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Police in China and South Africa have seized thousands of 400 vials of fake doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, equivalent to around 2,400 doses containing fake vaccine. The global police organisation Interpol said on Wednesday, warning this represented only the “tip of the iceberg” in vaccine-related crime.. Read more HERE
Broadcaster Enikass TV confirms deaths of three workers in two separate attacks in Jalalabad. Three women who worked for an Afghan television station have been shot dead in the eastern city of Jalalabad, the latest in a string of targeted assassinations that are increasingly overshadowing US-brokered attempts to negotiate an end to the country’s civil war.Zalmai Latifi, the director at Enikass TV, said the women worked in the station’s dubbing department and were killed in two separate attacks. “They are all dead. Read more HERE.
A flare-up in an oxygen pipe sparked a fatal blaze. One person has been killed and another wounded after an oxygen explosion in a ward treating patients for coronavirus in a hospital in western Ukraine.The blast occurred on the second floor of the Chernivtsi hospital at around lunchtime on Saturday, Ukraine’s emergency service said.The aftermath of the fire that raged through a hospital ward
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The domination of global medicine by major pharmaceutical companies needs to be confronted to provide fairer access to vaccines, a leading South African official has said.The scramble over Covid vaccines should alert rich countries to the power of profit-driven companies that control production of crucial medicines, 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 [waiting],” said De Gama, who called on nations where many of these pharmaceutical firms are based to stop blocking a patent waiver proposed at the WTO. Read more HERE
Indigenous communities in some of the world’s most forested tropical countries have faced a wave of human rights abuses during the Covid-19 pandemic as governments prioritise extractive industries in economic recovery plans, according to a new report.
New mines, infrastructure projects and agricultural plantations in Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Indonesia and Peru are driving land grabs and violence against indigenous peoples as governments seek to revive economies hit by the pandemic, research by the NGO Forest Peoples Programme has found. Read more HERE