COVID-19
Israeli study: South African coronavirus variant may evade protection from Pfizer vaccine
The coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa may evade the protection provided by Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study in Israel found, though its prevalence in the country is very low and the research has not been peer reviewed. The study, released on Saturday, compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine, against the same number of unvaccinated patients with the disease. It matched age and gender, among other characteristics. The South African variant, B.1.351, was found to make up about 1% of all the COVID-19 cases across all the people studied, according to the study by Tel Aviv University and Israel’s largest healthcare provider, Clalit. But among patient...
All Chinese schools now have access to internet
Andrew Brookes/Getty Images All Chinese schools now have full access to the Internet, and 95.2 per cent of them are equipped with multi-media classrooms, according to a senior official with China’s Ministry of Education. The country has been constantly accelerating informationisation of teaching, and sees it as underpinning the modernisation of education, said Zhong Denghua, vice minister of the education ministry, at a virtual conference attended by ministers of education on the E9 Digital Learning Initiative jointly held by UNESCO and Bangladesh on April 6. Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, online courses thrived across the country as a way to ensure normal teaching activities, said Zhong, adding that nearly 300 million teachers and students had learnt or taught online whi...
Indoor Concerts and Other Private Gatherings Can Return in California Starting April 15th
As it starts to get warmer and warmer outside, we’re constantly reminded of the sense of freedom that the spring and summer months bring. California, once considered the nation’s “coronavirus epicenter,” is now the state with the lowest positivity rate in the country. As case continue to decline, the California Department of Public Health announced that starting April 15th, indoor theaters and concerts—among other private gatherings—will be allowed. Although the news is exciting, these processes will most likely continue to move at a slow pace as venues navigate the mercurial nature of reopening. If your county is in the most restrictive purple tier, indoor gatherings will remain dormant. This phase of reopening will only apply to counties in the red, oran...
Reports: Governments ‘gender blind’ to coronavirus’ ‘greater impact’ on women
Governments are putting women and girls at greater risk of the health and socio-economic impacts posed by the coronavirus pandemic, two global studies released Wednesday show. They called on leaders to prioritise gender equity in their response to the health crisis. Two studies, one from a global research partnership led by the Global Health 50/50 Project in London and another by the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, were released Wednesday to coincide with World Health Day that highlight major failings by national governments to consider sex or gender in their COVID-19 policies. Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, several studies have pointed to the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on women. Many women have shouldered a heftier burden taking on more unpa...
Ted Nugent Thinks There Was COVID-1 through -18, Wonders Why There Weren’t Shutdowns Then
<span class="localtime" data-ltformat="F j, Y | g:ia" data-lttime="2021-04-08T15:04:27+00:00“>April 8, 2021 | 11:04am ET Legendary guitarist and gun-toting purveyor of extreme right-wing views Ted Nugent has a bone to pick with the COVID-19 shutdown. He wonders why we didn’t have shutdowns during COVID-1 through 18, mistakenly thinking that COVID-19 is the 19th iteration of the contagious disease. Lamenting the fact that he won’t be back on the road anytime soon, The Nuge took to Facebook Live (transcribed by Blabbermouth) to declare, “This year’s tour is canceled again. The production companies won’t let us tour again this year. Dirty bastard, lying, scam, smoke-and-mirrors COVID-19 freaks.” That’s when he mistakenly and hilariously used non-factual lo...
Maynard James Keenan Says “Everything’s Grand” After Two Bouts with COVID, Preps for New Puscifer Livestream
<span class="localtime" data-ltformat="F j, Y | g:ia" data-lttime="2021-04-06T20:08:53+00:00“>April 6, 2021 | 4:08pm ET Maynard James Keenan and his band Puscifer are getting ready to unveil their second concert livestream of the pandemic, this time playing their 2015 album, Money $hot, in its entirety. The performance comes after Keenan twice battled COVID-19, but as he tells us in a new interview, he is no longer experiencing the lingering effects of the virus. Puscifer recently announced the the new livestream “Billy D and the Hall of Feathered Serpents featuring Money $hot by Puscifer”, a prequel to their October livestream, where they performed their 2020 album, Existential Reckoning, in full. The new concert is set at the Mayan Theater in Los Ange...
Amnesty: Russia may be ‘slowly’ killing Alexey Navalny
Alexey Navalny, the prominent opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is imprisoned in conditions that amount to torture and may slowly be killing him, human rights group Amnesty International said on Wednesday. Navalny, who last year was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent, was now being subjected to sleep deprivation and did not have access to a doctor he could trust in jail, it said. “Russia, the Russian authorities, may be placing him into a situation of a slow death and seeking to hide what is happening to him,” Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said ahead of the publication of the group’s annual report. “Clearly the Russian authorities are violating his rights. We have to do more,” she said. “[They] have already attempted to kill him, they are n...
Morgan Freeman Films COVID-19 Vaccine PSA: “If You Trust Me, You’ll Get the Vaccine”
Despite well over 500,000 reported deaths from COVID-19 in the United States alone and nearly 3 million worldwide, many people are still reluctant to get vaccinated against the highly infectious and devastating disease. In response, the multi-time voice of God and legendary actor Morgan Freeman, has been brought in for a PSA about the vaccine. Watch it below. “I’m not a doctor, but I trust science. And I’m told that, for some reason, people trust me,” the legendary actor says at the beginning of the video, which was created by arts advocacy group The Creative Coalition and the National Blue Ribbon Task Force to stem COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. He continues, “So here I am to say I trust science and I got the vaccine. If you trust me, you’ll get the vaccine. In math, it’s called the distribu...
Study: EDM is the Most Popular Genre to Listen to Before Bed—But Also the Worst
A new study has found that if you go to bed with music playing, you get a sound sleep. Despite that awful pun, the study offers some eye-opening data on music-related dreams. The Sleep Judge surveyed 1,063 people about their experiences with music-related dreams. 55% of respondents were men and 45% were women, and they ranged in age from 22 to 61 with an average of 36. The analysis found that EDM is the most popular genre of music to listen to late at night before bed among 14% of people. However, it was also delineated as the worst genre to listen to in bed, with 54% of people unable to sleep well and 57% dissatisfied with their sleep. Let’s chalk it up to it being the catchiest and most likely to get stuck in your head. Pop music was the most popular genre for the st...
Yinka Odumakin: Nigeria has lost a fearless activist – Ekiti governor
The Ekiti State Governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi, has mourned the death of Mr. Yinka Odumakin, the renowned activist and Spokesperson of the Pan-Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere, describing the news of his passing as “tragic and deeply devastating.” Odumakin, according to his family, passed away Saturday morning after battling with COVID-19 complications at the age of 59years. Fayemi in a statement signed by his Chief Press Secretary, Yinka Oyebode said the Yoruba and indeed Nigeria have lost, ” a truly patriotic citizen, a fearless activist who consistently spoke truth to power and a man of the people who championed the cause of his people till he breathed his last.” He described the death of the Afenifere spokesperson as a personal loss to him, ” having had a long-standing working relat...
Lagos PDP: Yinka Odumakin lived fulfilled life, fought for downtrodden
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Lagos State has mourned the death of the Spokesman of a pan-Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere, Yinka Odumakin. The PDP Publicity Secretary in the state, Taofik Gani, told newsmen on Saturday in Lagos that Odumakin spoke and fought for the masses. “Yinka Odumakin lived a fulfilled life, fighting and speaking for the downtrodden, devalued ethnic groups and the nation at large. “We cannot forget his outspokenness on national issues and fight for equal rights amongst ethnic nationalities. He spoke truth to power,” he said. The PDP spokesman added that Odumakin surprised the party when he was invited as a speaker at a Democracy Day symposium. He honoured the invitation and spoke the truth to the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and PDP. “A rar...
Senate faults PTF conversion to PSC, laments doctors strike
The Senate Committee on Health said on Thursday that the Presidency should have consulted the National Assembly before converting the the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 to the Presidential Steering Committee. The panel also expressed surprise that the National Association of Resident Doctors embarked on strike despite the fact that their demands had been met by the Federal Government. Chairman of the Senate panel, Yahaya Oloriegbe, stated these during a public hearing on a bill seeking to establish a Federal Medical Centre in Mubi, Adamawa State. Oloriegbe said, “I was listening to the radio yesterday (Wednesday) and I heard that the PTF (on COVID-19) has been converted to a steering committee. “We were not consulted in terms of what will be the operational mechanism and so on. “I am ...