Malawi Wire

A new study reveals the two-dose COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech is 90% effective at keeping someone from being hospitalized from the virus up to six months after receiving the second dose.

Researchers from Pfizer and U.S.-based health care consortium Kaiser Permanente observed the records of about 3.4 million people who were members of Kaiser’s Southern California health insurer and provider program between December 2020 and August of this year.

The study, published Monday in The Lancet medical journal, also revealed the vaccine was 93% effective against the highly contagious Delta variant for at least six months after the second shot.

But the researchers also found that the vaccine’s effectiveness against infection dropped from 88% one month after completing the regimen to 47% after six months.

The new study was published on the same day the European Union’s drug regulator approved the use of booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for those aged 18 years and older, but left it to individual countries to decide whether or not to recommend the shots for widespread use.

The European Medicines Agency said in a statement Monday that a booster dose of the Pfizer vaccine “may be considered at least 6 months after the second dose for people aged 18 years and older.”

The agency said people with a severely weakened immune system should be given a third dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine at least 28 days after they have received their second shot.

The guidance comes as some EU member states have already begun administering booster shots, while others are still debating how broadly to use boosters in their populations.

Meanwhile, the New York Times newspaper said Monday that Johnson & Johnson will ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve a booster shot of its single-dose COVID-19 vaccine.

The U.S. drugmaker announced last month that clinical trials show a second shot of its vaccine increased its effectiveness against the virus to 94% about two months after the first dose, which provided about 70% effectiveness.

Johnson & Johnson said the company is submitting the results of its studies to the FDA, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the European Medicines Agency and other health authorities for potential use of the vaccine as a booster eight months or later after the primary single-dose vaccination.

Johnson & Johnson’s request comes less than two weeks after the FDA authorized a third shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech two-dose COVID-19 vaccine for Americans 65 years old and above and adults at high risk of severe illness. The FDA is currently considering whether to approve a third shot of the two-dose Moderna vaccine.

Source: Voice of America

The U.N. Children’s Fund says children are likely to suffer most from the monthslong COVID-related restrictions, school closures, and separation from family and friends.

The latest estimates show more than one in seven adolescents aged 10 to 19 suffer from mental health disorders globally, while nearly 46,000 adolescents commit suicide every year.

UNICEF spokesman James Elder told VOA most of these conditions are not being addressed because of the stigma attached to mental illness and the lack of government investment. Only about two percent of government health budgets are allocated to mental health spending globally, he said.

“Twenty percent … of young people are saying that they are feeling depressed and have very little interest in things,” he said. “That again is a clear indication of the impact COVID’s been having. … There is a whole range of mental disorders — anxiety and depression and bipolar — that young people are suffering from.”

UNICEF reports more than 1.6 billion children have suffered some loss of education because of pandemic lockdowns. Elder said children’s mental health often deteriorates when there is a disruption to their daily routines, such as not attending school, not engaging in recreational activities, and not socializing with friends. These problems, he said, affect children all over the world, in rich and poor countries alike.

“Of course, if you are from a country where you do not have connectivity, you do not have a laptop or one of your parents is on $200 a month, then, of course, those stresses, that anxiety, that risk of slipping into a mental health disorder is much greater,” he said. “And in some of the world’s poorest countries, governments are spending less than a dollar per person treating mental health conditions.”

The cost of ignoring mental disorders is enormous, UNICEF warned. It cited a new analysis by the London School of Economics, which indicates nearly $390 billion in human capital is lost every year due to mental disorders among young people.

Source: Voice of America

The Biden administration on Monday reversed a ban on abortion referrals by family planning clinics, lifting a Trump-era restriction as political and legal battles over abortion grow sharper from Texas to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Department of Health and Human Services said its new regulation will restore the federal family planning program to the way it ran under the Obama administration, when clinics were able to refer women seeking abortions to a provider.

Groups representing the clinics said they hope the Biden administration action will lead hundreds of service providers that left in protest over Trump’s policies to return, helping to stabilize a longstanding program that has been shaken by the coronavirus pandemic on top of ideological battles.

Known as Title X, the taxpayer-funded program makes available more than $250 million a year to clinics to provide birth control and basic health care services mainly to low-income women. Under former President Donald Trump, clinics were barred from referring patients for abortions, prompting a mass exit by service providers affiliated with Planned Parenthood, as well as several states and other independent organizations.

Women’s groups labeled the Trump policy a “gag rule,” and medical organizations called it a violation of the clinician-patient relationship. But religious and social conservatives praised the policy for imposing a strict separation between family planning services and abortion. Under federal law, clinics could not use federal money to pay for abortions.

In 2018, the family planning clinics served about 3.9 million clients, but HHS estimates that number fell by nearly 40% after the Trump policy. The upheaval may have led to more than 180,000 unintended pregnancies, the agency said.

Biden campaigned on a promise to overturn the restrictions on family planning clinics, but abortion was not a central issue in the 2020 presidential race. It may become one in the 2022 midterm elections to determine who controls Congress.

U.S. Supreme Court

Restrictive state laws in Texas, Mississippi and elsewhere have prompted a mobilization by abortion rights supporters, who fear a conservative-leaning Supreme Court will overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationally. Hundreds of abortion-themed protests were held around the country Saturday, including one that brought thousands of abortion rights supporters to the steps of the court.

The Supreme Court has allowed the Texas law to take effect but has not ruled on the substantive legal questions behind that statute, which bans most abortions in the state. The justices will hear arguments December 1 on the Mississippi law, which bans most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Source: Voice of America

Officials investigating one of California’s biggest oil spills were trying to determine whether the undersea pipeline that spewed 572,807 liters (126,000 gallons) of heavy crude into the Pacific Ocean had been damaged by a ship’s anchor.

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the two busiest container ports in the United States, according to their websites. Together, they see more than 100 cargo ships a day, and those ships pass through and anchor in the area where the pipeline runs.

“We’re looking into if it could have been an anchor from a ship, but that’s in the assessment phase right now,” said Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Jeannie Shaye.

Meanwhile, residents of Huntington Beach, California, said authorities were slow to react to the large oil spill off the coast.

The spill, which has sullied the beaches and poses a threat to wildlife, is believed to come from a leak in an underwater pipeline.

Residents said that they noticed oil and the smell of petroleum Friday evening, but that there was no response until Saturday afternoon. They said it wasn’t until Saturday night that Amplify Energy Corp., the oil company that owns the pipeline, shut it down.

In a press release Monday, Amplify Energy said that it spotted the oil spill Saturday and immediately notified the U.S. Coast Guard and initiated its oil spill response. The company shut down the pipeline and sent a remotely operated vehicle to help find the source.

Garry Brown, president of the environmental group Orange County Coastkeeper and a Huntington Beach resident, said, “By the time (the oil) comes to the beach, it’s done tremendous damage. Our frustration is, it could have been averted if there was a quick response.”

More than 572,000 liters of crude have reportedly leaked, some of it washing up in coastal Orange County. Several beaches in the area are closed and could remain so for weeks or months, according to Huntington Beach Mayor Kim Carr.

In response to the spill, crews led by the U.S. Coast Guard have deployed skimmers and booms to try to contain the damage. Of particular concern is the Talbert Marsh, a 10-hectare wetland.

U.S. Representative Michelle Steel, a Republican representing the affected area, has asked President Joe Biden to declare the spill a disaster so that federal money can be allocated toward the cleanup.

“This is a really serious disaster,” she told CNN.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded to a reporter’s question Monday about the spill.

“We’re working collaboratively with state and local partners to address efforts to find the leak, contain the spill and assess impact, and address potential causes,” she said.

Amplify Energy operates the pipeline and three offshore oil platforms, all installed in the early 1980s. The 16-inch pipeline carries crude oil to a storage facility in Long Beach.

Beta Operating Company, the Amplify subsidiary that operates the field, has been cited 125 times for safety and environmental violations since 1980, according to a database from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the federal agency that regulates the offshore oil and gas industry, The Associated Press reported.

Source: Voice of America

The whistleblower who shared a trove of Facebook documents alleging the social media giant knew its products were fueling hate and harming children’s mental health revealed her identity Sunday in a televised interview, and accused the company of choosing “profit over safety.”

Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa, has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest, but said in an interview with CBS news show “60 Minutes” that Facebook was “substantially worse” than anything she had seen before.

She called for the company to be regulated.

“Facebook over and over again has shown it chooses profit over safety. It is subsidizing, it is paying for its profits with our safety,” Haugen said.

“The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world,” she added.

The world’s largest social media platform has been embroiled in a firestorm brought about by Haugen, who as an unnamed whistleblower shared the documents with U.S. lawmakers and The Wall Street Journal that detail how Facebook knew its products, including Instagram, were harming young girls.

In the “60 Minutes” interview she explained how the algorithm, which picks what to show in a user’s news feed, is optimized for content that gets a reaction.

The company’s own research shows that it is “easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions,” Haugen said.

“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” she said.

During the 2020 U.S. presidential election, she said, the company realized the danger that such content presented and turned on safety systems to reduce it.

But “as soon as the election was over, they turn them back off, or they change the settings back to what they were before, to prioritize growth over safety, and that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me,” she said.

“No one at Facebook is malevolent,” she said, adding that the incentives are “misaligned.”

“Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. … And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact, the more they consume,” she said.

Haugen did not draw a straight line between that decision to roll back safety systems and U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, though “60 Minutes” noted that the social network was used by some of the organizers of that violence.

‘Ludicrous’

Earlier Sunday, Facebook dismissed as ludicrous suggestions it contributed to the January 6 riot.

Facebook’s vice president of policy and global affairs Nick Clegg also vehemently pushed back at the assertion its platforms are toxic for teens, days after a tense congressional hearing in which U.S. lawmakers grilled the company over its impact on the mental health of young users.

The New York Times reported Saturday that Clegg sought to preempt Haugen’s interview by penning a 1,500-word memo to staff alerting them of the “misleading” accusations.

Clegg pressed the case in an appearance on CNN.

“I think the assertion (that) January 6th can be explained because of social media, I just think that’s ludicrous,” Clegg told the broadcaster, saying it was “false comfort” to believe technology was driving America’s deepening political polarization.

The responsibility for the insurrection “lies squarely with the people who inflicted the violence and those who encouraged them, including then-president Trump” and others who asserted the election was stolen, he added.

Polarization

While everyone “has a rogue uncle” or old classmate whose extreme views may be visible on Facebook, Clegg reportedly wrote in his memo, “changes to algorithmic ranking systems on one social media platform cannot explain wider societal polarization.”

Facebook has encountered criticism that it fuels societal problems, attacks Clegg said should not rest at Facebook’s feet. But he acknowledged that some people may not benefit from social media use.

“I don’t think it’s intuitively surprising if you’re not feeling great about yourself already, that then going on to social media can actually make you feel a bit worse,” he told CNN.

He also disputed reporting in a Wall Street Journal series that Facebook’s own research warned of the harm that photo-sharing app Instagram can do to teen girls’ well-being.

“It’s simply not borne out by our research or anybody else’s that Instagram is bad or toxic for all teens,” Clegg said, but added Facebook’s research will continue.

Source: Voice of America