COVID-19

Liberia On Heightened Alert After Guinea Ebola Deaths

Published

2 weeks ago

February 15, 2021

Onyebuchi Aniekeyi

Liberian President George Weah on Sunday put the country’s health authorities on heightened alert after four people died of Ebola in neighbouring Guinea, the first resurgence of the disease in five years.
Weah mandated the Liberian health authorities and related stakeholders in the sector to heighten the country’s surveillance and preventative activities in the wake of reports of the emergence of the deadly Ebola virus disease in neighbouring Guinea, his office said in a statement.

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Guinea’s Health Minister, Remy Lamah told the Press on Saturday that four people had died of Ebola, the first deaths since a 2013-2016 epidemic which began in Guinea killed 11,300 people across the region.

According to Weah’s statement on Sunday, the new deaths occurred in Guinean town of Gouecke close to Liberia’s northeastern border.

COVID-19

Kremlin Critic Navalny Begins Serving Time For Parole Violation

Published

3 hours ago

February 28, 2021

Onyebuchi Aniekeyi

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been transferred to a penal colony east of Moscow to serve a term for violating parole, a public commission that monitors detainees’ rights said Sunday.
President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent was sentenced this month to two-and-a-half years at a facility in the Vladimir region about 200 kilometres (125 miles) east of the capital.
He was convicted of violating parole terms while in Germany recovering from a poisoning attack.
For several days, Navalny’s allies were unaware of his whereabouts, with the head of the Federal Prison Service saying Friday only that he had been transferred from a Moscow detention centre to a penal colony.
Reports based on unnamed sources circulated in local media over the weekend about Navalny’s possible location, before Moscow’s public commission said in a statement that he was in a Federal Prison Service institution in the Vladimir region.

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Reports in Russian news agencies suggested that the opposition figure’s final destination would be penal colony no. 2 in the town of Pokrov.
Another state news agency, TASS, cited an unnamed source as saying that the Kremlin critic will have the option of working as a cook, librarian, mask sewer or machinist.

COVID-19

Us Authorizes J&J Covid Vaccine For Emergency Use

Published

3 hours ago

February 28, 2021

Onyebuchi Aniekeyi

Us Authorizes J&J Covid Vaccine For Emergency Use

The United States on Saturday authorized Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine, otherwise known as J&J COVID Vaccine for emergency use, giving the nation a third shot to battle the outbreak that has killed more than 500,000 Americans.
The single-shot vaccine is highly effective in preventing severe Covid-19, including against newer variants, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said before giving it a green light.
He urged Americans to remain vigilant with anti-virus curbs such as social distancing, warning that new variants of the virus still posed a threat.

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A third vaccine is seen as a vital means to ramp up the immunization rate in the United States, where more than 500,000 people have lost their lives to the coronavirus.
In large clinical trials, the J&J vaccine’s efficacy against severe disease was 85.9 percent in the United States, 81.7 percent in South Africa, and 87.6 percent in Brazil.
Overall, among 39,321 participants across all regions, the efficacy against severe Covid-19 was 85.4 percent, but it fell to 66.1 percent when including moderate forms of the disease.
Crucially, analyses of various demographic groups revealed no marked differences across age, race, or people with underlying conditions.
The J&J vaccine is the third to be greenlighted in the United States after Pfizer’s and Moderna’s were provisionally approved in December.