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Vaccine bandits: A black market for vaccines is undermining Kenya’s vaccination campaign, just weeks before a mandate goes into effect. Corrupt officials are diverting vaccines, falsifying records, and smuggling vials (to mostly remote areas) for $30 to $50 each. These vaccine bandits create significant health concerns: the doses are often transported without adequate refrigeration, they risk contamination, and they aren’t being administered by healthcare professionals with proper sanitation or precautions. The Kenyan government offers doses for free to its citizens, but...
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South Africans are furious over re-imposed travel bans after the Omicron variant was detected in South Africa on 24 November. The UK was the first country to announce a red list of countries that citizens were prohibited from travelling to. This list includes South Africa and Botswana – the two African countries with the first confirmed cases of Omicron infections – as well as Angola, Namibia, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The US, EU countries, Canada, UAE, Australia, and...
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Omicron rising: Health officials in South Africa announced Wednesday that the Omicron variant has become the most prevalent version of COVID-19 in the country. The number of cases doubled from Tuesday, and test positivity climbed from 10.2% to 16.5%. In Gauteng province, early analyses suggest that COVID-19 cases and test positivity are increasing faster than in previous waves. While hospitalizations in the country are also rising, it’s too soon to draw conclusions about Omicron’s transmissibility and lethality, and officials are urging caution. On Wednesday,...
Earlier this month, seven ONE Champions and one ONE staff member attended the YouLead Africa Summit in Arusha, Tanzania, where they discussed the future of the continent and the importance of youth representation.
The YouLead Summit is an annual forum of young leaders, mentors, government policymakers, civil society, and other partners from all over Africa to craft responses to the continent’s rapidly growing youth population, their challenges, and opportunities.
Happening since 2017, the forum is the highlight event to the Youth...
Two decades ago, HIV/AIDS infections were doubling each year and almost 4,000 people died daily from the virus.
Since then, the global response has come a long way and serves as a model of how to address a public health crisis. AIDS-related deaths have dropped by more than half since their peak in the early 2000s. And now, 27.5 million people have access to life-saving treatments.
But COVID-19 has severely impacted a lot of that progress, as the world battles twin...
Cases of sexual violence against women are increasing in Ethiopia, as the conflict between the rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed continues. Seventy women in Nifas Mewcha in the Amhara region reported being raped by TPLF fighters during a nine-day period in August when the armed group took control of the town, according to an Amnesty International report. Many of the women said they experienced physical and mental health problems after the...
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Surge campaign: Nigeria plans to administer more than 1 million vaccines a day, starting this Friday. The surge is intended to vaccinate half of its target population, or 55 million people, by the end of January. Just 1.5% of Nigerians are fully vaccinated. The government says it has enough vaccines in the pipeline to hit this mark, as well as plans to scale up vaccination sites. But success is far from assured. Nigeria’s political and economic troubles risk...
In 2020, the world became familiar with adjusting to change, and today the world has risen to the challenge of fighting the pandemic through science, communication, music, and, now the arts. We know that coming together in solidarity is essential to ending the COVID-19 pandemic. No one is safe until everyone is safe, and in order to ensure that, every member of the global community must come together to fight this global health crisis. That’s why we launched our...
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Dose deployment: Johnson & Johnson will make its vaccines available for NGOs to deploy in conflict settings, waiving liability restrictions that have previously prevented nongovernmental actors from administering them. The US government will also donate an additional 1.5 million J&J doses to people in conflict settings. Significant hurdles remain in actually deploying vaccines in conflict zones, including security risks for humanitarian workers and establishing networks to share inoculation site information.
Ignoble Prize: Diplomats are desperately trying to avert an all-out civil war in Ethiopia. At least 16...
COVID-19 vaccine inequity is set to worsen unless urgent measures are taken to accelerate vaccine production and distribution globally. Most low- and middle-income countries failed to achieve the WHO target of vaccinating at least 10% of their populations by the end of September. Only 15 African countries met the WHO target, with huge variations among this group. For example, 72% of the population in the Seychelles has been vaccinated, compared to just 13% in Rwanda.
Rich countries, on the other hand,...