Bulgaria, EU's least vaccinated nation, faces deadly surge

September 08, 2021

VELIKO TARNOVO, Bulgaria (AP) — Standing outside the rundown public hospital in Bulgaria's northern town of Veliko Tarnovo, the vaccination unit's chief nurse voices a sad reality about her fellow citizens: “They don’t believe in vaccines.”

Bulgaria has one of the highest coronavirus death rates in the 27-nation European Union and is facing a new, rapid surge of infections due to the more infectious delta variant. Despite that, people in this Balkan nation are the most hesitant in the bloc to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Only 20% of adults in Bulgaria, which has a population of 7 million, have so far been fully vaccinated. That puts it last in the EU, which has an average of 69% fully vaccinated. “We are open every day,” Yordanka Minekova, the chief vaccination nurse who has worked at the hospital for 35 years, told The Associated Press. “But people who want to be vaccinated are very few.”

Krasimira Nikolova, a 52-year-old restaurant worker, has chosen not to get vaccinated, saying she has doubts over the vaccines' effectiveness, even though the shots have been shown to be highly effective in preventing serious illness and deaths.

“I don’t believe vaccines work,” she told the AP. “I already had the virus. I don’t believe it’s so dangerous.” But Sibila Marinova, manager of Veliko Tarnovo’s intensive care unit, says the full COVID-19 ICU ward in her hospital shows that's simply not true.

“100% of the ICU patients are unvaccinated,” she told the AP, adding that staff shortages are only piling on more pressure. And she said she's angry that so many Bulgarians are refusing to get jabbed.

Bulgaria has access to all four of the vaccines approved by the EU — Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson. But since the start of the pandemic, more than 19,000 people in Bulgaria have died of COVID-19, the EU’s third-highest death rate, behind only the Czech Republic and Hungary. In the last week, an average of 41 people have died each day.

In response, the government imposed tighter restrictions Tuesday. Restaurants and cafes must close at 11 p.m. and their tables are limited to six people. Nightclubs have been shuttered and cinemas and theaters are limited to half capacity. Outdoors sports arenas are limited to 30% capacity.

“The low vaccination rate forces us to impose these measures,” Health Minister Stoycho Katsarov said. Despite being in a vulnerable age group, 71-year-old retiree Zhelyazko Marinov doesn't want to get vaccinated.

“I think I’m healthy enough and have a good natural immunity,” he said, adding that he could be persuaded to get vaccinated if he couldn't travel without a vaccine certificate. Mariya Sharkova, a public health law specialist, believes that Bulgaria's worryingly low vaccine uptake is the result of residents' low trust in official institutions, along with fake news about the shots, political instability and a weak national vaccination campaign.

“In Bulgaria, we don’t have good health literacy,” she told the AP. “Many people choose to believe conspiracy theories and fake news.” Only vaccines that are mandatory in Bulgaria — such as measles, mumps and rubella — have a high uptake. Sharkova said some blame has to lie with the government's vaccination program.

“They didn’t build any strategy on how to fight vaccine hesitancy,” she said. “We didn’t have any real information campaign for the vaccines. The ministry of health relies mainly on announcements on the ministry’s website, and I don’t think anyone actually goes on and reads it.”

“The best policy for such hesitant countries and populations as ours are mandatory vaccines,” said Sharkova, who is dismayed that national TV channels often invite vaccine-skeptic doctors to be on their programs.

But making COVID-19 vaccines mandatory could risk further polarizing the issue, she said. Hriska Zhelyazkova, a 67-year-old military officer from the coastal city of Burgas, says she distrusts vaccines because "they were created so quickly” -- apparently unaware that years of research laid the groundwork for the vaccine shots, which now have been used in hundreds of millions of people with exceedingly rare serious side effects.

Still, she said she may get vaccinated if authorities slap tougher restrictions on unvaccinated people. Back at the Veliko Tarnovo hospital, pro-vaccination drawings colored by children hang on the walls. “You are our superheroes,” one caption read.

But Minekova, the vaccination nurse, isn't optimistic about the future. “Somehow, I think it’s too late,” she said. “The right moment has been missed. I don’t see a way right now to solve this.”

Valentina Petrova contributed to this report from Burgas.

WHO chief urges halt to booster shots for rest of the year

September 08, 2021

GENEVA (AP) — Rich countries with large supplies of coronavirus vaccines should refrain from offering booster shots through the end of the year and make the doses available for poorer countries, the head of the World Health Organization said Wednesday, doubling down on an earlier appeal for a “moratorium" on boosters that has largely been ignored.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also said he was “appalled” after hearing comments Tuesday from a top association of pharmaceutical manufacturers that vaccine supplies are high enough to allow for both booster shots for people in well-supplied countries and first jabs in poorer countries that face shortages. He said that’s already been the case.

“I will not stay silent when companies and countries that control the global supply of vaccines think the world’s poor should be satisfied with leftovers,” he told a news conference. "Because manufacturers have prioritized or been legally obliged to fulfill bilateral deals with rich countries willing to pay top dollar, low income countries have been deprived of the tools to protect their people.”

Tedros had previously called for a moratorium on boosters through the end of September. But wealthy countries — including Britain, Denmark, France, Greece, Germany, and Spain — have begun or are considering plans to offer third shots of two-dose vaccines to their vulnerable people such as the elderly or those with compromised immune systems.

Israel has been providing third doses to a wide swath of people who already received a full two-dose regimen months earlier. And last month, United States health officials recommended that all Americans get boosters to shore up their protection amid evidence that the vaccines’ effectiveness is falling. WHO officials insist the scientific justification for boosters remains unclear.

Tedros acknowledged that third doses might be necessary for at-risk groups, but said: “We do not want to see widespread use of boosters for healthy people who are fully vaccinated." Responding to the WHO calls on booster shots, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the U.S. has donated and shared about 140 million doses with over 90 countries, "more than all other countries combined.”

She added: “From Senegal to South Africa to India, we’ve made significant investments in boosting global productions of COVID vaccines. At the same time, the President and this administration has a responsibility to do everything we can to protect people in the United States.”

U.S. health officials are continuing to assess the science and utility of boosters, and there are growing indications that the U.S. may miss the Biden administration's Sept. 20 target date for a wide rollout of extra shots for vaccinated people.

The WHO chief said he received a message of “clear support” from health ministers at a meeting of the influential Group of 20 countries this week for a commitment to help hit a WHO target that all countries vaccinate at least 40% of their people by year's end.

“A month ago, I called for a global moratorium on booster doses, at least until the end of September to prioritize vaccinating the most at risk people around the world who are yet to receive their first dose,” Tedros said. “There has been little change in the global situation since then.”

“So today, I’m calling for an extension of the moratorium until at least the end of the year to enable every country to vaccinate at least 40% of its population,” he said. The WHO says 5.5 billion coronavirus vaccine doses have been administered so far, but 80% of those have been to upper- and middle-income countries. Rich countries have also offered to donate 1 billion doses to other countries, but fewer than 15% of those doses have “materialized," Tedros said.

He noted that manufacturers have pledged to prioritize the U.N.-backed COVAX program, which aims to get vaccines to the neediest people in the world — no matter how wealthy the country. “We don’t want any more promises. We just want the vaccines,” the WHO chief said.

Earlier Wednesday, COVAX managers again scaled back their target to ship doses this year, projecting about 1.4 billion doses will be available through the program by year-end — down from about 1.8 billion previously. They had originally hoped to ship 2 billion doses this year.

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which co-runs the program, said COVAX has faced setbacks including export restrictions from hard-hit India — a key producer of vaccines — as well as regulatory hurdles for some vaccine candidates and manufacturing troubles elsewhere. But it also said deliveries are ramping up strongly, and another 1.1 billion doses are expected to be available by year-end through the program, up from 330 million so far. Most of those doses have gone to or are destined for poorer countries.

The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations said Tuesday that about 1.5 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses are now being produced every month, and cited projections that a total of 12 billion will have been produced by year-end.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, a top adviser to Tedros, acknowledged that “some countries may be going ahead with decisions" to widely administer boosters, but that the WHO call for a moratorium “makes a real difference.” He said some countries — which he did not identify — have approached the WHO about whether booster policies could be delayed.

But admittedly, the WHO's first call for a moratorium through September has not fixed the gaping imbalance in access to vaccines. “(O)ur role is to make sure that we put forward the strongest possible arguments and way out of this pandemic — and the way out of that is a moratorium and to extend it," Aylward said. "Because since the last time we called for it, the equity gap has gotten greater, the amount of vaccine available to low-income countries has gone down.”

Aamer Madhani in Washington DC contributed to this report.

It's time for Australia to develop its own guided missiles

by Graeme Dunk | ANU/Shoal Group

Sydney, Australia (The Conversation) 

Sep 09, 2021

Step by step, Australia is inching its way towards more autonomy in defense.

On Wednesday, Defense Minister Peter Dutton was reported to have signaled greater access to US missile technology will be a key test of the US-Australia alliance at a closed meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia.

In March Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the defense department would select an industry partner to develop a A$1 billion guided weapons manufacturing capability.

But, more than in earlier times, it's the details that will matter.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Peter Jennings says a key lesson from the collapse of the US operation in Afghanistan is that its allies can no longer assume it will be just "over the horizon ready to defend our strategic interests".

It was, he said, "a tough message for Australia, which has become habituated to think that defense spending at a little over 2% of gross domestic product and a defense force about two-thirds the size of a Melbourne Cricket Ground crowd is enough to defend the country".

Japan seems to be also rethinking its strategy.

Four options: the best is expensive

There are four options for improving self-reliance in guided weapons.

The first is simply to buy more of what we currently have. It isn't bad as a short-term approach, but we can't guarantee we will have what we need, when we need it. Weapons can date and we can slip down the queue for replenishment - just think of COVID-19 vaccine supply.

The second option is to assemble in Australia, rather than simply import.

This is better than the first option, and would create jobs. But jobs are hardly going to be the most pressing issue when the firing starts. And we are unlikely to get all of the intellectual property (the knowledge about how to build and repair) we might need to upgrade when circumstances change.

The third option is to use Australian industry to improve and replace some capabilities of current weapons with locally-developed alternatives.

Targeting software and counter-counter-measure software could be examples.

This option is better than the previous two options, but still relies on us having access to foreign (often US) intellectual property, which might be problematic.

The best option is to design and build our own guided weapons. This would be expensive, and it would require significant time, but it would actually make us self-reliant. We would own the intellectual property and own the codes.

We would be able to upgrade to take account of developments in technology and to account for changes in the adversary. We wouldn't have to wait in line to be given an upgrade.

We will probably need all four options

This is not to suggest we need to develop every type of guided weapon type we would use. There are some where the integration issues would be profound if not close to impossible (the joint strike fighter is an example).

It isn't that we need sovereignty in guided weapons, what is that we need smart sovereignty - smart in the sense that we focus our efforts and our money where we can get the most useful sovereignty.

In some cases the sensible thing will be to buy and/or fabricate, just as Australia buys foreign cars and in the early days of manufacturing assembled foreign cars.

In others cases it will be to develop additional weapons locally. Each approach will be the best in different circumstances. We will probably need some of each, simultaneously.

But we need to take charge of our own destiny where we can, rather than just rely on a helping hand that may or may not come when we need it, or in the way we will need it.

We certainly can't go toe-to-toe with our most likely regional adversary on our own. We don't have anything like the capability.

But what we can do is target the development of local weapons to those that are likely to be of the most use against that adversary. Deployable, mobile, hypersonic anti-access/area denial guided weapons are among those that would help.

Waiting might leave us unable to choose

Irrespective of the option we choose, we will need to test the guided weapons we use domestically. This means developing in parallel a domestic capability for the modelling, simulation and analysis that will be critical to success.

Australian industry has the capability, but time is running short. The pandemic has shown us that the money can be found where the need is critical.

The future might not be kind to us but at the moment we still have time to choose the path to take. Later, that path might be dictated for us.

Source: Space War.

Link: https://www.spacewar.com/reports/Its_time_for_Australia_to_develop_its_own_guided_missiles_999.html.

Australia voices full support for King Abdullah

05-04-2021

Ammon News - Australia expressed its complete support to His Majesty King Abdullah.

"Australia is a steadfast friend to the people of Jordan and to His Majesty King Abdullah," The Australian Foreign Ministry said in a statement distributed by the Australian embassy in Amman.

Source: Ammon News.

Link: https://en.ammonnews.net/article/48416.

Do tourist boats stress out whales? Researchers find out

By Jeremie Richard

Husavik, Iceland (AFP)

Sept 5, 2021

Just off the northern coast of Iceland, scientists are collecting data from whales' breath to find out if they get stressed by whale-watching boats, an industry that has boomed in recent years.

Researchers from Whale Wise, a marine conservation charity, are studying the whales' stress levels in their hormones.

From their small sailboat, a drone lifts off. After six hours of waiting, the scientists have finally spotted a humpback whale.

Attached to the flying device are two petri dishes -- transparent cylindrical containers -- that will collect water droplets from the whale's spray.

The timeframe to collect the sample is short -- the duration of a whale's breath.

This time, the drone flies over the whale carefully, crossing through the spray coming from the whale's blowhole... and mission accomplished. It returns to the sailboat, delivering its precious cargo to the researchers.

Once wrapped in paraffin and frozen, the samples will be sent to a laboratory for analysis.

The researchers aim to collect samples before a whale watching boat arrives and then afterwards, then compare the two samples to determine the direct impact of that encounter on stress levels.

Tourists have been increasingly flocking to the waters of the North Atlantic off Iceland to admire the majestic creatures, though 2020 was a quiet year due to the pandemic.

More than 360,000 whale watchers were registered in 2019, three times the number a decade ago.

Almost a third of them began their whale watching tour in the Husavik harbor, heading for the chilly waters of Skjalfandi Bay.

- Feeding disruptions -

Previous studies on tourism's impact on whales, which were based on behavioral observations, concluded that tourism caused only minor disruptions to the mammals.

The most recent study, from 2011, found that whale-watching excursions were disrupting minke whales in the Faxa Bay near Reykjavik, in the south of the country.

"We found that the minke whales were disturbed in their feeding, but it was only a short-term disturbance," one of the authors of the study, Marianne Rasmussen, director of the University of Iceland Research Center in Husavik, told AFP.

"It didn't affect their overall fitness."

The method used by Whale Wise this summer has been used elsewhere by biologists but this was a first for researchers in Iceland.

"From the samples, you can look at hormones such as cortisol, which is a stress-related hormone, and then you can determine the physiological stress levels of these whales," said Tom Grove, Whale Wise co-founder and a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh.

Since 2018, 59 samples have been collected. While a minimum of 50 are needed for a proper analysis, he hopes to collect around 100.

This summer, some of the samples were collected together with French environmental group Unu Mondo Expedition, which travelled to Iceland for a month-long expedition to study climate change issues.

"The whales are important to us, for our lives, because they are part of the ecosystem on our planet," said Sophie Simonin, 29, the organization's co-founder.

"They also absorb enormous amounts of carbon dioxide," she added.

According to a December 2019 study by the International Monetary Fund, a large whale captures an average of 33 tons of carbon dioxide.

While whales are a tourist attraction, they are also hunted in Iceland.

The International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986, but Iceland, which opposed the moratorium, resumed its hunt in 2003.

Iceland only bans the hunt of blue whales.

But while the country has established an annual quota of 209 fin whales and 217 minke whales until 2023, no whales were hunted this year for the third straight year, as whalers say it is not financially viable.

Source: Terra Daily.

Link: https://www.terradaily.com/reports/Do_tourist_boats_stress_out_whales_Researchers_find_out_999.html.

Earthlike planets in other solar systems? Look for moons

Urbana IL (SPX)

Sep 10, 2021

Finding an exact copy of the Earth somewhere in the universe sounds like a far-fetched notion, but scientists believe that because Earth happened in our solar system, something similar is bound to exist someplace else. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researcher Siegfried Eggl and his colleagues say orbiting moons may play a key role in keeping planets habitable over long periods and identified a method to find them.

"In our solar system, we have an average of 20 moons orbiting around each planet. So, we suspected there are moons around planets in other systems, too. There is really no reason why there shouldn't be any," said Eggl, a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at UIUC.

Eggl said astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array have recently observed what they believe is evidence of a moon forming around the extrasolar planet PDS 70c. The next step is finding moons around planets that have two stars.

Some planets in other solar systems can be seen using very large telescopes like ALMA, the W.M. Keck observatory in Hawaii, or the European Southern Observatory in Chile, but fully formed moons are still too tiny to spot.

"We know they are there. We just need to look harder. But because it is so difficult to see them, we identified a way to detect them through the effect they have on a planet using transit timing variations."

Eggl said they can observe how planets behave in orbit and compare those observations to models with and without moons.

"We know the planets, stars, and moons in our solar system interact gravitationally like a giant board game," Eggl said. "The moon is tidally interacting with the Earth and slowing its own rotation, but the Sun is also there, tugging on both. A second star would act as another external perturber to the system."

When a planet passes in front of a star the star dims a little, Eggl said. A moon tugging on the planet is causing the planet to wobble slightly on its orbit. This wobble makes the darkening of the star occur sometimes earlier and other times later. In a double star system, additional variations in the time of transit are due to the forced, elliptical orbits of the planet and its moon. If detected, those variations can lead to additional insights into the properties of the system.

Much like proving there is wind by observing tree branches bending, Eggl said "This is an indirect proof of a moon because there's nothing else that could tug on the planet in that kind of fashion."

Of course, this assumes that planets did not lose their moons along the way.

"We first had to determine the orbital resonances in the systems we looked at," Eggl said. "When moons and planets have slightly elliptical orbits, they don't always move at the same speed. The more eccentric an orbit, the more frequencies can be excited, and we see these resonances become more and more important. At some point there will be overlapping resonances that can lead to chaos in the system. In our study we have shown, however, that there is enough stable 'real estate' to merit a thorough search for moons around planets in double star systems."

Billy Quarles, lead author of the study, said, "The major difference with binary systems is the companion star acts like the tide at the beach, where it periodically comes in and etches away the beachfront. With a more eccentric binary orbit, a larger portion of the stable 'real estate' is removed. This can help out a lot in our search for moons in other star systems."

The bottom line for Eggl is that our solar system is probably not as special as we'd like to think it is.

"If we can use this method to show there are other moons out there, then there are probably other systems similar to ours," he said. "The moon is also likely critical for the evolution of life on our planet, because without the moon the axis tilt of the Earth wouldn't be as stable, the results of which would be detrimental to climate stability. Other peer-reviewed studies have shown the relationship between moons and the possibility of complex life."

Source: Space Daily.

Link: https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Earthlike_planets_in_other_solar_systems_Look_for_moons_999.html.

Conservation meet mulls plan to protect 80% of Amazon

By Marlowe Hood

Marseille (AFP)

Sept 6, 2021

Should 80 percent of the Amazon be declared a protected area by 2025?

The world's top conservation body is on Sunday poised to decide whether its 1,400 members can vote on this controversial proposal, put forward by indigenous groups.

Submitted under an emergency provision to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the measure calls for a "global action plan" to halt rampant deforestation and the destructive extraction of precious minerals and oil.

Over the last two decades, the Amazon has lost roughly 10,000 square kilometers every year, according to assessments based on satellite data.

"That's the emergency, not just for us but for humanity," Jose Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, a leader of the Curripaco people in Venezuela, told AFP at the Congress venue in Marseille.

For the first time in the IUCN's 70-year history, indigenous groups have a separate status alongside government agencies and national or international NGOs.

Diaz Mirabal submitted the Amazon proposal for the newly admitted organization COICA, which represents more than two million indigenous people in nine Amazon nations.

"We have been neglected, and now we have a voice and will exercise that voting right," he said.

- 'Territory of humanity' -

Recent research has warned that massive destruction of tropical forests combined with climate change are pushing the Amazon towards a disastrous "tipping point" which would see tropical forests give way to savannah-like landscapes.

This would not only drastically change the region's climate, but have an impact on global climate systems as well, scientists say.

Rates of tree loss drop sharply in the forests where native peoples live, especially if they hold some degree of title -- legal or customary -- over land, other research has shown.

IUCN officials are reviewing the COICA measure, along with 20 others proposals submitted after the deadline last year, "to make sure they are both 'new' and 'urgent'," said Enrique Lahmann, a senior administrator.

"Both criteria are required."

A decision will be announced late Sunday or Monday, his office said.

While the vote, which would be held in the coming week, would not have legal weight, it demonstrates the strength of feeling among indigenous groups.

In an emotional press conference, Diaz Mirabal -- flanked by indigenous leaders from French Guiana and Ecuador -- implored world leaders to take head of his message.

"We are asking governments to help us protect our territory, which is also the territory of humanity," he said. "Because if the Amazon rainforest disappears, people will die everywhere, it's that simple."

"It is crucial to stop extracting the oil, the gold, the uranium," he added. "This is wealth for Europe, the United States, Russia, and China, but is poverty for us."

Source: Terra Daily.

Link: https://www.terradaily.com/reports/Conservation_meet_mulls_plan_to_protect_80_of_Amazon_999.html.