Rich countries are on course to have over a billion more doses of COVID-19 vaccines than they need, leaving poorer nations scrambling for leftover supplies.

The advocacy group, the ONE Campaign, which campaigns against poverty and preventable diseases, said wealthy countries, such as the United States and Britain, should share the excess doses to “supercharge” a fully global response to the pandemic and that a failure to do so would deny billions of people essential protection from the COVID-19-causing virus and likely prolong the pandemic.

To date, the United States, the European Union, Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan have already secured more than 3 billion doses – over a billion more than the 2.06 billion needed to give their entire populations two doses.

“This huge excess is the embodiment of vaccine nationalism,” said Jenny Ottenhoff, ONE Campaign’s senior director for policy. “Rich countries understandably hedged their bets on vaccines early in the pandemic but with these bets paying off in spades, a massive course correction is needed if we are going to protect billions of people around the world.” 

The analysis found that, along with other COVID vaccine supplies procured by the global COVAX vaccine-sharing plan and in bilateral deals, the excess rich-country doses would go a long way to protecting vulnerable people in poorer countries. This would significantly reduce the risk of deaths from COVID-19, it said, as well as limiting the chances of new virus variants emerging and accelerating an end to the pandemic.

Rich nations stockpiling a billion more COVID-19 shots than needed: report | Reuters

 In all the other mature democracies when it comes to election reforms the purpose is to encourage participation and make it easier for electors to vote. Not so in the USA. There are at least 165 bills pending in 33 states that would make it harder to vote, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.

Georgia has unveiled sweeping new legislation that would make it dramatically harder to vote in the state, following an election with record turnout and surging participation among Black voters.

The bill would block officials from offering early voting on Sundays, a day traditionally used by Black churches to mobilize voters as part of a “souls to the polls” effort. It would place new limits on the use of mail-in ballot drop-boxes, restrict who can handle an absentee ballot, and require voters to provide their driver’s license number or a copy of other identification with their application for a mail-in ballot. It would also require voters to provide the same driver’s license information on the mail-in ballot itself or the last four digits of their social security number if they do not have an acceptable ID.

The bill gives voters less time to request and return mail-in ballots, not only moving up the deadline to return an application but also limiting requests to start 78 days ahead of an election instead of the current 180. It requires election officials to reject ballots mistakenly cast in the wrong precinct and bans organizers from offering food or water to voters standing in line to cast a ballot.

A separate bill under consideration in the state senate would eliminate no excuse absentee voting, something Republicans wrote into law in 2005, only allowing people to vote by mail if they are 75 or older or have an excuse.

The effort to shorten mail-in voting comes after many voters saw severe delays in getting their mail-in ballots because of delays with the United States Postal Service and overwhelmed election offices. About one third of early votes in the state were from Black voters and Joe Biden overwhelmingly won the mail-in vote in Georgia. The problem with early voting is simple: too many African-Americans in Georgia used it.

“With exacting precision, the bill targets voters of color,” said Nse Ufot, chief of the New Georgia Project, one of the groups that mobilized voters of color in Georgia. “Georgia Republicans saw what happens when Black voters are empowered and show up at the polls, and now they’re launching a concerted effort to suppress the votes and voices of Black Georgians.”

Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, one of the groups that helped mobilize Black voters last year, said there was no justification for the bill. One of the ways Butler’s group helped voters ahead of the election was by assisting them in returning their absentee ballot applications to election officials. The Republican proposal would prohibit that.

“There’s no reason for it other than this ideology and this misinformation that there was fraud. There was no fraud in the election. The governor, everyone said there was no fraud,” she said.

“The right lost! So now they are trying to change the rules and make it harder to vote,” Deborah Scott, the executive director of Georgia Stand-Up, another group that worked to mobilize Black voters, said 

Georgia Republicans in sweeping new effort to make it harder to vote | Georgia | The Guardian

 California’s Proposition 22 exempted some major tech firms from fully complying with labor laws. In November, California voters passed Prop 22, with 58.63% of voters in favor of the amendment to exempt app-based gig workers from California assembly bill 5, which granted gig workers the rights of employees such as unemployment insurance, health insurance, minimum wage, and collective bargaining. Uber, Lyft, and other gig companies refused to comply with AB5 and threatened to shut down operations in the state of California if they were forced to do so. Prop 22, authored by Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and DoorDash, went into effect in mid-December 2020 after an aggressive public relations campaign of more than $200m launched by the companies. The companies out-spent opponents to Prop 22 by 10 to one, making it the most expensive ballot measure in California’s history.

“It’s clear that as soon as Prop 22 passed, it was open season to start cutting my pay again,” said Peter Young, a rideshare driver for four years in Los Angeles. “If you try to earn money, just purely on the delivery fee, it comes out to about $5 an hour. A good day for me is maybe earning $100 before gas and expenses off eight hours of work,” said Young.

Ben Valdez has worked part-time as an Uber driver in Los Angeles for five years.

“I was under the impression that I was going to get an additional $0.30 per mile after Prop 22,” said Valdez, but he hasn’t received that extra compensation. “A lot of drivers were duped because they expected they were magically going to be able to qualify for benefits that the companies made it sound like they were going to pay for up front and that drivers were going to be getting reimbursement for the mileage,” said Valdez. “They also made drivers believe that if Prop 22 didn’t pass then Uber and Lyft were going to leave the state of California because they couldn’t afford to pay drivers as employees.”

“Prop 22 hasn’t made anything better because the companies still don’t take into consideration the waiting time and driving time to stores, so their guaranteed 120 percent of minimum wage is fraudulent,” said Okawa. She pays about $180 a week to rent a car through Uber’s partnership with Avis and spends about $90 on gas a week. She works five to six days a week from 7.30am to 6pm. She claimed the gig companies had changed base pay without giving a reason.

A study by labor economists at the University of California, Berkeley, in October 2019 found Prop 22 guarantees a minimum wage of $5.64 an hour, as only engaged time is accounted for in the wage calculations. The minimum wage in California is $14 an hour as of January 2021, and $13 an hour for employers with less than 25 employees.

 Several gig apps announced fees for customers in California would increase to cover the costs of Prop 22 driver benefits after several of the apps used fear of prices increases  if Prop 22 didn’t pass.

‘I can’t keep doing this’: gig workers say pay has fallen after California’s Prop 22 | California | The Guardian

 The domination of global medicine by major pharmaceutical companies needs to be confronted to provide fairer access to vaccines , said Mustaqeem De Gama, South Africa’s delegate at the World Trade Organization (WTO) on intellectual property rights. 

“While Rome is burning, we are fiddling around,” said De Gama. “The first effective vaccines were ready four or five months ago. Do you think it would have made a difference if we had the capacity to manufacture? I certainly think so.” De Gama said more structural change was needed to enable countries to make their own vaccines instead of relying on terms set by donors or profit-driven companies. “The infrastructure right now is providing a minimum and leaving the rest to the private sector,” said De Gama. “I don’t think governments should be outsourcing their responsibility for public health to private companies who are responsible to shareholders only.”

Backed by dozens of developing countries, the proposal, introduced by South Africa and India, argued that by-passing intellectual property rights would allow more of the world’s population to be quickly vaccinated by boosting production.

Supplies are low after rich countries bought more vaccines than they needed to, leading to predictions that many low-income countries may not be able to reach mass immunisation until 2024.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) on Thursday called for urgent delivery of vaccines to lower-income countries in order to avoid further mutations of the coronavirus, such as the 501Y.V2 variant that has spread throughout southern Africa.

Roz Scourse, a policy adviser for MSF Access, said the EU had been “hypocritical” in its recent outrage over undelivered AstraZeneca vaccines while blocking the proposed patent waiver, alongside other countries that host big pharmaceutical companies, including the UK.

“This is really showing the EU and other rich countries what happens when you hand over all the rights and control of the manufacture and distribution of Covid vaccines in the time of a pandemic to huge multinational corporations,” said Scourse.

South Africa leads backlash against big pharma over access to Covid vaccines (msn.com)

 “Everybody’s worst fear about capital punishment is that innocent people will be wrongfully convicted and executed,” Robert Dunham, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) executive director, said. “But the more we learn about what actually happens in these cases, the worse the problem gets.”

The DPIC added 11 cases to its “Innocence List” that tracks American death row exonerations on Thursday, bringing the total to 185 and raising concerns over the likelihood more innocents – especially people of colour – will be condemned.

DPIC has found wrongful death penalty convictions in “virtually every part of the country, with exonerations documented in 29 states and 118 different counties”, the report found. By their estimate, one in every 8.3 people sentenced to death in the United States since capital punishment resumed in 1970 were exonerated.

The cases reveal trends of “misconduct and racial bias”, the DPIC said. About 70 percent involved misconduct from police, prosecutors or other government officials. Roughly 80 percent “involved some combination of misconduct or perjury/false accusation and more than half involved both”.

Black exonerees saw misconduct in their cases at a much higher rate, 78.8 percent, than white exonerees at 58.2 percent. “Black exonerees spent an average of 4.3 more years waiting for exoneration than white exonerees”, the report said.

A major concern involving cases that involve capital punishment is false evidence, including false confessions – which occur at rates as high as 25 to 30 percent in exonerations won by DNA evidence. Forensic practices, such as hair analysis, bitemark analysis and bloodshot patterns, played an outsized role in wrongful convictions. DNA evidence has played a profound role in exonerations, the DPIC report said. DNA uncovered mistakes in official misconduct, false confessions, mistaken witness identification and more in capital punishment cases at much higher rates than cases where no DNA was present.

Despite concerns over capital punishment, the federal government conducted 13 executions between 2020 and the end of former President Donald Trump’s administration in January 2021, including the first killing of a female inmate since 1953. The executions were uniformly challenged based on faulty evidence or the mental acuity of the condemned, though none won reprieves.

‘We can be sure innocents died’, US death row exonerations show | Crime News | Al Jazeera

 The media constantly moves on, forgetting crises when they are no longer news worthy. 

A record 12.4 million Syrians – nearly 60 percent of the population – are now food insecure, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP). 

In just over one year, an additional 4.5 million Syrians have become food insecure.  the number of people who are severely food insecure – meaning they cannot survive without food assistance – has doubled in just one year to stand at 1.3 million people. Unless urgent action is taken, an additional 1.8 million people are at risk of falling into severe food insecurity.

“The situation has never been worse. After ten years of conflict, Syrian families have exhausted their savings as they face a spiralling economic crisis,” said WFP Representative and Country Director in Syria Sean O’Brien. It is alarming that a simple meal is beyond the reach of families across Syria, and this new data shows humanitarian assistance is the difference between putting a meal on the table and going to bed hungry. Lifesaving support has never been so crucial,” said O’Brien.

An economic crisis, job losses as a result of COVID-19 and soaring food prices have added to the plight of Syrians who have been displaced and worn down by a decade of conflict. Each month WFP provides lifesaving food assistance to almost 5 million of Syria’s most vulnerable people. For many, this is the only food they eat each month.

Basic foods to feed a family for a month – bread, rice, lentils and oil and sugar- now cost at least 120,000 Syrian Pounds which far exceeds the average salaries. Over the last year food prices across Syria have soared, and the price of basic items has increased by 236 percent, just as the value of the Syrian Pound has plummeted. On average, the price of oil has increased from 1000 Syrian pounds in Jan 2020, to 5000 Syrian pounds in Jan 2021. Parents now report making desperate decisions to survive, eating less food so they can feed their children, going into debt, and selling assets and livestock to generate an income. In addition, close to 50% of the Syrian population report having lost one or more sources of income because of the economic downturn and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Twelve million Syrians now in the grip of hunger, worn down by conflict and soaring food prices – Syrian Arab Republic | ReliefWeb

 Towering Injustice

Forty four months since Grenfell burned, and still

Too many tenants in too many towers

Sleep one eye open through the early hours

For when the shrill fire alarm isn’t a drill.

The wall beyond the curtain’s not secure,

Cheaply dressed, just for appearance sake,

But allows the damp or the flame to take

And negates even the means to insure.

Capital builders will promote facades

To try and disguise what’s shoddy behind,

Sure the poor should be too grateful to mind:

Where profit fails, frustrated need pervades.

People remain disgruntled, yet resigned,

Until, that is, the working class abraids.

D. A.

 Towering Injustice

Forty four months since Grenfell burned, and still

Too many tenants in too many towers

Sleep one eye open through the early hours

For when the shrill fire alarm isn’t a drill.

The wall beyond the curtain’s not secure,

Cheaply dressed, just for appearance sake,

But allows the damp or the flame to take

And negates even the means to insure.

Capital builders will promote facades

To try and disguise what’s shoddy behind,

Sure the poor should be too grateful to mind:

Where profit fails, frustrated need pervades.

People remain disgruntled, yet resigned,

Until, that is, the working class abraids.

D. A.

Migrants are needed to stop population decline in Scotland, a new report has found.

New Zealand’s birthrate dropped to its lowest ever level in 2020, well below the population replacement rate of 2.1. The country’s declining birthrate is in line with trends seen in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan and the US, among others.

The country’s total fertility rate dropped to 1.61 births per woman of child-bearing age (15–49 years), the latest fall in a decade-old trend.

Most babies registered in 2020 were conceived before New Zealand moved to Covid-19 lockdown on 25 March last year, said Hamish Slack at Statistics NZ.

“Fertility rates in New Zealand were relatively stable between 1980 and 2012, but have generally decreased since then,” said Slack. “Since 2013, the number of women of reproductive age has increased by 11% and the number of births has decreased by 2%.”

In 2020, there were 57,753 live births registered in New Zealand, down 2,064 (3%) from the previous year.

Demographer Prof Paul Spoonley from Massey University forecasts for the next 20 years indicated many families would have either one child or be childless.

He said “The results of the demographic transition which we’re going through now is something we’ve never encountered before,” he said. “We’ve never had a society in which one in four people is aged over 65, for example. It is unprecedented.”

New Zealand birthrate sinks to its lowest ever | New Zealand | The Guardian