AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EST
Poor countries face long wait for vaccines despite promises
NEW DELHI (AP) — With Americans, Britons and Canadians rolling up their sleeves to receive coronavirus vaccines, the route out of the pandemic now seems clear to many in the West, even if the rollout will take many months. But for poorer countries, the road will be far longer and rougher.
The ambitious initiative known as COVAX created to ensure the entire world has access to COVID-19 vaccines has secured only a fraction of the 2 billion doses it hopes to buy over the next year, has yet to confirm any actual deals to ship out vaccines and is short on cash.
The virus that has killed more than 1.6 million people has exposed vast inequities between countries, as fragile health systems and smaller economies were often hit harder. COVAX was set up by the World Health Organization, vaccines alliance GAVI and CEPI, a global coalition to fight epidemics, to avoid the international stampede for vaccines that has accompanied past outbreaks and would reinforce those imbalances.
But now some experts say the chances that coronavirus shots will be shared fairly between rich nations and the rest are fading fast. With vaccine supplies currently limited, developed countries, some of which helped fund the research with taxpayer money, are under tremendous pressure to protect their own populations and are buying up shots. Meanwhile, some poorer countries that signed up to the initiative are looking for alternatives because of fears it won't deliver.
“It’s simple math,” said Arnaud Bernaert, head of global health at the World Economic Forum. Of the approximately 12 billion doses the pharmaceutical industry is expected to produce next year, about 9 billion shots have already been reserved by rich countries. “COVAX has not secured enough doses, and the way the situation may unfold is they will probably only get these doses fairly late."
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US vaccinations ramp up as feds weigh 2nd COVID-19 shot
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hundreds more U.S. hospitals will begin vaccinating their workers Tuesday as federal health officials review a second COVID-19 shot needed to boost the nation’s largest vaccination campaign.
Packed in dry ice to stay at ultra-frozen temperatures, shipments of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine are set to arrive at 400 additional hospitals and other distribution sites, one day after the nation’s death toll surpassed a staggering 300,000. The first 3 million shots are being strictly rationed to front-line health workers and elder-care patients, with hundreds of millions more shots needed over the coming months to protect most Americans.
The Food and Drug Administration is set to publish its analysis of a second rigorously studied COVID-19 vaccine, which could soon join Pfizer-BioNTech’s in the fight against the pandemic. If FDA advisers give it a positive recommendation on Thursday, the agency could greenlight the vaccine from drugmaker Moderna later this week.
A second vaccine can’t come soon enough as the country’s daily death count continues to top 2,400 amid over 210,000 new daily cases, based on weekly averages of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The devastating toll is only expected to grow in coming weeks, fueled by holiday travel, family gatherings and lax adherence to basic public health measures.
The first vaccine deliveries have provided a measure of encouragement to exhausted doctors, nurses and hospital staffers around the country.
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Vaccine comes too late for the 300,000 US dead
When Brittany Palomo was hired as a nurse in March, her parents tried to talk her out of it, fearful of the fast-spreading coronavirus. All the more reason, she told them, to start the career that had been her long-held dream.
The pandemic, though, is a nightmare -- one that has now claimed 300,000 lives in the U.S. and counting.
“Wake up, my little girl, wake up!” Palomo's mother, Maria Palomo Salinas, screamed, her grief echoing through a Harlingen, Texas, hospital, when her daughter died of COVID-19 complications around 2 a.m. on a Saturday in late November.
Palomo was 27 and, as a health care worker, was probably weeks away from getting the new vaccine that could have protected her from the virus. Instead, she became yet another victim of the relentless outbreak whose U.S. toll is accelerating as it eclipses another round-number mark.
“The numbers are staggering -- the most impactful respiratory pandemic that we have experienced in over 102 years, since the iconic 1918 Spanish flu,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said days before the U.S. reached the milestone.
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Electoral College makes it official: Biden won, Trump lost
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Electoral College decisively confirmed Joe Biden on Monday as the nation’s next president, ratifying his November victory in an authoritative state-by-state repudiation of President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede he had lost.
The presidential electors gave Biden a solid majority of 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232, the same margin that Trump bragged was a landslide when he won the White House four years ago.
Heightened security was in place in some states as electors met to cast paper ballots, with masks, social distancing and other pandemic precautions the order of the day. The results will be sent to Washington and tallied in a Jan. 6 joint session of Congress over which Vice President Mike Pence will preside.
For all Trump's unsupported claims of fraud, there was little suspense and no change as every one of the electoral votes allocated to Biden and the president in last month's popular vote went officially to each man. On Election Day, the Democrat topped the incumbent Republican by more than 7 million in the popular vote nationwide.
California’s 55 electoral votes put Biden over the top. Vermont, with 3 votes, was the first state to report. Hawaii, with 4 votes, was the last.
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Russia's Putin congratulates Biden on winning U.S. election
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday congratulated Joe Biden on winning the U.S. presidential election after weeks of holding out.
Putin's message to Biden came a day after the Electoral College confirmed Biden as the nation’s next president, ratifying his November victory in an authoritative state-by-state repudiation of President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede that he had lost.
The Kremlin had said earlier that the Russian president would hold off on congratulating Biden until the winner was officially confirmed. “We are just waiting for the end of the internal political confrontation,” Putin said last month, referring to numerous Republican challenges to the vote count.
In his message, Putin wished Biden “every success," according to a Kremlin statement Tuesday, and expressed confidence that “Russia and the U.S., which bear special responsibility for global security and stability can, despite the differences, really contribute to solving many problems and challenges that the world is currently facing."
The Russian president noted that “the Russian-American cooperation based on the principles of equality and mutual respect would meet the interests of the people in both countries and the entire international community.”
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After Arab Spring, a decade of upheaval and lost hopes
CAIRO (AP) — Was it real?
It’s all been erased so completely, so much blood has been shed and destruction wreaked over the past decade. The idea that there was a moment when millions across the Middle East wanted freedom and change so much that they took to the streets seems like romantic nostalgia.
“It was very brief, man. It was so brief,” said Badr Elbendary, an Egyptian activist.
Elbendary was blinded on the third day of his country’s revolt in 2011, when security forces shot him in the face. It happened during a clash that became iconic among Egypt’s “revolutionaries,” when protesters and police battled on a bridge over the Nile in Cairo for hours, ending with the police scattering.
Today, he’s in the United States. He can’t return home. Many of his comrades from the protests languish in prisons in Egypt.
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Pandemic backlash jeopardizes public health powers, leaders
Tisha Coleman has lived in close-knit Linn County, Kansas, for 42 years and never felt so alone.
As the public health administrator, she’s struggled every day of the coronavirus pandemic to keep her rural county along the Missouri border safe. In this community with no hospital, she’s failed to persuade her neighbors to wear masks and take precautions against COVID-19, even as cases rise. In return, she’s been harassed, sued, vilified and called a Democrat, an insult in her circles.
Even her husband hasn’t listened to her, refusing to require customers to wear masks at the family’s hardware store in Mound City.
“People have shown their true colors,” Coleman said. “I’m sure that I’ve lost some friends over this situation.”
By November, the months of fighting over masks and quarantines were already wearing her down. Then she got COVID-19, likely from her husband, who she thinks picked it up at the hardware store.
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Trump says Barr resigning, will leave before Christmas
WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General William Barr, one of President Donald Trump’s staunchest allies, is departing amid lingering tension over the president’s baseless claims of election fraud and the investigation into President-elect Joe Biden’s son.
Barr went Monday to the White House, where Trump said the attorney general submitted his letter of resignation. “As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family,” Trump tweeted.
Trump has publicly expressed his anger about Barr’s statement to The Associated Press earlier this month that the Justice Department had found no widespread fraud that would change the outcome of the election. Trump has also been angry that the Justice Department did not publicly announce it was investigating Hunter Biden ahead of the election, despite department policy against such a pronouncement.
Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Barr's resignation leaves Trump without a critical ally as he winds down his final weeks in office, and it throws into question open Justice Department investigations, especially the probe into Hunter Biden's taxes.
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Germany demands EU agency approve vaccine before Christmas
BERLIN (AP) — Germany on Tuesday increased the pressure on the European Union’s regulatory agency, with its health minister, a leading hospital association and lawmakers all demanding that the agency approve a coronavirus vaccine before Christmas.
“Our goal is an approval before Christmas so that we can still start vaccinating this year,” Health Minister Jens Spahn said, the dpa news agency reported Tuesday.
Spahn had expressed impatience with the European Medicines Agency on Sunday, noting that Germany has created some 440 vaccination centers, activated about 10,000 doctors and medical staff and was ready to start mass vaccinations as early as Tuesday.
Spahn is pushing for a quick approval of a new vaccine developed by Germany’s BioNTech and American drugmaker Pfizer that has already been authorized for use in Britain, the United States, Canada and other countries. But Germany cannot use it because it is still waiting for approval by the EMA, which evaluates drugs and vaccines for the EU's 27 nations.
Seeing the same vaccine being given to thousands of people in Britain, Canada and the United States was galling for many Germans.
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Japan 'Twitter killer' sentenced to death for serial murders
TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese court on Tuesday sentenced a man to death for killing and dismembering nine people, most of whom had posted suicidal thoughts on social media, in a case that shocked the country.
The Tachikawa branch of the Tokyo District Court found Takahiro Shiraishi, known as the “Twitter killer,” guilty of killing, dismembering and storing the bodies of the victims in his apartment in Zama, near Tokyo.
Shiraishi, 30, pleaded guilty and said he would not appeal his death sentence.
Police arrested Shiraishi in 2017 after finding the bodies of eight females and one male in cold-storage cases in his apartment.
Investigators said Shiraishi approached the victims via Twitter, offering to assist them with their suicidal wishes. He killed the women, including teenagers, after raping them, and also killed a boyfriend of one of the women to silence him, investigators said.