Day: February 10, 2022

French researcher Luc Montagnier, who won a Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering HIV and more recently spread false claims about the coronavirus, has died at age 89, local government officials in France said.

Montagnier died Tuesday at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a western suburb of the capital, the area’s city hall said. No other details were released.

Montagnier, a virologist, led the team that in 1983 identified the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, leading him to share the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine with colleague Francoise Barré-Sinoussi.

The French minister for higher education and research, Frédérique Vidal, praised Montagnier’s work on HIV in a written statement Thursday and expressed her condolences to his family.

Inspired by discoveries

Montagnier was born in 1932 in the village of Chabris in central France.

According to his autobiography on the Nobel Prize website, Montagnier studied medicine in Poitiers and Paris. He said recent scientific discoveries in 1957 inspired him to become a virologist in the rapidly advancing field of molecular biology.

He joined the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1960 and became head of the Pasteur Institute’s virology department in 1972.

“My involvement in AIDS began in 1982, when the information circulated that a transmissible agent — possibly a virus — could be at the origin of this new, mysterious disease,” Montagnier said in his autobiography.

In 1983, a working group led by him and Barré-Sinoussi at the Pasteur Institute isolated the virus that would later become known as HIV and was able to explain how it caused AIDS.

American scientist Robert Gallo claimed to have found the same virus at almost exactly the same time, sparking a disagreement over who should get the credit. The United States and France settled a dispute over the patent for an AIDS test in 1987. Montagnier was later credited as the discoverer of the virus, Gallo as the creator of the first test.

Shunned for recent views

Since the end of the 2000s, Montagnier started expressing views devoid of a scientific basis. His opinions led him to be shunned by much of the international scientific community.

As COVID-19 spread across the globe and conspiracy theories flourished, Montagnier was among those behind some of the misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus.

During a 2020 interview with French news broadcaster CNews, he claimed that the coronavirus did not originate in nature and had been manipulated. Experts who have looked at the genome sequence of the virus have said Montagnier’s statement was incorrect.

At the time, AP made multiple unsuccessful attempts to contact Montagnier.

Last year, he claimed in a French documentary that COVID-19 vaccines led to the creation of coronavirus variants.

Experts contacted by The Associated Press explained that variants found across the globe began emerging long before vaccines were widely available. They said the evidence suggests new variants evolved as a result of prolonged viral infections in the population and not vaccines, which are designed to prevent such infections.

Earlier this year, Montagnier delivered a speech at a protest against vaccine certificates in Milan, Italy.

Montagnier was emeritus professor at the Pasteur Institute and emeritus research director at the CNRS. He received multiple awards, including France’s highest decoration, the Legion of Honor.

Source: Voice of America

Legislation has advanced in the U.S. House of Representatives to impose sanctions on Ethiopians committing human rights abuses, blocking food aid delivery, or taking other actions that are worsening the country’s 15-month crisis. It would also sanction those providing training, weapons, or financial support to those involved in the conflict.

The proposed Ethiopian Stabilization, Peace and Democracy Act was voted out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday. It can now be voted on by the full U.S. House. A similar bill is being considered in the Senate.

If enacted, the bill would sanction individuals as well as suspend U.S. security and financial assistance to the Ethiopian government until certain human rights conditions are met. It would also require the U.S. to oppose loans by international agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Congressman Tom Malinowski, a Democrat from New Jersey who co-sponsored the bill, said urgent action is needed.

“The war in Ethiopia has created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, and all the combatants, along with their foreign backers, are responsible for horrific abuses of basic human rights,” he said.

“Today, Congress is coming together to say that the conflict must end, and to hold accountable all those responsible for perpetuating it.”

The bill follows September sanctions and the November decision to suspend Ethiopia from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which allows African countries’ exports duty-free access to the U.S. market.

One of the issues of ongoing concern to Congress is also the mass detention of Tigrayan civilians in several cities across Ethiopia, including the capital, Addis Ababa. Rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, say ethnic Tigrayans have been targeted since the start of the conflict in November 2020, citing reports of forced disappearances and arbitrary arrests among other human rights violations.

“The mass detention of Tigrayan civilians in unlivable conditions is a human rights violation so outrageous that it demands a forceful U.S. response,” tweeted Congressman Brad Sherman of California, calling for action on what he called an atrocity.

The bill calls on the State Department to determine whether war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide has been perpetrated by any party to the conflict. It also asks State to report on the role of foreign governments including those of China, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey in fueling the conflict.

The bill has drawn condemnation from the Ethiopian government and supporters in the global diaspora.

The American-Ethiopian Public Affairs Committee, a nonprofit diaspora organization that has supported the government during this conflict put the blame squarely on the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, which the government has designated a terrorist group, and armed forces in Tigray.

“This bill ignores the millions in Amhara and Afar … who were victims of the TPLF’s attacks,” the AEPAC said in a tweet.

The group further criticized the impact it would have on ordinary Ethiopians. “It will do nothing to repair the lives of those who have been left without loved ones or who have suffered serious injuries.”

Others in the Tigrayan diaspora have, however, supported the bill and previous U.S. sanctions on Ethiopian and Eritrean officials, including Omna Tigray, a nonprofit group consisting of Tigrayans residing in the diaspora who see the move as a way to protect the lives of civilians caught in the conflict.

Other analysts point to the effectiveness of earlier sanctions. Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that “the praiseworthy design of the sanctions regime avoids typical pitfalls.” She said that implemented sanctions are meant to give “legal exceptions for humanitarian relief delivery.”

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has emphasized the goal of targeted sanctions is to ensure perpetrators are held to account.

“These sanctions authorities are not directed at the people of Ethiopia or Eritrea,” a White House official said in September during a call with reporters. “The new sanctions program is deliberately calibrated to mitigate any undue harm to those already suffering from this conflict.”

The United Nations has said thousands have been displaced by conflict in the country, and more than 60,000 Ethiopians, mostly from the Tigray region, are seeking refuge in neighboring Sudan. The U.N. estimates that about 9.4 million people in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray, Amhara, and Afar regions are in dire need of humanitarian assistance.

Source: Voice of America

Facing growing pressure from impatient state governors, the Biden administration acknowledged for the first time that it is developing plans to guide the country away from the pandemic’s emergency phase toward a more relaxed national response, including ending the federal recommendation for wearing masks in most indoor settings.

“We are internally discussing, of course, what it looks like to be in the phase of the fight against the COVID pandemic where it is not disrupting everyone’s daily lives,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Wednesday. “We recognize people are tired of the pandemic. They’re tired of wearing masks.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) currently recommends “universal indoor masking,” including in businesses and schools, “regardless of vaccination status and regardless of what states require.”

While some states follow the CDC guidance, pandemic health protocols have always varied by state with different requirements for masks, vaccines and testing.

Now more states are relaxing coronavirus health protocols, including New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Rhode Island and Washington. The rule changes, implemented by both Republican and Democratic governors, include lifting indoor mask requirements in certain settings, such as schools and businesses, as well as rescinding vaccine mandates.

Psaki insisted that while administration officials understand the need to be flexible, they are following the advice of medical experts who rely on scientific evidence.

“That doesn’t move at the speed of politics; it moves at the speed of data,” she said.

The CDC said it is working on new guidance.

“We are working on following the trends for the moment,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Wednesday.

Democrats joining Republicans

In the first two years of the pandemic, Democrats were more in favor of strict public health restrictions while Republicans largely rejected them.

But now, with vaccination rates higher than 70% in some states and polls showing public pandemic fatigue, Democratic governors and state officials are also relaxing measures to avoid a backlash.

“Public health is made up of two words. The health part we focus on a lot of science and the data, but we need to understand the public part as well,” Dr. Anand Parekh, chief medical adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said to VOA.

Over the past week, an average of more than 227,000 new coronavirus cases has been reported each day in the United States, a decrease of 63% from the national pandemic peak of more than 806,000 cases in mid-January, according to data tracked by The New York Times. Hospitalizations are also declining significantly across the country.

“For the next few weeks, we should see a decrease in epidemic activity. All of the indicators seem to go down,” Alessandro Vespignani said to VOA. Vespignani is the director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University and leads a team of infectious-disease modelers who have been developing COVID-19 projections since the pandemic began.

Governors are seeing this trend, recognizing that their citizens are weary, and in the absence of CDC guidance, taking steps to relax restrictions.

“The CDC and the administration are trying to play catch-up to that reality,” Parekh said, underscoring that the federal response must focus not only on the moment but what it would look like a month from now.

“We see time and time again, federal agencies being late. We saw that with respect to omicron and testing just a couple of months ago,” he said.

Many public health experts are still advising caution.

The downward trend needs to be sustained over a period of several weeks and reduced even further before the nation can transition from pandemic to endemic response, said Dr. William Schaffner, professor of medicine in the Infectious Diseases Division at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

“Endemic is where we kind of have a truce with the virus,” Schaffner said, and the strain on the health care system will be “substantially diminished.”

“At the moment I stand with the CDC,” Schaffner told VOA. “Let’s keep wearing our masks. Let’s allow the cases to really come down. Let’s do this for another month or two, to be absolutely sure, not only that we’re heading down but that we’ll stay down.”

Vespignani added, “We could see bumps in the road due to omicron-2, a mutated version of the omicron variant that has begun to circulate in some places.”

He said the easing of mitigations should be done in a way that makes sure we keep facilitating the quick decreasing trends in infections.

“It is more and more important to increase the number of vaccinated and boosted individuals,” he said. “This is the wall that we want to be as high as possible to protect us in case of any future wave of the pandemic.”

A recent Monmouth University poll found that 70% of Americans surveyed agree with the sentiment that “it’s time we accept that COVID is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives.”

“Americans’ worries about COVID haven’t gone away. It seems more to be a realization that we are not going to get this virus under control in a way that we thought was possible just last year,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Just 52% supported face mask and distancing guidelines in their home state, down from a peak of 63% last September during the delta variant surge, the Monmouth poll found.

Countries changing restrictions

Some other countries are making similar moves. Spain and Italy – two European countries with high vaccination rates, declining infection numbers and lower hospitalization figures, are loosening measures this week to coexist with the coronavirus.

England, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and several Nordic countries, including Denmark and Sweden, have also taken steps to end or relax their restrictions.

China, meanwhile, is maintaining its most stringent protocols. During the Winter Olympics, Beijing is keeping its “zero-COVID” policy of testing, mass lockdowns and strict social restrictions as authorities worry about the ability of the Chinese health care system to cope and adapt to new strains.

Besides China, India, Canada, Germany, Angola and Indonesia are some of the countries with the strictest government COVID policies, according to the Government Stringency Index put together by researchers at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford.

Nine metrics are used to calculate this index – school closures, workplace closures, cancellation of public events, restrictions on public gatherings, closures of public transport, stay-at-home requirements, public information campaigns, restrictions on internal movements and international travel controls.

While some European leaders have said that COVID-19 should be treated as an endemic, like influenza, the World Health Organization says that’s premature.

“We are now starting to see a very worrying increase in deaths, in most regions of the world,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in remarks to media earlier this month.

“It’s premature for any country either to surrender, or to declare victory,” he said.

American public health experts said the debate in the U.S. to lift restrictions must take into account the steps being taken to prevent new variants.

“Only 10% of people in low-income countries around the world have been vaccinated,” Parekh said. “Until we can vaccinate the rest of the world, the threat of variants and the threat to the United States will still be there.”

Vanderbilt’s Schaffner said helping countries vaccinate their population is necessary not only for humanitarian reasons, but also self-interest.

“Those variants can come from abroad and be here in no time,” he said.

The U.S. remains the largest donor of vaccines. At least 414 million doses of vaccines have been shipped, about 34% of the 1.3 billion doses pledged by the administration.

Source: Voice of America