A handful of wealthy nations are on track to deliver vaccines to all adults who want them in the coming months, while dozens of the world’s poorest countries have not inoculated a single person. As it stands, 30 countries have not received a single vaccine dose.

Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s access to medicine program said right now , “it’s not even clear the goal is to vaccinate the world”.

The disparity has been called “vaccine apartheid”.

Many have  called for the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies to share technical know-how in an effort to speed the global vaccination project beyond existing vaccine supply. Many see a bigger fight in patent laws, and are drawing on experience advocating for greater access to antiretroviral drugs for HIV.

“There’s no question poorer countries are having a hard time affording doses,” said Dr Howard Markel, a pandemic historian at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. “Even if they were at wholesale or cost there are a lot of different markups.”

“This is a classic case where you have an industry that has a very direct stake in protecting itself, and there’s very little understanding among the public how much is at issue,” said Dean Baker, an economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Activists argue pharmaceutical companies should share production know-how, and be appropriately compensated. One part of this fight centers on a provision of international trade law called the Trips agreement, or more formally, the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. Put in force in 1995, Trips requires all member states to recognize 20-year monopoly patents for pharmaceuticals, including vaccines.

“What Trips was about was imposing US-European style copyright on the whole world,” said Baker. “Most developing countries had very little idea what they were dealing with.”

Annual or booster Covid-19 shots appear increasingly likely – in part driven by the possibility variants could emerge in populations without vaccine access – and as pharmaceutical companies eye future profits.

Coronavirus: how wealthy nations are creating a ‘vaccine apartheid’ | Coronavirus | The Guardian

According to data from the University of Maryland and Global Forest Watch the rate at which the world’s forests are being destroyed increased sharply last year, with at least 42,000 sq km of tree cover lost in key tropical regions.

The loss was well above the average for the last 20 years, with 2020 the third worst year for forest destruction since 2002 when comparable monitoring began.

The losses were particularly severe in humid tropical primary forests, such as the Amazon, the Congo and south-east Asia. These forests are vital as carbon sinks in the regulating the global climate, as well as for their irreplaceable ecosystems. Losses from this type of forest alone amounted to 4.2m hectares (10.4m acres). Brazil’s forested areas fared the worst, with 1.7m hectares destroyed, an increase of about a quarter on the previous year. Altogether, 12.2m hectares of tree cover were lost in the tropics in 2020, an increase of 12% on 2019, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI). 

Destruction of world’s forests increased sharply in 2020 | Trees and forests | The Guardian

 Low-paid key workers would not be able to afford to buy the average priced home in 98% of Great Britain. Years of rising prices have put homeownership out of reach of many key workers, who have also experienced pay freezes and had to channel their wages into paying high private rents, rather than being able to save for a deposit.

Dan Wilson Craw, deputy director of campaign group Generation Rent, said: “Raising a deposit is just one half of the equation; you must also be able to afford the monthly repayments, and a 95% mortgage comes with a higher interest rate.”

The Guardian’s analysis, which was based on the sums needed for a 90% mortgage, found that a nurse on the median wage of £33,920 a year would not be able to raise a big enough mortgage to buy the median-priced property in almost three-quarters of local authorities nationwide. A nurse with a partner on the average wage would be locked out of the market in more than a fifth of areas.

 The median salary for a senior care worker in the UK stood at £21,243 in 2020. Based on these earnings, with a 10% deposit to put down, a senior care worker would be able to afford the average priced property in just six council areas in Great Britain, locking them out of 98% of areas. If this individual applied for a joint mortgage with a partner on the average UK salary of £31,461, the couple would be unable to afford the average property in four-in-10 local authorities across Britain.

A postal worker with a partner on the average wage would be priced out in more than one-third of local authorities. A postal worker earning the median income of £24,028 would be able to secure a mortgage on the average-priced home in just 13 local authorities

Bus drivers, even within a couple, they are unable to afford the average property in 31% of local authorities. A bus driver on a single wage of £27,191 would be priced out of nine-out-of-10 council areas.

  While a teacher could not afford a mortgage in 60% of areas across Britain. A secondary school teacher earning £40,881 – would be unable to afford a typical property in almost a fifth of council areas.

Covid frontline workers priced out of homeowning in 98% of Great Britain | UK news | The Guardian

 Financial corporations started administering the pensions of Argentinians in 1993 and of Bolivians in 1996. Argentina and Bolivia are among only 30 countries (of the world’s 192) that experimented with privatization of their pension systems. Today, the majority of these countries are reversing the privatization of pensions.  Private insurance corporations are suing Argentina and Bolivia for loss of potential profits as a result of the reversal of privatization of their pension programs. If Argentina and Bolivia lose the disputes, it means that impoverished citizens and elderly pensioners will have to compensate wealthy financial corporations. These cases affect the lives of millions of Argentinians and Bolivians.

Pension policy is not about securing profits for private insurance corporations. Pension systems exist to provide income security in old age—to ensure that older persons retire with adequate pensions.

 Pension privatization failed because of  inadequacies in the private pension system:

• Coverage rates decreased or stagnated under private pension systems.1

• Pension benefits deteriorated, making private pensions very unpopular.2

• Old-age poverty worsened due to low pensions.

• Gender and income inequality increased.3

• Private systems were expensive: The high transition costs of privatization created large fiscal pressures.4

• Private pension administrators incurred high administrative costs and extracted excessive profits through these extraordinary administrative fees.5

• Financial and demographic risks were transferred to individuals; pensioners had to suffer the loss of benefits when these risks occurred, such as during the global financial crisis.

• Social dialogue severely deteriorated.1 In Argentina, coverage rates for men fell from 46% (in 1993, prior to the reform) to 35% (in 2002) and for women to only 31%; in Bolivia, they stagnated.

2 In Bolivia, after privatization, the replacement rate fell to 20% of the average salary during working life; this is far below ILO international standards.

3 In Bolivia, the proportion of elderly women receiving a contributory pension fell from 23.7% in 1995 to 12.8% in 2007 as a result of privatization.

4 In Argentina, initial estimations put the cost at 0.2% of GDP; later the World Bank increased the cost estimate to 3.6% of GDP, 18 times the original estimate; in Bolivia, the actual transition costs of the reform were 2.5 times the initial projections.

5 In Argentina, administration costs jumped from 6.6% of contributions in 1990 before privatization to 50.8% in 2002; in Bolivia, from 8.6% in 1992 to 18.1% in 2002 after privatization.The corporations are using the World Bank’s business-friendly International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)

 Finland was recently rated Europe’s most resistant nation to fake news and it is where critical thinking has become a core, cross-subject component of the school national curriculum. The curriculum was devised by the Finnish government after 2014, when the country was first targeted with fake news stories by its Russian neighbour, and the government realised it had moved into the post-fact age.

Students learn how easy it is to lie with statistics. In art, they see how an image’s meaning can be manipulated. In history, they analyse notable propaganda campaigns, while Finnish language teachers show the many ways in which words can be used to confuse, mislead and deceive.

Kari Kivinen, head teacher, points out you can start when children are very young, “Fairytales work well. Take the wily fox who always cheats the other animals with his sly words. That’s not a bad metaphor for a certain kind of politician, is it?”

He wants his pupils to ask questions such as: who produced this information, and why? Where was it published? What does it really say? Who is it aimed at? What is it based on? Is there evidence for it, or is this just someone’s opinion? Is it verifiable elsewhere?

“The goal is active, responsible citizens and voters,” Kivinen said. “Thinking critically, fact-checking, interpreting and evaluating all the information you receive, wherever it appears, is crucial. We’ve made it a core part of what we teach, across all subjects.”

Fake news, Kivinen said, is not a great term, especially for children. Far more useful are three distinct categories: misinformation, or “mistakes”; disinformation, or “lies” and “hoaxes”, which are false and spread deliberately to deceive; and mal-information, or “gossip”, which may perhaps be correct but is intended to harm.

“Even quite young children can grasp this,” he said. “They love being detectives. If you also get them questioning real-life journalists and politicians about what matters to them, run mock debates and real school elections, ask them to write accurate and fake reports on them…democracy, and the threats to it, start to mean something.”

Priya, 16, said education was “the best way to fight it. The problem is, anyone can publish anything. There’s not much a government can do when they’re faced with big multinationals like Google or Facebook, and if it does too much it’s censorship. So yes, education is what’s most effective.”

How Finland starts its fight against fake news in primary schools | Finland | The Guardian

Most land does not belong to those who toil on it.

According to National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) data, 60% of the country’s population has right over only 5% of land; whereas 10% of the population has control over 55% of the land. 

The 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census shows that 56% of households in rural India do not own any agricultural land. The NSSO 2013 revealed that top 7.18% of households own more than 46.71% of the land.

 By the end of 2019, at least 690 million people went hungry. Now millions more of people continue to suffer acute food insecurity as they face the consequences of the pandemic. Lockdown policies and quarantines have affected all stages of food supply, resulting in a steep rise in food prices and widespread food insecurity.

 As of October 2020, a staggering seven million people have died of hunger. Pandemic-related hunger also led to the deaths of 10,000 more children each month over the first year of the health crisis. 

Landlessness has been exacerbated by large-scale land deals and acquisitions – land grabs led by corporations have dispossessed and displaced farmers from the land they till. Millions of hectares of land planted with staples, grains, and other food crops, as well as indigenous lands, and public lands were land grabbed and converted into plantations, extractive mining projects, and farms devoted to export cash crops. 

Governments have become willing accomplices in these land grabs through public-private partnerships that take away land, water, and other natural resources from the people. Profits keep pouring into the pockets of the few as the majority of peasants and their families endure worsening landlessness and land grabs amid a pandemic. 

Land to the tillers for genuine food system change | Countercurrents

Big Pharma once more exposed itself as an industry filled by socio-paths who will overlook unnecessary deaths if they make sufficient profit and yet escape the full consequences of their criminal behaviour. 

A French court has fined, Servier,  one of the country’s biggest pharmaceutical firms €2.7m (£2.3m) after finding it guilty of deception and manslaughter over a pill linked to the deaths of up to 2,000 people and thousands more left with debilitating cardiovascular problems. Its former executive Jean-Philippe Seta was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence of four years. Magistrates accused Servier of having “knowingly concealed the medication’s true characteristics” from the 1970s and hidden medical studies unfavourable to the product, perpetrating a long-term fraud.

The French medicines agency, accused of failing to act quickly enough on warnings about the drug, was fined €303,000. The scandal, forced the resignation of the head of France’s public health agency and sparked outrage about the lobbying power of French pharmaceutical companies.

 Servier is accused of covering up fatal side-effects of the widely prescribed drug Mediator, an amphetamine derivative licensed as a diabetes treatment, but was widely prescribed as an appetite suppressant to help people lose weight.

“Despite knowing of the risks incurred for many years, … they [Servier] never took the necessary measures and thus were guilty of deceit,” said the president of the criminal court, Sylvie Daunis.

As many as 5 million people took the drug between 1976 and November 2009 when it was withdrawn in France, long after it was banned in Spain and Italy. It was never authourised in the UK or US.

French pharma firm found guilty over medical scandal in which up to 2,000 died | France | The Guardian

  Thousands of Syrians will no longer receive legal support, leaving many “in utter destitution” without documents they need to work, travel or return home, after the British government pulled £4m in funding from a charity programme, run by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), supporting refugees and internally displaced Syrians.

 Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the NRC, said: “This cut means we need to stop legal and protection assistance for 65,000 displaced people in Syria and Lebanon. Syrian children will no longer get help to get birth certificates, students and schoolchildren will no longer get help to get exam or training documents and we can no longer help people with housing, land and property rights.” It could also lead to people having to stay longer in camps, he said. “For some people, who hoped to be integrated into Lebanon, that hope has gone,” Egeland said. “It’s utter destitution when you are paperless.”

The cuts runs counter to the UK’s ideals and interests, he said. “The UK has been a champion of legal advice for refugees for many years, so that people can one day return to working life as productive citizens.”

Bahia Zrikem, of NRC, said staff had reported increased child labour, and families reduced to eating two meals a day. “Humanitarian needs are increasing, not falling” she said. A decade of conflict has left more than 90% of Syrians in poverty, 12.4 million facing food insecurity and 12.2 million without access to clean water.

One executive of a development charity said: “It’s no exaggeration to say there is an atmosphere of fear in the aid sector at the moment. The cuts are going to cost thousands of lives and yet we are being pressured by some quarters of the FCDO [Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office] to not discuss them publicly as it could compromise ongoing funding decisions. You can dress it up in legalese, but it feels as though the sector is being silenced in order that these cuts can be forced through with little or no scrutiny. The public have a right to know about the damage this decision will do, and the thousands of lives they will cost.”

Stephanie Draper, chief executive of Bond, the NGO network, described reports that people were being warned against speaking out as “very concerning”. “Policymakers and the public need to understand the serious implications of this political decision,” she said.

British aid cuts to leave tens of thousands of Syrians ‘paperless’ | Aid | The Guardian

 Roughly 12% of American households with children reported not having enough to eat in February.

Advocates said the pandemic made clear that welfare programs too often set up barriers for those who need help the most.

“It was frustrating, it was burdensome, and it made an already difficult situation even more difficult for many people,” said Pamela Herd, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University.

Much federal aid is filtered through state governments, and caseloads have varied considerably from state to state. Lawmakers loosened guidelines to make it easier for people to qualify for assistance, allowing states to screen applicants over the phone or internet, rather than in person. Still, the ranks of the hungry in the United States have grown.

Kentucky boosted the number of participants in the Women, Infants and Children food assistance program by 21% between February and November, while participation dropped by 17% in Arkansas, government figures show. Likewise, participation in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program rose by 74% in Indiana between February and September and dropped by 37% in Mississippi.

 Congress created the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT) program in March 2020. With most school buildings shut, lawmakers opted to give roughly 30 million low-income students debit cards worth up to $400 to cover the cost of the free meals they had been getting at school. The Brookings Institution think tank estimates the initiative reduced child hunger by roughly a third during the spring and summer, and experts view it as a surprising success. But as with other programs, success varied considerably by state. Some, like Michigan and Indiana, were able to get benefits to eligible children within weeks. Others took months. Tennessee, like 20 other states, required families who were not already enrolled in other welfare programs to fill out an application. That proved to be a major barrier for many families who lacked internet access or, did not know the benefit was available.

As the program was due to expire at the end of September, 240,000 children – a third of those eligible – still had not gotten benefit cards. The state mailed those cards to schools for families to pick up, but 60,000 of them were sent back unclaimed. No applications were needed for a second round of benefits in the Fall. Congress renewed the program in October, but then-President Donald Trump’s administration did not provide clear guidelines on who should qualify, as some schools had returned to in-person learning. Lawmakers provided clearer guidance in December, but as of this month only 29 states had been approved to distribute benefits that should have gone out months ago.

In Tennessee, officials are saying the new round of benefit cards will go out soon. This time, those qualified will not have to fill out an application.

Oatmeal yes, eggs no: Gaps emerge in U.S. anti-hunger push for children | Reuters

 Saudi Arabia has spent at least $1.5bn on high-profile international sporting events in a PR bid to bolster its reputation. The figures acquired only apply to deals between entities controlled by the Saudi state, such as the organisation Visit Saudi and NEOM, the body overseeing construction of a futuristic $500bn city in the desert, but not individual members of the Saudi royal family, meaning the $1.5bn figure is very likely a great underestimation of the true scale of the Kingdom’s investments in sports.

 The Saudi rulers have invested millions across the sporting world, the report by the human rights organisation Grant Liberty says, from chess championships to golf, tennis and $60m alone on the Saudi Cup, the world’s richest horse-racing event with prize money of $20m.

They include $145m in a three-year deal with the Spanish Football Association, and $15m in appearance fees for a single Saudi International men’s golf tournament. It also includes $33m to host the Saudi Arabian Masters snooker tournament in the Kingdom, and $100m for the boxing match known as “Clash on the Dunes” between Andy Ruiz Jr and Anthony Joshua in 2019. Saudi Arabia also cut a $500m 10-year deal with World Wrestling Entertainment in 2014, one where female performers were banned from appearing until two years ago.

 The Saudis have now also entered pending bids for forthcoming events, including $200m for the Tyson Fury Vs Joshua boxing match set to take place later this year, and $180m in sponsorship for Real Madrid through the Qiddiya project, a tourism and entertainment megaproject in Riyadh under the umbrella of “Vision 2030”.

The report details the Saudi Arabian Kingdom’s $650m ten-year deal with Formula One, whose world championships begin this Sunday and for the first time will include a race in the port city of Jeddah.

Grant Liberty’s terms Saudi Arabia’s investments in such spectacles  and extravaganzas as  “sportswashing”  to obscure its dismal human rights record, and tout itself as a new  tourist destination.

“Saudi Arabia is trying to use the good reputation of the world’s best loved sports stars to obscure a human rights record of brutality, torture and murder,” said Grant Liberty’s Lucy Rae, who accused Saudi Arabia of “committing human rights abuses on an industrial scale. The world’s leading sports stars might not have asked to be part of a cynical marketing plan to distract the world from the brutality – but that’s what is happening,” she added.

 Deals which failed to come to fruition because of indignant outcries, include a $6m offer to footballers Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi to be the face of the Kingdom’s tourism body Visit Saudi and an attempted $400m takeover-bid for Newcastle United.

Saudi Arabia has spent at least $1.5bn on ‘sportswashing’, report reveals | Saudi Arabia | The Guardian