The roll-out of COVID vaccines gives much-needed hope. But without fundamental reform of the drug industry, inequality and mistrust will cost lives both nationally and globally.
A woman getting vaccinated at a drive-through Covid-19 vaccination centre in Manchester |Peter Byrne/PA Wire/PA Images
9 January 2021 (openDemocracy)* — If there’s one thing keeping us going through this dark and difficult January, it is surely this: the end is in sight, a vaccine is here. While many of us in Britain are in a state of deep despair at the incompetence of our government, the speed and ingenuity of those who have researched and developed the vaccines is something to applaud.
7 January 2021 (IWGIA)* — Human rights violations have escalated in Asia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Indigenous Peoples are disproportionately affected, putting the structural inequalities and discrimination that Indigenous Peoples face into sharper focus as they are met by multiple threats simultaneously.
Governments in Asia are passing legislation for controversial development projects on the basis of the need for economic recovery, meaning that Indigenous communities witness their land being overtaken by development activities to an exacerbating degree.
FAO Food Price Index reached a three-year high over all of 2020
Robiola cheese in Italy.
Rome (FAO)* – World food prices rose for the seventh consecutive month in December, led by dairy products and vegetable oils, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on 7 January 2021 reported.
The FAO Food Price Index averaged 107.5 points in December, 2.2 percent higher than in November. Over the whole of 2020, the benchmark index, which tracks monthly changes in the international prices of commonly-traded food commodities, averaged 97.9 points, a three-year high and a 3.1 percent increase from 2019 although still more than 25 percent below its historical 2011 peak.
7 January 2021 (openDemocracy)* — Filipino healthcare workers have found themselves thrust to the frontlines of the pandemic to care for the most vulnerable across the globe. The Philippines is one of the world’s leading labour-sending countries, facilitating the migration of an estimated 2.2 million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) during the period April to September 2019.
7 January 2021 (Wall Street International)* — By mid-February 2021, American deaths from Covid-19 may well surpass the country’s 405,400 deaths during the Second World War.
By around mid-May, more Americans will have died from Covid-19 than during the Civil War, which killed 655,000, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, when 675,000 are estimated to have perished.
Meanwhile,” the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the already dire humanitarian and socio-economic situation” Secretary-General António Guterres said at a meeting online last November, marking the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
Patients arrive at a health centre in Gaza. Credit: UNRWA
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 7 2021 (IPS)* – If the coronavirus is not deemed a biological weapon, is the heavily-publicized Covid-19 vaccine in danger of being weaponized when over 159,000 Palestinians who have tested positive in Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) are being denied treatment during a deadly pandemic?
The London-based human rights organization Amnesty International (AI) says Israel’s vaccine roll-out plan excludes the nearly 5 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli military occupation.
As a child, she received emergency nutritional support from the World Food Programme where she is now a monitor helping Burundian refugees
Liberee Kayumba’s traumatic experience during the genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda inspired her to make a difference in the lives of others. Photo: WFP/Jonathan Eng
Liberee Kayumba, a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, has seen the horrors of war first-hand. She was only 12 years old when she lost her parents and brothers in the genocide – a trauma that was further compounded by the immediate risk of starvation.
6 January 2021 (WMO)* — The record-breaking 2020 Antarctic ozone hole finally closed at the end of December after an exceptional season due to naturally occurring meteorological conditions and the continued presence of ozone depleting substances in the atmosphere.
5 January 2021 (Wall Street International)* — Here are some quotations from a December 2, 2020 article by Justin Rowlatt entitled Humans waging suicidal war on nature – UN chief Antonio Guterres:
Humanity is waging what he describes as a suicidal war on the natural world.
Nature always strikes back, and is doing so with gathering force and fury, he told a BBC special event on the environment.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 