Reunion Wire

 

 

The U.S. military will start requiring service members to receive a COVID-19 vaccine by the middle of September, anticipating full regulatory approval of a vaccine by then.

In a memo to service members, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he would seek President Joe Biden’s approval to make the vaccines mandatory no later than mid-September or as soon as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gives final approval to the Pfizer vaccine, “whichever comes first.”

 

The memo urges troops to prepare for the requirement, and Austin added that if coronavirus infection rates rise, “I will not hesitate to act sooner or recommend a different course to the president if l feel the need to do so.”

Biden said in a statement Monday that he strongly supports Austin’s message, adding that “being vaccinated will enable our service members to stay healthy, to better protect their families, and to ensure that our force is ready to operate anywhere in the world.”

The announcement comes a week and a half after Biden set new rules requiring federal workers to provide proof of vaccination or face regular testing. At that time, Biden also directed the Pentagon to look into requiring the COVID-19 vaccine for members of the military.

The FDA is expected to give full regulatory approval to the Pfizer vaccine by next month. Without that approval, the Pentagon would need a waiver from the president to make the vaccine mandatory.

The decision to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine adds that inoculation to a list of other vaccines that service members are already required to receive.

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said military services are being asked to develop plans to implement the mandate. He said the military did not have a deadline on which all troops should be vaccinated.

“Mandating vaccines in the military is not new,” said General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a memo to the Joint Force on Monday. “Getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is a key force protection and readiness issue.”

U.S. Representative Mike Rogers, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Monday, “We have already seen COVID-19 affect our readiness downrange. … We must not allow COVID-19 to be a hindrance on our force.”

According to the U.S. military, around half of the U.S. armed forces are fully vaccinated. The Air Force reports that more than 65% of its active-duty forces are at least partially vaccinated, while the Navy has the highest vaccination rates, with nearly 75% of all active duty and reserve sailors inoculated with at least one shot.

Once the vaccine is mandated, military officials say, a refusal can be punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, according to The Associated Press.

Service members can seek an exemption from the vaccine mandate for health or religious reasons.

 

 

Source: Voice of America

 

A student organization is trying to combat misinformation about COVID-19 and pandemic on American campuses through social media.

COVID Campus Coalition’s mission is to dispel “misconceptions surrounding COVID vaccines by providing students with weekly digestible scientific summaries through a plethora of virtual and in-person platforms,” according to its website.

“Look at the comments of an Instagram post about the vaccine and you have people spouting myths and conspiracies about the virus,” said sophomore James Lifton of Edinburgh, Scotland, a political science major, who has teamed up with COVID Campus Coalition on his campus, Texas A&M (TAMU).

Social media has been rife with inaccurate and misinformed opinions at the same time more than 150 studies have been retracted about COVID, leading some people to feel confused or alienated about what information is real and true, and what is fabricated or political.

On its website and social media accounts, COVID Campus Coalition pushes accurate information to its audience from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and scientific articles by medical professionals released through New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard Medicine, University of Chicago Medicine and MedRxiv.

There are 23 Campus Coalition chapters across the United States, including Rutgers University in New Jersey, University of Florida, University of Southern California and Cornell University in New York.

Student ambassadors like Lifton “reach out to the community through spreading statistics and posts about debunking common myths of the vaccine,” he said.

“I hope that this project can push more young people to get the vaccines to help assist with herd immunity, as well as start conversations about what the vaccine is for young people,” Lifton said.

Another wave of increased cases is making its way across the U.S., this time via the highly transmissible delta variant, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The Delta variant is to blame for 80% of all new COVID cases, the agency reported.

At TAMU, 10,772 people have been vaccinated through Student Health Services, only 15% of the student population.

“If this account can convince just one Aggie to get vaccinated, I would see it as a success,” said TAMU junior Sadie Hurst, referring to the nickname for the TAMU student body. “If it can convince one Aggie to get vaccinated, what’s to stop it from convincing hundreds?”

 

Approximately 54.9% of individuals aged 18-24 have received at least one dose of the COVID vaccine in the United States, while 44.6% of individuals of the same age have been fully vaccinated, according to Mayo Clinic’s vaccine tracker as of August 9. Among 25- to 39-year-olds, 58.7% have received at least one dose, while 49.2% have been fully vaccinated.

“There is an ideological divide on my campus,” Lifton said. “Having people be on board with getting the vaccine will be difficult. I believe this is the right move in order to ensure that cases at college do not continue rising as we go back in person. It will be difficult but I believe that it is possible.”

Olivia Nicholson is a student on the other side of the divide. The freshman at Belmont University in Nashville said she has chosen not to be inoculated.

“It just doesn’t seem that effective,” Nicholson said. “There is no guarantee that if you receive the vaccine you will not contract COVID. I feel like if I still have to wear a mask — and there is no guarantee that I will not contract COVID — then I won’t put something in my body without knowing exactly what effect it could have on me.”

According to the CDC, “COVID-19 vaccines are effective at keeping you from getting COVID-19, especially severe illness and death. COVID-19 vaccines reduce the risk of people spreading the virus that causes COVID-19.”

“If you are fully vaccinated, you can resume activities that you did before the pandemic,” it states on its website.

Those activities include returning to college campuses. A year and a half into the pandemic that is believed to have spread from China in late 2019, students have endured more than a year of campus shut down, prolonged and insufficient online learning, missed ceremonies, and a lack of social interaction with peers and professors.

Most recently, they have faced the new variant and vaccine requirements, according to the CDC. Many students fear classes will continue online rather than in person, and campus activities will be delayed again.

“With lectures and labs being almost completely online, I do not know a single student who didn’t feel just completely drained by the end of the school year,” Hurst said.

“Severe burnout seemed to be rampant on campus by midterms. My grades plummeted, my friends’ grades plummeted, and even my classmates who had good semester GPAs would tell you they did not feel like they learned anything during the year. It is exhausting to be a student during COVID,” she said.

In addition to the COVID Campus Coalition, other entities offer scientific resources and information, including the World Health Organization, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, and the Davidson College COVID-19 Testing Dashboard on COVID facts and misinformation.

 

 

 

Source: Voice of America

One-third of Israel’s seniors — about 420,000 of those age 60 and older — have received a coronavirus booster shot, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Sunday, adding that the figure could reach 500,000 by the end of the day.

Bennett announced the progress of the vaccine campaign, which began 10 days ago and uses the Pfizer vaccine, at a Cabinet meeting.

Israel became a vaccination leader early in the pandemic, with about 5.4 million of its population of 9.3 million people fully vaccinated. Still, with hospitalizations on the rise, almost exclusively with the delta variant, the government offered the third shot and reinstated a mask mandate indoors.

With the world a year and a half into the pandemic, the United States, India and Brazil have suffered the most cases of COVID-19 and deaths from the virus by far, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

The U.S. has reported more than 35.7 million cases and more than 616,000 deaths. India has reported nearly 32 million cases and nearly 428,000 deaths. Brazil has reported 20.1 million cases and more than 563,000 deaths.

France, Russia and the United Kingdom fill the next three spots with more than 6 million cases each and 112,000 to 162,000 deaths.

India, which faced a devastating second wave of the virus earlier this year, said Sunday that it had recorded more than 39,000 new COVID-19 cases in the previous 24-hour period. Brazil reported more than 43,000 new cases on Sunday. The U.S. reported just more than 44,000 new cases, all figures according to Johns Hopkins.

Neither the U.S. nor any European country has yet authorized booster shots of the vaccine. Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) called for a moratorium on discussions of booster shots until more of the global population is vaccinated.

In India, just more than 8% of its population has been fully vaccinated. In Brazil, that figure stands at 21%, and the U.S. sits at almost 51%, all according to Johns Hopkins.

Coronavirus cases are rising in the United States, which confirmed an average of 100,000 new infections every day in the last week. Infections have been rising, due to the more contagious delta variant.

Frances Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, told ABC’s “This Week” Sunday that the country was failing in its pandemic response.

“We should not really have ever got to the place we are,” he said.

More than 230,000 people marched Saturday in cities across France to protest measures meant to counter the spread of the coronavirus, including vaccines for health care workers and a health pass needed for many public indoor activities.

This fourth week of protests was also the largest, and included marches in Paris, Nice, Montpellier and Lyon, where police used tear gas on protesters who threw objects at police. The measures have brought together France’s hard-left anarchists and hard-right militants, according to Reuters.

Health care workers have until September 15 to get their shots or face suspension.

“I’d rather not be paid than be forced to have the vaccine,” hospital psychiatrist Diane Hekking told Reuters as she protested in Paris.

The health pass shows proof of vaccination, a recent negative COVID-19 test or recovery from COVID-19. One will be needed starting Monday to enter cafes and restaurants, travel on intercity trains and access nonemergency care at hospitals. The pass was already needed for cinemas, concert halls, sports arenas and theme parks that hold more than 50 people, according to The Associated Press.

France isn’t the only European country to turn to health passes.

Italy’s Green Pass took effect Friday. Denmark pioneered vaccine passes with little resistance. In Austria, the pass is needed to enter restaurants, theaters, hotels, sports facilities and hairdressers, the AP said.

In Poland, though, thousands marched Saturday in protest as the government debated whether to place restrictions on unvaccinated people, Reuters reported.

In the past month, Poland has reported nearly 3,300 new cases of coronavirus and 167 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins.

Johns Hopkins reported early Sunday more than 202.2 million global COVID-19 infections. The university said over 4.4 billion vaccine doses had been administered.
 

Source: Voice of America

 

BERLIN – Two spacecraft are set to swoop past Venus within hours of each other this week, using the maneuver to do a little bit of bonus science on the way to their main missions at the center of our solar system.

The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter probe, a cooperation with NASA, will swing around Venus early Monday, using the planet’s gravity to help put it on a course to observe the Sun’s poles.

About 33 hours later, the European-Japanese spacecraft BepiColombo will get even closer to Venus in a maneuver designed to help it slow down sharply and safely steer into the orbit of Mercury in 2025.

“Without the flyby, we would not be able to reach our target planet,” said Elsa Montagnon, the spacecraft operations manager for BepiColombo. “The energy required to enter into orbit of Mercury would be prohibitively expensive in terms of propellant.”

Both probes have numerous scientific instruments on board, some of which will be used to take a closer look at Venus as they zoom past.

The measurements will add to those taken by the Japanese probe Akatsuki, which is already in orbit around Earth’s hotter neighbor. NASA and the European Space Agency are planning to send three more missions to Venus toward the end of the decade.

 

 

Source: Voice of America

 

 

TOKYO – The official price tag for the Tokyo Olympics in $15.4 billion, which a University of Oxford study says is the most expensive on record. What else could those billions buy?

The ballpark figure for building a 300-bed hospital in Japan is $55 million. So you could put up almost 300 of these.

The average elementary school in Japan costs about $13 million. For that price, you get 1,200 schools.

A quick search finds a Boeing 747 is priced at roughly $400 million. Voila: 38 jumbo jets for the cost of the Tokyo Olympics.

The point is that Olympic Games are costly and may bump aside other priorities. In fact, several Japanese government audits say the real outlay for the Tokyo Games is even more than the official figure, perhaps twice as much. All but $6.7 billion comes from public money from Japanese taxpayers. According to the latest budget, the IOC’s contribution is $1.3 billion. It also chipped in several hundred million more after the pandemic.

Olympic costs have been dissected in a  study by the University of Oxford, which found that all Games since 1960 have had cost overruns averaging 172%. Tokyo’s cost overrun is 111% or 244%, depending on which cost figure you select.

Embarrassment

“The IOC and host cities have no interest in tracking costs, because tracking tends to reveal cost overruns, which have increasingly become an embarrassment to the IOC and host cities,” Oxford author Bent Flyvberg said in an email. Flyvberg also pointed out that costs would be reduced if the IOC picked up more of the bills rather than opening organizers’ wallets.

Following costs is a tedious exercise, dotted with arguments about what are — and what are not — Olympic expenses. Flyvberg explained that numbers from different games can be “opaque and noncomparable” and require sorting and tracking.

“The problem is disentangling what is Olympics cost and what is just general infrastructure spending that would have happened anyways but was sped up for the Olympics,” Victor Matheson, who studies sports economics at College of the Holy Cross, wrote in an email.

For example: The 1964 Tokyo Games, he says, “were either one of the cheapest or one of the most expensive Games depending on how much of the preparation costs count as the Olympics.”

The 2008 Beijing Olympics, usually listed as costing more than $40 billion, and the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, priced at $51 billion, are often singled out incorrectly as the most expensive.

“The numbers for Beijing and Sochi likely include wider infrastructure costs: roads, rail, airports, hotels, etc. Our numbers do not,” Flyvberg wrote in an email.

The blur around costs — and who pays — allows the IOC to pitch the Olympics as a global party that brings the world together and promotes world peace. Everybody is seen to benefit, and the financial interests of the not-for-profit IOC are hidden behind national flags, pomp and ceremony, and heart-tugging stories about athletes winning gold and beating the pandemic.

Tokyo, of course, saw costs soar with the postponement. Officials say the delay added $2.8 billion to the final total. The postponement and a subsequent ban on fans also wiped out virtually all ticket sales income, which was budgeted at $800 million. That shortfall will have to be picked up by Japanese government entities — likely the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

Sponsors’ complaint

Tokyo organizers raised a record $3.3 billion from domestic sponsors, driven by giant Japanese advertising company Dentsu Inc. But many sponsors complained openly in the run-up to the Games that their investment was wasted without fans. Toyota, one of the IOC’s top 15 sponsors, pulled its Games-related advertising off television in Japan because of public discontent about holding the Olympics in the middle of a pandemic.

The big winner appears to be the Switzerland-based International Olympic Committee, which by holding the Olympics — even without fans — assured broadcast rights income of $3 billion to $4 billion. The IOC is essentially a sports and entertainment business, and almost 75% of its income is from selling broadcast rights, with another 18% from sponsors.

The IOC was able to drive the Games forward, partly because the terms in the so-called Host City Agreement favor the IOC and not the Japanese hosts.

In an interview last week, President Thomas Bach said financial interests were not at the center of the IOC’s decision to postpone instead of cancel.

“We could have canceled the Games 15 months ago,” Bach said. “Financially, it would have been the easiest solution for the IOC. But we decided at the time not to cancel the Games, not to draw on the insurance we had at the time.”

The IOC has never said how much insurance coverage it has for such eventualities, nor what is covered.

So why did Tokyo want the Olympics? Why does any city? German sports economist Wolfgang Maennig said the Olympics offer little economic boost. So any value must be elsewhere. He has often likened the Olympics to throwing a big party for your friends and overspending, hoping they go away happy and remember you fondly.

“After three decades of empirical research, economists agree that the Olympics do not generate any significant positive effect on national (or even regional) income, employment, tax income, tourism etc.,” Maennig, a 1988 Olympic gold medalist in rowing, wrote in a email.

Good for the home team

He said any benefits were elsewhere and include home-field advantage and more medals for home athletes, new sporting facilities, enhanced international awareness and fast-track decision-making around urban regeneration. Japan’s Olympic performance has been in line with that; it has won more gold medals and overall medals than ever before.

Much of the Olympic benefit goes to construction companies and contractors. Tokyo built eight new venues. The two most expensive were the National Stadium, which cost $1.43 billion, and the new aquatic center, priced at $520 million. The next two Olympic organizers — Paris in 2024 and Los Angeles in 2028 — say they are cutting back drastically on new construction.

Though Tokyo probably suffered short-term economic losses from the pandemic and absence of fans, any losses are relatively small for a country with a $5 trillion economy.

In another study of Olympic costs by Robert Baade and Victor Matheson, “Going for Gold: The Economics of the Olympics,” they point out that Olympic investment is risky and only a few reap the benefits.

“The goal should be that the costs of hosting are matched by benefits that are shared in a way to include ordinary citizens who fund the event through their tax dollars,” they wrote. “In the current arrangement, it is often far easier for the athletes to achieve gold than it is for the hosts.”

 

Source: Voice of America

The U.S. averaged more than 107,000 new COVID-19 cases a day for the first week of August, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center on Saturday.

For comparison, on June 7, the U.S. reported just more than 10,000 new COVID-19 cases, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The increase in coronavirus infections comes as the highly contagious delta variant continues to spread quickly throughout the United States.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in an interview with CNN earlier this week that government data shows infections in the U.S. “could be up to several hundred thousand cases a day, similar to our surge in early January.”

After peaking at nearly 250,000 infections per day in early January, cases bottomed out in June, but began ramping up even as U.S. adults were being vaccinated. More than 70% of all U.S. adults have been at least partially vaccinated, AP reported.

The seven-day average for daily fatalities in the U.S. increased from about 270 a day to almost 500 a day over the past week as of Friday, according to Johns Hopkins.

 

More than 166.2 million people, or 50.6% of the population, have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins’ vaccine tracker.

The southeast U.S. has some of the lowest vaccinations rates in the country, such as Alabama and Mississippi, in which fewer than 35% of residents are vaccinated, AP reported. The region also has seen the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients increase 50%, to a daily average of 17,600 over the past week from 11,600 the previous week, according to the CDC, as reported by AP.

Florida, which last week was called the national epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic by the CDC, broke another record for the number of COVID-19 cases on Saturday.

The CDC said the state reported 23,903 new infections in a 24-hour period ending Friday. The figure is the largest single-day number of cases in Florida since the pandemic began more than a year ago.

A week before, on July 30, the state had set a record with 21,683 new cases.

The delta variant of the coronavirus is fueling the rise in cases in Florida and across the U.S.

In Houston, health officials are warning that COVID-19 cases are on the rise.

Texas health officials are concerned, chief state epidemiologist Jennifer Shuford told Houston Public Media.

“We’ve been living this pandemic now for a year and a half,” she told the news organization. “We thought we had seen the worst of it with those first two pandemic waves that we experienced. This third wave that we’re having right now in Texas is showing a very steep increase in cases and hospitalizations, as great or even steeper than what we were seeing with those first two waves.”

 

Coronavirus-related hospitalizations in Harris County, where Houston is located, have increased nearly 262% over the past month, the Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council reported on Thursday, according to Houston Public Media.

On Friday, there were 8,522 people in Texas hospitals with COVID-19, the most since February 11, the AP reported. In Harris County, the state’s largest with more than 4.5 million residents, nearly 1,700 people were hospitalized with COVID-19, according to the Houston Public Media report.

Dr. David Persse, who is serving as the chief medical officer for the city of Houston, spoke to the AP about the latest increase in COVID-19 cases.

“The health care system right now is nearly at a breaking point. … For the next three weeks or so, I see no relief on what’s happening in emergency departments,” he said.

Persse said some ambulances were waiting hours to offload patients at Houston area hospitals because no beds were available. He told AP that he feared this would lead to prolonged respond times to 911 medical calls.

In the U.S. Midwest, more than 98% of all new COVID-19 cases are from the delta variant, according to the CDC.

The Omaha Board of Education, which oversees the largest school district in Nebraska with 52,000 students, will discuss on Monday whether to require face coverings inside school and district buildings.

The Omaha Education Association, a union that represents teachers and staff, is concerned by the rise in delta variant cases and the state’s middling vaccination rate. The group had called on the district to require masks, according to an Omaha World-Herald report.

Of the state’s nearly 2 million residents, roughly half (49.9%) are fully vaccinated, similar to the U.S. figure of 50.6% announced, according to Johns Hopkins.

As of midday Saturday, there were more than 202 million infections and nearly 4.3 million deaths worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins. The U.S. continued to lead the world in cases, with more than 35.7 million, and fatalities, with more than 616,000, according to Johns Hopkins.

 

Source: Voice of America