LONDON: British officials authorized a COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use on Wednesday, greenlighting the world’s first shot against the virus that’s backed by rigorous science and taking a major step toward eventually ending the pandemic.
The go-ahead for the vaccine developed by American drugmaker Pfizer and Germany's BioNTech comes as the virus surges again in the United States and Europe, putting pressure on hospitals and morgues in some places and forcing new rounds of restrictions that have devastated economies.
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, which licenses drugs in the UK, recommended the vaccine could be used after it reviewed the results of clinical trials that showed the vaccine was 95% effective overall — and that it also offered significant protection for older people, among those most at risk of dying from the disease. But the vaccine remains experimental while final testing is done.
“Help is on its way,'' British Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the BBC, adding that the situation would start to improve in the spring.
“We now have a vaccine. We're the first country in the world to have one formally clinically authorized but, between now and then, we've got to hold on, we've got to hold our resolve," he said.
Other countries aren’t far behind: Regulators in the United States and the European Union also are vetting the Pfizer shot along with a similar vaccine made by competitor Moderna Inc. British regulators also are considering another shot made by AstraZeneca and Oxford University.
Hancock said Britain expects to begin receiving the first shipment of 800,000 doses “within days,'' and people will begin receiving shots as soon as the National Health Service gets the vaccine.
Doses everywhere are scarce, and initial supplies will be rationed until more is manufactured in the first several months of next year.
A government committee will release details of vaccination priorities later Wednesday, but Hancock said nursing home residents, people over 80, and healthcare workers and other care workers will be the first to receive the shot.
Pfizer said it would immediately begin shipping limited supplies to the UK — and has been gearing up for even wider distribution if given a similar nod by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a decision expected as early as next week.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla called the UK decision “a historic moment.”
“We are focusing on moving with the same level of urgency to safely supply a high-quality vaccine around the world,” Bourla said in a statement.
While the UK has ordered 40 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, enough for 20 million people, it’s not clear how many will arrive by year’s end. Hancock said the UK expects to receive “millions of doses" by the end of this year, adding that the actual number will depend on how fast Pfizer can produce the vaccine.
One concern about the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is that it must be stored and shipped at ultra-cold temperatures of around minus 70 degrees Celsius (minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit), adding to the challenge of distributing the vaccine around the world.
Pfizer says it has developed shipping containers that use dry ice to keep the vaccine cool. GPS-enabled sensors will allow the company to track each shipment and ensure they stay cold, the company says.
“Pfizer has vast experience and expertise in cold-chain shipping and has an established infrastructure to supply the vaccine worldwide, including distribution hubs that can store vaccine doses for up to six months," the company said in a statement.
The company also says it has agreed to work with other vaccine makers to ensure there is sufficient supply and a range of vaccines, “including those suitable for global access.”
Every country has different rules for determining when an experimental vaccine is safe and effective enough to use. Intense political pressure to be the first to roll out a rigorously scientifically tested shot colored the race in the US and Britain, even as researchers pledged to cut no corners. In contrast, China and Russia have offered different vaccinations to their citizens ahead of late-stage testing.
The shots made by US-based Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech were tested in tens of thousands of people. And while that study isn’t complete, early results suggest the vaccine is 95% effective at preventing mild to severe COVID-19 disease. The companies told regulators that of the first 170 infections detected in study volunteers, only eight were among people who’d received the actual vaccine and the rest had gotten a dummy shot.
“This is an extraordinarily strong protection,” Dr. Ugur Sahin, BioNTech’s CEO, recently told The Associated Press.
The companies also reported no serious side effects, although vaccine recipients may experience temporary pain and flu-like reactions immediately after injections.
Final testing must still be completed. Still to be determined is whether the Pfizer-BioNTech shots protect against people spreading the coronavirus without showing symptoms. Another question is how long protection lasts.
The vaccine also has been tested in only a small number of children, none younger than 12, and there’s no information on its effects in pregnant women.
UK authorizes Pfizer coronavirus vaccine for emergency use
https://arab.news/z875a
UK authorizes Pfizer coronavirus vaccine for emergency use
- The vaccine remains experimental while final testing is done
- Hancock said Britain expects to begin receiving the first shipment of 800,000 doses “within days,'' and people will begin receiving shots as soon as the NHS gets the vaccine
Federal judge blocks Trump administration from barring foreign student enrollment at Harvard
- The ruling from US District Judge Allison Burroughs puts the sanction against Harvard on hold, pending a lawsuit lodged by the university
- Harvard enrolls almost 6,800 foreign students at its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most are graduate students from more than 100 countries
WASHINGTON: A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from cutting off Harvard’s enrollment of foreign students, an action the Ivy League school decried as unconstitutional retaliation for defying the White House’s political demands.
In its lawsuit filed earlier Friday in federal court in Boston, Harvard said the government’s action violates the First Amendment and will have an “immediate and devastating effect for Harvard and more than 7,000 visa holders.”
“With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission,” Harvard said in its suit. “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.”
The ruling from US District Judge Allison Burroughs puts the sanction against Harvard on hold, pending the lawsuit.
The Trump administration move has thrown campus into disarray days before graduation, Harvard said in the suit. International students who run labs, teach courses, assist professors and participate in Harvard sports are now left deciding whether to transfer or risk losing legal status to stay in the country, according to the filing.
The impact would be heaviest at graduate schools such as the Harvard Kennedy School, where about half the student body comes from abroad, and Harvard Business School, which is about one-third international. Along with the impact on current students, the move would block thousands of students who were planning to come for summer and fall classes.
Harvard said it immediately puts the school at a disadvantage as it competes for the world’s top students. Even if it regains the ability to host students, “future applicants may shy away from applying out of fear of further reprisals from the government,” the suit said.
If the government’s action stands, Harvard said, the university would be unable to offer admission to new international students for at least the next two academic years. Schools that have that certification withdrawn by the federal government are ineligible to reapply until one year afterward, Harvard said.
Harvard enrolls almost 6,800 foreign students at its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most are graduate students, and they come from more than 100 countries.
The Department of Homeland Security announced the action Thursday, accusing Harvard of creating an unsafe campus environment by allowing “anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators” to assault Jewish students on campus. It also accused Harvard of coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party, contending the school had hosted and trained members of a Chinese paramilitary group as recently as 2024.
Harvard President Alan Garber earlier this month said the university has made changes to its governance over the past year and a half, including a broad strategy to combat antisemitism. He said Harvard would not budge on its “its core, legally-protected principles” over fears of retaliation. Harvard has said it will respond at a later time to allegations first raised by House Republicans about coordination with the Chinese Communist Party.
Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president and US treasury secretary, wrote on X that the decision would mean losing key people, “some small fraction of whom are going to go on to be Prime Ministers of countries who’ve now been turned into enemies of the United States.” He said the administration’s action “is madness.”
The threat to Harvard’s international enrollment stems from an April 16 request from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who demanded that Harvard provide information about foreign students that might implicate them in violence or protests that could lead to their deportation.
Harvard says it provided “thousands of data points” in response to Noem’s April 16 demand. Her letter on Thursday said Harvard failed to satisfy her request, but the school said she failed to provide any further explanation.
“It makes generalized statements about campus environment and ‘anti-Americanism,’ again without articulating any rational link between those statements and the decision to retaliate against international students,” the suit said.
Harvard’s lawsuit said the administration violated the government’s own regulations for withdrawing a school’s certification.
The government can and does remove colleges from the Student Exchange and Visitor Program, making them ineligible to host foreign students on their campus. However, it’s usually for administrative reasons outlined in law, such as failing to maintain accreditation, lacking proper facilities for classes, or failing to employ qualified professional personnel.
Noem said Harvard can regain its ability to host foreign students if it produces a trove of records on foreign students within 72 hours. Her updated request demands all records, including audio or video footage, of foreign students participating in protests or dangerous activity on campus.
The lawsuit is separate from the university’s earlier one challenging more than $2 billion in federal cuts imposed by the Republican administration.
South Africa police minister says Trump ‘twisted’ facts to push baseless genocide claims
JOHANNESBURG: South Africa’s top law enforcement official said Friday that US President Donald Trump wrongly claimed that a video he showed in the Oval Office was of burial sites for more than 1,000 white farmers and he “twisted” the facts to push a false narrative about mass killings of white people in his country.
Police Minister Senzo Mchunu was talking about a video clip that was played during the meeting between Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday that showed an aerial view of a rural road with lines of white crosses erected on either side.
“Now this is very bad,” Trump said as he referred to the clip that was part of a longer video that was played in the meeting. “These are burial sites, right here. Burial sites, over a thousand, of white farmers, and those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning.”
Mchunu said the crosses did not mark graves or burial sites, but were a temporary memorial put up in 2020 to protest the killings of all farmers across South Africa. They were put up during a funeral procession for a white couple who were killed in a robbery on their farm, Mchunu said.
A son of the couple who were killed and a local community member who took part in the procession also said the crosses do not represent burial sites and were taken down after the protest.
South Africa struggles with extremely high levels of violent crime, although farm killings make up a small percentage of the country’s overall homicides. Both white and Black farmers are attacked, and sometimes killed, and the government has condemned the violence against both groups.
Whites make up around 7 percent of South Africa’s 62 million people but generally still have a much better standard of living than the Black majority more than 30 years after the end of the apartheid system of racial segregation. Whites make up the majority of the country’s wealthier commercial farmers.
Mchunu said Trump’s false claims that the crosses represented more than 1,000 burial sites was part of his “genocide story” — referring to the US president’s baseless allegations in recent weeks that there is a widespread campaign in South Africa to kill white farmers and take their land that he has said amounts to a genocide.
“They are not graves. They don’t represent graves,” Mchunu said regarding the video that has become prominent on social media since it was shown in the White House. “And it was unfortunate that those facts got twisted to fit a false narrative about crime in South Africa.”
“We have respect for the president of the United States,” Mchunu added. “But we have no respect for his genocide story whatsoever.”
The White House, when asked about Mchunu’s remarks, pointed back to press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s comments a day earlier at her briefing, when she said that “the video showed crosses that represent the dead bodies of people who were racially persecuted by their government.”
Of the more than 5,700 homicides in South Africa from January through March, six occurred on farms and, of those, one victim was white, said Mchunu. “In principle, we do not categorize people by race, but in the context of claims of genocide of white people, we need to unpack the killings in this category,” he said.
Lourens Bosman, who is a former lawmaker in the national Parliament, said he took part in the procession shown in the video the Trump administration played. It happened near the town of Newcastle in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal in September 2020. The crosses were symbols to white and Black farmers and farmworkers who had been killed across South Africa over the previous 26 years, Bosman said.
Trump’s falsehoods that South Africa’s government is fueling the persecution and killing of its minority white farmers has been strongly denied by the country, which says the allegations are rooted in misinformation.
Ramaphosa pushed for this week’s meeting with Trump in what he said was an attempt to change Trump’s mind over South Africa and correct misconceptions about the country to rebuild ties.
Trump issued an executive order on Feb. 7 that cut all US financial assistance to South Africa and accused it of mistreating white Afrikaner farmers and seizing their land. The order accused Ramaphosa’s government of “fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”
Trump’s executive order also accused South Africa of pursuing an anti-American foreign policy and specifically criticized its decision to launch a case at the International Court of Justice accusing US ally Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The order accused South Africa of supporting the Palestinian militant group Hamas through that case.
Defense Secretary Hegseth, bedeviled by leaks, orders more restrictions on press at Pentagon
- Newly restricted areas include his office and those of his top aides
Bedeviled by leaks to the media during his short tenure, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a series of restrictions on the press late Friday that include banning reporters from entering wide swaths of the Pentagon without a government escort — areas where the press has had access in past administrations as it covers the activities of the world’s most powerful military.
Newly restricted areas include his office and those of his top aides and all of the different locations across the mammoth building where the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Space Force maintain press offices.
The media will also be barred from offices of the Pentagon’s senior military leadership, including Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, without Hegseth’s approval and an escort from his aides. The staff of the Joint Chiefs has traditionally maintained a good relationship with the press.
Hegseth, the former Fox News Channel personality, issued his order via a posting on X late on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend. He said it was necessary for national security.
“While the department remains committed to transparency, the department is equally obligated to protect (classified intelligence information) and sensitive information, the unauthorized disclosure of which could put the lives of US service members in danger,” wrote Hegseth.
The Pentagon Press Association expressed skepticism that operational concerns were at play — and linked the move to previous actions by Hegseth’s office that impede journalists and their coverage.
“There is no way to sugarcoat it. Today’s memo by Secretary Hegseth appears to be a direct attack on the freedom of the press and America’s right to know what its military is doing,” it said in a statement Friday night. “The Pentagon Press Association is extremely concerned by the decision to restrict movement of accredited journalists within the Pentagon through non-secured, unclassified hallways.”
Hegseth also said reporters will be required to sign a form to protect sensitive information and would be issued a new badge that more clearly identifies them as press. It was not clear whether signing the form would be a condition of continued access to the building.
Two months ago, the department was embarrassed by a leak to The New York Times that billionaire Elon Musk was to get a briefing on the US military’s plans in case a war broke out with China. That briefing never took place, on President Donald Trump’s orders, and Hegseth suspended two Pentagon officials as part of an investigation into how that news got out.
The Pentagon was also embarrassed when the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently included in a group chat on the Signal messaging app where Hegseth discussed plans for upcoming military strikes in Yemen. Trump’s former national security adviser, Mike Waltz, took responsibility for Goldberg being included and was shifted to another job.
The administration has taken several aggressive actions toward the press since Trump took over, including FCC investigations into ABC, CBS and NBC News. Restrictions imposed on The Associated Press’ access to certain White House events earlier this year led to a court battle that is ongoing.
The White House has also increased access for conservative media that are friendly to the president. Nevertheless, a study released earlier this month found that Trump had more frequent exchanges with reporters during his first 100 days in office than any of his six predecessors.
Hegseth, however, has been far less available. He has yet to speak to the press in the Pentagon briefing room. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has held only one Pentagon press briefing since Jan. 20. The Pentagon has taken other steps to make it more difficult for reporters, including taking office space away from eight media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and NBC.
Kyiv mayor says Russian drones, missiles trigger fires, injure eight
- Klitschko said fragments from one drone struck the top floor of an apartment building in the Solomyanskyi district
Russia attacked Ukraine’s capital Kyiv early on Saturday with drones and missiles, triggering fires, strewing debris in districts throughout the city and injuring at least eight people, the city’s mayor said.
Reuters witnesses saw and heard successive waves of drones flying over Kyiv, and a series of explosions jolted the city.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko said two residents had required hospital treatment and that air defense units were in action.
Klitschko said fragments from one drone struck the top floor of an apartment building in the Solomyanskyi district on the west bank of the Dnipro River, which bisects the city. One apartment building was on fire in the area as was one non-residential building.
Timur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said a fire had also broken out on two floors of an apartment building in Dniprovskyi district on the opposite bank.
Officials also reported a fire in Obolon in the city’s northern suburbs and fallen debris on a shopping center in the same area. They said drone fragments hit the ground in a number of other widely separated neighborhoods.
An air alert remained in effect more than two hours after it was first declared.
The overnight strikes followed several days of Ukrainian drone attacks — some 800 attacks — on targets inside Russia, including capital Moscow.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had vowed on Friday to respond to those attacks.
White House National Security Council hit by more firings, sources say
- The restructuring of the NSC is expected to grant more authority to the State Department, the Defense Department and other agencies
WASHINGTON: A large restructuring of the White House National Security Council got under way on Friday as President Donald Trump moved to reduce the size and scope of the once-powerful agency, five sources briefed on the matter said.
Staff dealing with a variety of major geopolitical issues were sent termination notices on Friday, said the sources, who requested anonymity as they were not permitted to speak to the media.
The move comes just weeks after Secretary of State Marco Rubio took over from Mike Waltz as national security adviser. The NSC declined to comment.
The restructuring of the NSC is expected to grant more authority to the State Department, the Defense Department and other agencies, the sources said. The aim is to reduce the size of the NSC to just a few dozen people.
The NSC is the main body used by presidents to coordinate national security strategy. Its staff often make key decisions regarding America’s approach to the world’s most volatile conflicts and play a key role in keeping America safe.
The firings will reduce the NSC’s already pared-down staff. The body had more than 300 staffers under Democratic President Joe Biden, but even before the recent firings under Trump was less than half the size of Biden’s NSC.
The NSC staffers who are cut from the agency will be moved to other positions in government, two of the sources told Reuters.
