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Biden administration increased stimulus distributions as well as payments to help families buy food
Washington:
New US President Joe Biden on Friday ordered more aid to Americans struggling to cope with the pandemic in the world’s worst-hit country, as international deals made it possible to get cheaper tests and vaccines for millions of people in less wealthy countries.
The Biden administration has increased stimulus aid as well as payments to help families buy food as a growing number of poor American children go hungry because they previously relied on meals in schools – now closed due to Covid-19.
“The American people cannot afford to wait,” said Brian Deese of the White House National Economic Council, adding that many people “were hanging by a thread.”
Around the world, there have been new signs of the scale of the damage inflicted on the economy, with the closely watched PMI index showing that Europe is heading into another recession and Latin America is suffering its biggest drop in foreign trade since the global financial crisis.
– Hungarian rebellion –
As vaccine deployments accelerate around the world, Hungary has announced that it is going it alone and is buying two million doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, frustrated by the European Union’s heavy-handed strategy of buying injections in bulk on behalf of members.
“It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches the mouse,” Orban said of the different vaccines, despite some experts’ suspicion that Sputnik V was deployed before large clinical trials. ladder. .
Brazil was meanwhile to receive two million doses of vaccine from another vaccine developed by the British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly warned that richer countries monopolize the vaccine.
But there was good news on Friday for poorer countries, as the WHO and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced an agreement for up to 40 million initial doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to be made available to them via the global Covax pool.
“We can only end the pandemic anywhere if we end it everywhere,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
A separate deal, negotiated by international agencies working with the WHO, will provide developing countries with tens of millions of rapid antigen tests at half the usual price of $ 5.
– Imams support vaccination campaigns –
In Britain, imams were using their Friday sermons to reassure worshipers that coronavirus vaccines are safe, using their influence in Muslim communities to support the vaccination campaign.
“The reluctance, worry (and) worry is driven by disinformation, conspiracy theories, fake news and rumors,” said Qari Asim, chairman of the National Advisory Council of Mosques and Imams of Grande. -Brittany.
The imams campaign comes as Britain struggles to coerce a new strain of Covid-19 that the government warned on Friday is not only more contagious, but potentially more deadly.
Chief government scientist Patrick Vallance said the strain could be 30 to 40% more deadly for certain age groups, although he stressed the assessment was based on scarce data.
The British strain, along with variants first detected in South Africa and Brazil, are fueling a tightening of travel restrictions, with Belgium banning non-essential travel out of the country.
Denmark, meanwhile, has banned all flights from the UAE, saying it needs to make sure the testing regime in Dubai is stringent enough.
– Rio Carnival canceled –
And from music to sports, organizers of large-scale events are grappling with the continued fallout from Covid-19, with the famous Rio de Janeiro carnival being canceled this year.
Real Madrid manager Zinedine Zidane has become the latest sports star to test positive, while former tennis world number one Andy Murray has announced he will not compete in the Australian Open after having failed to find a “viable quarantine” after his own recovery from the virus.
In Japan, the organizers of the Tokyo Olympics – already postponed from 2020 – face almost daily questions about whether the Games can really take place in July.
The Japanese government, however, insisted that there was “no truth” in a media report that said “the consensus is that it is too difficult” to host the Games in 2021.
– Techno music, unmasked –
But at the Super Monkey nightclub in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where Covid-19 first appeared in 2019, concerns about the virus were far away for crowds of late-night revelers.
After passing a temperature check at the door, they were welcomed inside, where there were glow-in-the-dark bunny ears, thrilling techno beats, champagne on ice, and a flexible attitude towards masks.
“I was stuck inside for two or three months,” a man in his 30s who gave Xu his name told AFP. “Now I can go out in peace.”
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
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