that mimicked the breath of a lung cancer patient. Ninety-three percent of the time, the bees could tell the difference between the cancer breath and the artificial breath of a healthy person. The bees could also distinguish between different types of lung cancer.

The discovery could have implications for early detection of many cancers, including lung, breast, head and neck, and colorectal cancers.

“We do think breath-based diagnostics of cancer can be a game changer,” Saha says. “The reason is, many times we detect the cancer late, when the tumor has already grown pretty big. But generally, when cancer starts growing in your body, the breath signature starts changing much earlier.”

He hopes to develop a portable system in which electrodes are implanted in a honeybee brain that a patient will be able to breathe into. This cyborg sensor, which is part-brain, part-engineered, would deliver test results in real time.

“Hopefully, within the next five years, we’ll have something to show that humans can be diagnosed using these insect brain disc sensors,” Saha says.

Using animals to detect cancer isn’t a new concept. At the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers are training dogs to recognize certain cancer odors.

“A lot of other animals also have quite intense and capable senses of smell,” says Cindy Otto, executive director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center. “But part of what makes dogs so good is that they cooperate with humans, and so, they communicate that information.”

The dogs are in a foster program where they live with families and are brought to “work” each day. Not all dogs can do the work, according to Clara Wilson, a postdoctoral researcher at the center.

“If the dog is not really interested in this type of work, we find out pretty quickly. And you can’t make a dog want to do this, because they’re not going to give you high-quality answers,” Wilson says. “They need to love it to be engaged. And so, it’s a really fun game for them.”

Sniffing out cancer might be a game to the animals, but researchers are finding that the animals detect cancer better than machines. A dog’s sense of smell is 10,000 to 100,000 times more acute than that of humans.

“Why are we finding that these dogs are outperforming the computers?” says Amritha Mallikarjun, another postdoctoral researcher at the center. “Well, part of their success is because of this superior sensitivity to detect odor molecules as compared to anything we currently have on the market.”

The researchers hope to continue isolating characteristics of cancer odors to enhance technological development, eventually creating e-noses that duplicate a dog’s cancer sniffing abilities, enabling earlier detection of cancer.

“This may not be the endgame, but I think it’s going to advance the overall approach to diagnosing not only cancer but many other diseases,” Otto says.

“You can look back in history to the Greeks and Romans. The physicians then used odor as part of their diagnostic tools, and I think as modern humans, we’ve kind of let go of that. I think we can really capitalize on that and advance the health of not only humans, but dogs and other species as well.”
…

Canada announced Wednesday it won’t block access to the popular video-sharing app TikTok but is ordering the dissolution of its Canadian business after a national security review of the Chinese company behind it.

Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said it is meant to address risks related to ByteDance Ltd.’s establishment of TikTok Technology Canada Inc.

“The government is not blocking Canadians’ access to the TikTok application or their ability to create content. The decision to use a social media application or platform is a personal choice,” Champagne said.

Champagne said it is important for Canadians to adopt good cybersecurity practices, including protecting their personal information.

He said the dissolution order was made in accordance with the Investment Canada Act, which allows for the review of foreign investments that may harm Canada’s national security. He said the decision was based on information and evidence collected over the course of the review and on the advice of Canada’s security and intelligence community and other government partners.

A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement that the shutdown of its Canadian offices will mean the loss of hundreds of local jobs.

“We will challenge this order in court,” the spokesperson said. “The TikTok platform will remain available for creators to find an audience, explore new interests and for businesses to thrive.”

TikTok is wildly popular with young people, but its Chinese ownership has raised fears that Beijing could use it to collect data on Western users or push pro-China narratives and misinformation. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020.

TikTok faces intensifying scrutiny from Europe and America over security and data privacy. It comes as China and the West are locked in a wider tug of war over technology ranging from spy balloons to computer chips.

Canada previously banned TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices. TikTok has two offices in Canada, one in Toronto and one in Vancouver.

Michael Geist, Canada research chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, said in a blog post that “banning the company rather than the app may actually make matters worse since the risks associated with the app will remain but the ability to hold the company accountable will be weakened.”

Canada’s move comes a day after the election in the United States of Donald Trump. In June, Trump joined TikTok, a platform he once tried to ban while in the White House. It has about 170 million users in the U.S.

Trump tried to ban TikTok through an executive order that said “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned” by Chinese companies was a national security threat. The courts blocked the action after TikTok sued.

Both the U.S. FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned that ByteDance could share user data such as browsing history, location and biometric identifiers with China’s government. TikTok said it has never done that and would not, if asked.

Trump said earlier this year that he still believes TikTok posed a national security risk, but was opposed to banning it.

U.S. President Joe Biden signed legislation in April that would force ByteDance to sell the app to a U.S. company within a year or face a national ban. It’s not clear whether that law will survive a legal challenge filed by TikTok or that ByteDance would agree to sell.
…

CHICAGO — For the second year in a row, Earth will almost certainly be the hottest it’s ever been. And for the first time, the globe this year reached more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming compared to the pre-industrial average, the European climate agency Copernicus said Thursday.

“It’s this relentless nature of the warming that I think is worrying,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus.

Buontempo said the data clearly shows the planet would not see such a long sequence of record-breaking temperatures without the constant increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere driving global warming.

He cited other factors that contribute to exceptionally warm years like last year and this one. They include El Nino — the temporary warming of parts of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide — as well as volcanic eruptions that spew water vapor into the air and variations in energy from the sun. But he and other scientists say the long-term increase in temperatures beyond fluctuations like El Nino is a bad sign.

“A very strong El Nino event is a sneak peek into what the new normal will be about a decade from now,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist with the nonprofit Berkeley Earth.

News of a likely second year of record heat comes a day after Republican Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and promised to boost oil drilling and production, was reelected to the U.S. presidency. It also comes days before the next U.N. climate conference, called COP29, is set to begin in Azerbaijan. Talks are expected to focus on how to generate trillions of dollars to help the world transition to clean energies like wind and solar, and thus avoid continued warming.

Buontempo pointed out that going over the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold of warming for a single year is different than the goal adopted in the 2015 Paris Agreement. That goal was meant to try to cap warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times on average, over 20 or 30 years.

A United Nations report this year said that since the mid-1800s on average, the world has already heated up 1.3 degrees Celsius — up from previous estimates of 1.1 degrees or 1.2 degrees. That’s of concern because the U.N. says the greenhouse gas emission reduction goals of the world’s nations still aren’t nearly ambitious enough to keep the 1.5 degree Celsius target on track.

The target was chosen to try to stave off the worst effects of climate change on humanity, including extreme weather. “The heat waves, storm damage, and droughts that we are experiencing now are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Natalie Mahowald, chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University.

Going over that number in 2024 doesn’t mean the overall trend line of global warming has, but “in the absence of concerted action, it soon will,” said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann.

Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson put it in starker terms. “I think we have missed the 1.5 degree window,” said Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who track countries’ carbon dioxide emissions. “There’s too much warming.”

Indiana state climatologist Beth Hall said she isn’t surprised by the latest report from Copernicus, but emphasized that people should remember climate is a global issue beyond their local experiences with changing weather. “We tend to be siloed in our own individual world,” she said. Reports like this one “are taking into account lots and lots of locations that aren’t in our backyard.”

Buontempo stressed the importance of global observations, bolstered by international cooperation, that allow scientists to have confidence in the new report’s finding: Copernicus gets its results from billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world.

He said that going over the 1.5 degree Celsius benchmark this year is “psychologically important” as nations make decisions internally and approach negotiations at the annual U.N. climate change summit Nov. 11-22 in Azerbaijan.

“The decision, clearly, is ours. It’s of each and every one of us. And it’s the decision of our society and our policymakers as a consequence of that,” he said. “But I believe these decisions are better made if they are based on evidence and facts.”
…

An initial 899,000 vaccine doses have been allocated for nine countries across Africa that have been hit hard by the current mpox surge, the WHO and other health organizations said on Wednesday.

The WHO declared mpox a global public health emergency for the second time in two years in August after a new variant of the virus, called clade Ib, spread from the Democratic Republic of Congo to neighboring countries.

In September, after facing criticism on moving too slowly on vaccines, the World Health Organization cleared Bavarian Nordic’s BAVA.CO vaccine for mpox and said it was considering LC16, made by Japan’s KM Biologics as a potential vaccine option.

The WHO also set up a scheme to help bring mpox vaccines, tests and treatments to the most vulnerable people in the world’s poorest countries, similar to efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The global health agency said on Wednesday the newly allocated vaccines will go to the Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda.

The largest number of doses – 85% of the allocated vaccines – will go to the Democratic Republic of Congo as the most affected country, the WHO said.

The allocated vaccines are from European countries, the United States, Canada and Gavi, a public-private alliance that co-funds vaccine purchases for low-income countries.

According to the latest WHO figures, there have been more than 46,000 confirmed and suspected cases of mpox in Africa this year, and more than 1,000 deaths in the continent due to the viral illness.
…