2023: Age and certificate forger Bola Tinubu says he is the 'quality' Nigeria is looking for

CC™ Politico News

All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential aspirant, Bola Tinubu, has disclosed that if given the support to become Nigeria’s president, he will unite the country’s different ethnic groups.

Speaking at Ataoja’s palace in Osogbo of Friday, as part of his consultation tour of the country, he said Nigeria needs a man that can harness the nation’s diversity for prosperity.

The former Lagos State Governor said managing resources is his specialty, adding that the urge to serve made him apply for nation’s presidency and will not let Nigerians down.

He adds, “I am the quality Nigeria is looking for to make the country a very great, prosperous and united, not only in Africa but worldwide.

“Having reviewed the Constitution, I ask myself who is better than me, this prompted me to come out, consult, and be ready to serve the country.

“I have been going round the country, I offer myself the opportunity to become the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. I have informed Buhari of this, I told him that I want to step in his shoe and not break a toe. I told him that I want to serve my country to the best of my ability”.

Tinubu added that he will rejig Nigeria such that quality education and job opportunities would be available for Nigerians irrespective of their ethnic nationalities or religion.

“We need a lot of jobs, solid education for our children, we need progress for our country.

“We want somebody that can bring that… what we have in our old national anthem that “Though tribe and tongues may differ, in brotherhood we stand”.

“We must be solid in that belief. We must know that it is the same blood that is running in our veins irrespective of tribe and faith.

“We must have a good attitude for progress and prosperity.

“You must find courage, determination, perseverance, you must find that fellow who will love you, respect you and prioritize national development,” he said.

Speaking on his ability to deliver, Tinubu said, “I am not applying for the job of grave digging, race running, or horse riding. I am not applying for a job of bricklaying.

“I went to school to study accountancy and management. I am applying for a job that demands using my brain, intelligent thinking. I am ready to do things right.

“The job I want to do for Nigeria is for the country to be greater and be proud of our sons and daughter. We want to leave a legacy of unlimited success”.

Responding, Ataoja of Osogbo, Oba Jimoh Olaonipekun said having seen that Tinubu is outstandingly fit, stressed the need for Yoruba nations to stand by him for quality service delivery.

“I have personally seen that you are fit to run the country contrary to insinuation peddled around, you are good product for Nigeria’s prosperity and your vision to rule Nigeria shall come to pass.

“You have nurtured quality men, you gave us one in Osun in 2018 and I know you will not let Nigerians down. Osogbo is with you on this project”, he said.

Panic in Russia as NATO deploys troops; West imposes ‘severe’ sanctions

CC™ Global News

NATO shifted some of its troops on Friday in order to be able to respond swiftly if needed, as Russian attacks on Ukraine continued unrelentingly and Western countries and alliances imposed tougher sanctions on Moscow.

NATO is deploying units of the rapid reaction NATO Response Force (NRF) on land, at sea, and in the air to respond quickly to any contingency, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said, as Russian continued its attack on Ukraine.

He did not initially state where the troops would be deployed, in comments that followed a video conference with NATO leaders, but sources learned that ground troops could be sent to Romania.

Meanwhile, NRF units are due to head to Norway, for an exercise, in the first deployment of parts of the NRF in the course of deterrence and defense of the alliance area, Stoltenberg said.

The NATO members said the measures were “preventive, proportionate, and non-escalatory” in a statement.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the emergency summit that the eastern members of the alliance needed more troops following Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

As he spoke, the first British soldiers and trucks carrying additional equipment reached Estonia to reinforce the NATO battalion there.

A convoy with six battle tanks and other military vehicles reached the Tapa military base, the Estonian army said.

London is set to send 850 soldiers and equipment to Estonia, roughly doubling the British contingent there.

Other NATO members also announced new deployments to strengthen the Western military alliance.

Italy said it was making around 3,400 additional soldiers available on the alliance’s eastern flank, while Denmark announced it was ready to contribute 20 more F-16 fighter jets to help secure NATO airspace.

Also on Friday, Russia banned British aircraft from using its airspace, in a tit-for-tat response a day after London barred Russia’s Aeroflot airline from flying to Britain.

Poland and the Czech Republic followed up later by saying they would also close airspace to Russian planes.

Friday also saw Western countries impose tougher sanctions amid Moscow’s unrelenting attacks.

Washington was the latest to announce sanctions targeting Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, on Friday after penalties imposed on the two earlier by Britain and the European Union in response to Moscow’s invasion.

Russia responded by criticizing the sanctions on Putin and Lavrov, slamming these as a sign of weak foreign policy.

In further efforts to cease hostilities, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) formally ended Russia’s accession negotiations, it said in a statement.

The organization said it would continue to reconsider its co-operation with Russia in the days and weeks ahead, while also weighing how to better support the Ukrainian government.

The move came after the 47-country Council of Europe, Europe’s human rights watchdog, suspended Russia with immediate effect.

Individual countries also adopted their own measures, with the Spanish government withdrawing the country’s ambassador to Ukraine.

The pro-Russian president of Serbia, Alexander Vucic, has been critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“We consider it a grave mistake to violate the territorial integrity of a country like Ukraine,” Vucic said in Belgrade on Friday evening.

At the same time, he said that his country would not be imposing sanctions on Moscow.

Ambassador Silvia Cortés will be taken to Poland in a convoy of vehicles together with around 100 other Spanish citizens, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares told Spanish media on Friday.

The invasion has opened the eyes of many EU states, according to Latvia’s prime minister Krisjanis Karins, who said a period of naivety had come to an end, in comments to Latvian news agency Leta.

“Many European countries have lived under the illusion that everything can be negotiated if they find the right words to say to Putin and if they are patient,” Karins said, referring to the Baltic states’ long-standing admonitions to its EU and NATO partners.

But with a “brutal war” unfolding in Ukraine, Karins said, the same countries now understand that these were only empty hopes.

“For a long time, the world did not want to accept the obvious. Now everything has changed.

“Putin has lost all trust and support within the democratic world,” Karins said.

At the close of the day, U.S. President Joe Biden reiterated Washington’s support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“I commended the brave actions of the Ukrainian people who were fighting to defend their country,” Biden said in a statement following their call.

“I also conveyed ongoing economic, humanitarian, and security support being provided by the United States as well as our continued efforts to rally other countries to provide similar assistance,” U.S. President Joe Biden assured Zelensky.

Washington also dismissed Russian offers of talks with Ukraine.

“Diplomacy by the barrel of a gun, coercive diplomacy, is not something that we are going to take part in,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said, adding this would not aid peace efforts in a real, genuine and sustainable way.

Diplomacy cannot succeed in a context where “you rain down bombs, mortar shells” and “your tanks advance towards a capital of 2.9 million people,” he said.

Meanwhile, people worldwide took to the streets to show their solidarity with Ukraine.

Buildings and monuments were lit up in the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag, including starting Friday evening the Eiffel Tower.

In Germany, rallies were announced for the weekend in cities including Berlin.

In Stockholm, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg showed her support during Friday’s climate protest.

Along with others, the 19-year-old stood in front of the Russian embassy.

She held a small sign in the blue and yellow national colors with the inscription “Stand with Ukraine” in her hand.

2023: Nigerians in Diaspora mobilise against career politicians

CC™ Politico News

By Clifford Ndujihe

To halt what they deemed the downward slide of Nigeria into socio-economic and development abyss, some Nigerians in the Diaspora have vowed to ensure that a career politician did not succeed President Muhammadu Buhari in 2023.

According to them, it is time for career politicians to take a back seat, and entrepreneurs must be supported to take over in the new era of “politics of the unusual.”

Meeting on the banner of Nigerian Patriotic Quest, NPQ, the concerned Nigerians across the world took the decision at a physical/online meeting held in Washington DC, United States of America on February 18.

In a communique by their Coordinator, Mr. Ahmed Ja’Usman Tijani, they said their desire is to “change the negative trajectory of Nigeria’s politics. There could be no better time to address these issues than now, as the nation gradually enters another season of politicking and horse-trading for the 2023 elections.

“The 247 participants at this inaugural meeting were drawn from various advocacy groups across the united states, the UK, Continental Europe, and Nigeria.

The participants were fervent in their conviction that Nigeria can no longer afford to continue on the path of political decadence that have blighted the promises of this nation in the past decades.

“The participants, also unanimously declared, that as stakeholders in the destiny of this nation they can no longer stand aloof, while some unsavoury characters continue to decimate and destroy the glory and prospects of this nation.

“A number of participants in diaspora stated that they were forced to flee Nigeria because of the inanities and destructive politics which have brutally dimmed the potentials of both Nigeria and Nigerians.

“We believe that working together, with all Nigerians, we can begin the arduous, but not insurmountable task of pulling this nation back from the path of self-destruction. There is no more time, this task must start with the forthcoming general elections in 2023.”

Going forward, they noted that leadership failure caused by the stranglehold on the reins of power by the old class of career politicians was the reason for Nigeria’s stunted growth.

“This set of leaders have failed to use the instruments of power to build the nation, but are only interested in acquiring power for the sake of power. This has been the bane of Nigeria and it is disheartening that such characters are already parading the national space, with the intention of attaining power at various levels come 2023 in order to continue their destructive politics of self-aggrandizement.

“Nigeria cannot afford to tow this path again. It is time for a new leadership to emerge. Until we retire the career politicians, who have created and used ethnic and religious divisions to attain and perpetuate themselves in power we will continue to wallow in poverty and underdevelopment.”

Consequently, they said: “it is time to build a new vanguard of leadership which is totally anchored on competence and track record of verifiable achievements.

“It was agreed generally, that in this nation they are personalities that have created massive values through dint of hard work, managerial acumen, and unbridled spirit of entrepreneurship.

“These men who have created something out of nothing deserve to be pushed forward at this time in order to rescue Nigeria from the edge of the precipice. “

AGENCY

Sheikh Gumi: President Buhari’s Ally In Funding Terrorism

CC™ Opinion Piece

The actions of self-appointed terror mediator, Sheikh Gumi has further exposed President Muhammadu Buhari and his Government as terror lovers. The tacit endorsement of the activities of terrorists in the country by the current Government and its key players is no longer news. No Government in the history of Nigeria has given moral, financial, and religious support to the terrorists like Buhari’s Government. Nigerians have repeatedly seen Buhari agree to the demands of terrorists. As envisioned, his intimate relationship with terrorists has further weakened his government and weakened the country’s democratic values making the war against terrorism almost ‘unwinnable’.

Sheikh Ahmad Abubakar Gumi as many Nigerians know is an Islamic cleric, scholar, and current chief judge of the Shariah Court of Appeal in Northern Nigeria. He is as well the current mufti and mufassir at the Kaduna central mosque Sultan Bello. How he silently transfigured himself to assume the scary position of Terrorism Liaison Officer (TLO) for bandits in Nigeria has left many lovers of peace in Nigeria into acute depression.

When he assumed the self-appointed position, many Nigerians appeared unconcerned not until his provocative statements in support of the terrorists who Government for obvious reasons prefer to call ‘bandits’ began to make headlines. To hoodwink innocent Nigerians, Gumi roams around as a peacemaker and flies the flag of a mediator yet at every turn, Gumi takes any available opportunity to put in a word for the terrorists, heaping the blame for their criminal ways on everyone but the deadly terrorists.

Many Nigerians would recall how Sheik Gumi, who rose to the rank of a captain as a doctor in the medical corps of the Nigerian Army, had a few months back accused Christians in the military’s counter-insurgency/banditry campaign of being responsible for the killing of bandits. A careful perusal of the remark would show that the aim was clear; to set off a sectarian war in the military, connecting the dots would simply show why Buhari refused to visit the Nigerian Defense Academy (NDA) in the aftermath of the attack in Kaduna, yes, many Nigerians do not know that only Christians were targeted and killed by the bandits in arguably the most secured vicinity in the country. To put it in terse terms, Buhari’s government is Gumi’s biggest ally.

How can Buhari pay blind eyes to the fact that over the last two years, Gumi has been very vociferous in his defense of the terrorists’ in bandits uniforms? Can he? In attacks on schools, Gumi has always made it a point of duty to hold the students culpable for the crime committed against them by the army of outlaws that have now overtaken the North. Gumi goes on the media to offer a rather romantic and generally sympathetic account and justification of the activities of the criminals. Gumi has successfully spun the narrative to paint bandits as victims and not as criminals. How can all this happen in a country that has laws if not for the common mission he shares with the Government of the day? By merely listening to Gumi, these beastly terrorists who have murdered hundreds of Nigerians in cold blood and received ransoms running into hundreds of millions of naira from both the State and traumatized relations of kidnap victims could be mistaken for evangelists yet, Buhari and his Government have continued to look the other way.

Gumi’s role as a bandit sympathizer has continued to endanger the collective security of Nigerians, upending the security setup in ways that should be repugnant to all supporters of order and justice, this can only happen with the active connivance with State actors, Buhari who is constitutionally mandated to protect Nigerians sees absolutely nothing wrong in the deliberate symbiotic relationship of Gumi and the deadly terrorist organizations wrecking mayhem in Nigeria. Gumi himself has severally and openly confessed that highly placed people in the Buhari Government are fully aware of his engagements with terrorists. Gumi as a matter of fact even gets State protection at will. This is the sad reality facing Nigerians.

Sometime early this year, when Gumi took what looked like an extremely dangerous journey to the forest to meet the terrorists, his justification was that the entire process needed an impartial arbiter, not the State who he claimed that had serially violated previous agreements with the terrorists. A curious thinker may wonder what kind of agreements this was, however, it shouldn’t be surprising to know that these were generous offers of appeasement money that were directed at getting the terrorists to drop their arms. So which government was Gumi referring to if not Buhari and his cohorts? In fact, take away the agreements which the government of the day has continued to downplay, those comments by Gumi were both a cheap surrender and admission of State failure.

Gumi and his likes are the reason why Buhari has continued to capture and release terrorists under the guise that they are now ‘repented’ ignoring the fact many of the terrorists rehabilitated under these arrangements returned to the forests before or as soon as they had exhausted their monetary largesse or as soon as they got tired of the charade. Many Nigerians do not know that the move which started as a peaceful approach to getting the terror under control was actually a big-time money-making business for the terrorists and some of those employed to check them in the security units. No wonder Gumi had to even openly advocate that agency or ministry be created for bandits using billions of taxpayers’ money.

More disgustful is the fact that Gumi has even gone as far as comparing the terrorists, who he claims lack a voice, to coup plotters while demanding State pardons for them. This is the sad rhetoric of appeasement, Gumi now tries to propagate. The terror-loving Islamic Sheikh has even gone on to describe the devastating onslaught of the terrorists on farming communities and the attendant conflict as ethnic wars. More worrisome is the fact that in his desperate appeasement game, Gumi, a few months ago made the outstanding claim that the northern terrorists learned their art from Niger-Delta militants. Just as he demanded that an amnesty programme in the manner of the one President Umar Yar'Adua emplaced for Niger-Delta militias should be instituted for the terror-bandits of the north. What manner of man is this terrorist? What are bandits fighting for? What does Gumi want?

What has Gumi not asked on behalf of his so-called beloved voiceless bandits? Just like many northern advocates as well as elements in the Buhari government, he has demanded that Bandits be recruited into the military or assigned the task of guarding the forests against terrorists like themselves! Where would this saccharine love of criminals, end? When would Buhari stop colluding with terrorists and shout enough of the bloodshed? Where was Gumi’s humanity when he urged parents of the abducted Greenfield University students to pay about ₦200 million in addition to procuring motorbikes for the bandits that abducted them in exchange for the return of the remainder of the students that escaped summary execution? He wants them pampered with amnesty and cash. Otherwise more school children would be abducted.

However, there are some things that are certain. Terrorists and terrorism require a structure to operate since money is their jugular vein. Arms, food supply, and logistics are all dependent on funds, as we’ve seen (and read). These terrorists, unbelievably, keep these variables in flux, along with their level of knowledge and strategies for eluding security officials (most times at least). How else could they survive despite billions of naira spent fighting them? They constantly seem to be one step ahead of any apparent progress made by security authorities to eliminate them. Buhari’s culpability is certain. A man that can shield Pantami is capable of doing just anything.

Why has Buhari allowed Gumi the leverage to continue to fan insurrection and disunity? How can a man who has unfettered access to bandits be allowed to threaten the government by saying the govt cannot protect all schools? How can a Government that believes that popular Nollywood actor, Chinwetalu Agu should be in jail on the account of a cloth he was putting on look the other way when Gumi is systematically breeding terrorism? Too many questions indeed, but then, the answer is simple, they are in the same business of propagating terrorism. And yes, Nigerians who have always been perplexed as to why Buhari has refused to designate the bandits as terrorists now have a clue. This is the painful reality.

AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK 

SAMSUNG SMARTPHONES WILL LEAVE ANDROID BEHIND

By Marco Lancaster

According to a recent report, Samsung may be preparing itself for a future where its smartphones will no longer run Android OS. Instead, it will run a new operating system that’s been in development in Google’s laboratories for a few years. If you’ve been following, then you probably know… yes, we’re talking about Fuchsia. Earlier this year, it came to light that Samsung has contributed to Fuchsia’s development. Now, a new report suggests that Samsung may have gone a few steps forward and decided to leave Android behind. The company will work to make Fuchsia its alternative over Android, but that may be still a few years away. 

As reported by the folks at SamMobile, this will not happen from a single night to a new day. The source specifics that it will take a few years before Samsung adopts this new open-source OS from Google. This will probably coincide with other companies as well. In the past, reports have suggested that Fuchsia was announced to become Google’s alternative for Android. For now, it’s too soon to say if Fuchsia OS will come with One UI or another proprietary skin from Samsung. The Open Source nature of the OS means that the Korean firm could easily apply its skin and features over Fuchsia.

The transition is not a mere coincidence. As aforementioned, it’s all a part of Google’s master plan to switch to a new platform. Unlike Android OS, Fuchsia will not use the Linux kernel code but a new code called Zircon. The search giant is developing Fuchsia to run on a wide variety of smart products, from wearables to smartphones, tablets, computers, and IoT. It was already used for the Nest hub as a pilot run.

So, as aforementioned, Samsung may not be the only company leaving Android. If Google makes Fucshia a viable alternative over Android, it will put it on the forefront with its Pixel smartphones,  being shipped with the new OS. As a result, we may see other companies jumping in the boat. Just like Thanos, moving to what Google offers will be inevitable.

One time that Samsung already has some insight of Fucshia’s development, then the company may have a certain advantage over its competitors. The Korean firm will familiarize itself with the new OS early on, and this early start may be a key for the company to keep the leadership in a new era without Android.

It’s interesting to see that Samsung is still going for Google rather than trying to build its own Operating System from scratch. In the past, the company tried to develop Tizen OS for its smartphones, but it proved to be a failure. In fact, companies that tried to ship their own OS didn’t achieve much success.

Source/VIA :

SamMobile

Buhari's Killing Fields: Dozens killed in ‘barbaric, senseless’ violence in Nigeria

CC™ Global News

Nigeria’s presidency says dozens of people have been killed in violence between farmers and herders in the country’s central Nasarawa state.

In a statement released by the office of President Muhammadu Buhari, the government said at least 45 farmers were killed in the violence that erupted between Fulani herders and farmers, with dozens more also reportedly wounded. 

Buhari “expressed grief over the heart-wrenching” killings and said his government would “leave no stone unturned in fishing out the perpetrators of this senseless and barbaric incident, and bring them to justice”.

Local police said the violence broke out when armed Fulani herders attacked villagers from the Tiv ethnic group over the killing of a kinsman that they blamed on Tiv farmers. The unrest continued unabated.

The police initially gave a death toll of eight. Nasarawa state police spokesman Ramhan Nansel earlier said military and police teams had deployed in the area to restore calm and arrest the perpetrators.

“We received a complaint on the killing of a Fulani herdsman but while the investigation was ongoing, a reprisal attack was carried out in Hangara village and neighbouring Kwayero village,” Ramhan Nansel,

“Eight people were killed in the attacks and their bodies were recovered by the police and taken to hospital.”

But Peter Ahemba of the Tiv Development Association said the death toll was higher.

“We recovered more than 20 corpses of our people killed in the attacks in 12 villages across Lafia, Obi and Awe districts where around 5,000 were displaced,” he said, adding that many people were still missing.

Deadly clashes between nomadic cattle herders and local farmers over grazing and water rights are common in central Nigeria.

The internecine conflict has taken on an ethnic and religious dimension in recent years. The Fulani herders are Muslim, and the farmers are primarily Christian.

The friction, which has roots dating back more than a century, was caused by droughts, population growth, the expansion of sedentary farming into communal areas as well as poor governance.

Violence by criminal gangs of cattle thieves among the herders, who raid villages, killing and burning homes after looting them, has compounded the situation.

The Governor of Nasarawa State,  Abdullahi Sule, has promised to go after killers of Fulani herders and Tiv farmers.

“There was needless loss of lives of our citizens. Such act of violence is most unfortunate, condemnable, and unacceptable and will not be condoned by this administration,” he was quoted as saying by the Sahara Reporters news site.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

New Zealand links 26-year-old man's death to Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine

CC™ Health News

New Zealand authorities on Monday said they had linked a 26-year-old man's death to Pfizer Inc's COVID-19 vaccine after the person suffered myocarditis, a rare inflammation of the heart muscle, after taking his first dose. 

  The death is New Zealand's second linked to a known but rare side effect from the vaccine after health authorities in August reported a woman had died after taking her doses. 

  "With the current available information, the board has considered that the myocarditis was probably due to vaccination in this individual," a COVID-19 Vaccine Independent Safety Monitoring Board said in a statement. 

  The man, who died within two weeks of his first dose, had not sought medical advice or treatment for his symptoms. Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle that can limit the organ's ability to pump blood and can cause changes in heartbeat rhythms. 

  A Pfizer spokesperson said the company was aware of the report of the death in New Zealand, it monitored all reports of possible adverse events, and continued to believe the benefit-risk profile for its vaccine was positive. 

  New Zealand's vaccine safety board also said another two people, including a 13-year-old, had died with possible myocarditis after taking their vaccinations. More details were needed before linking the child's death to the vaccine, while the death of a man in his 60s was unlikely related to the vaccine, it said. 

  Despite the rare side effects, the vaccine safety board said the benefits of vaccination greatly outweighed the risks.

REUTERS

Leftovers for Africa: Europe sent Nigeria up to 1 million near-expired doses of covid-19 vaccine

By Annalisa Merelli

Senior Reporter

As many as 1 million doses of AstraZeneca’s covid-19 vaccine reportedly expired before they could be used in Nigeria, a country of more than 200 million where less than 2% of the population is fully vaccinated.

According to Reuters, the doses were sent from Europe through Covax, a program to distribute covid-19 vaccines donated by rich countries to poor ones. But Nigeria didn’t have enough time to distribute the supply before much of it expired—in some cases, within four to six weeks, versus the AstraZeneca vaccine’s typical shelf life of six months—and much of the donation went to waste.

Vaccine waste routinely occurs in large immunization campaigns, and rich countries such as the US, UK, and Canada have been especially cavalier in letting millions of doses expire and destroying them, even as the rest of the world was short on supplies. But what happened in Nigeria is a different issue: Not only is the number of wasted doses very large, but they arrived relatively close to their expiration date, in a county not yet equipped to ensure rapid distribution, offering yet another indicator of the severity and complexity of vaccine inequality.

The blunder in Nigeria isn’t the first. In November, despite needing vaccine doses, Namibia warned it would be forced to destroy doses because their remaining shelf life wasn’t long enough to allow for distribution. South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Malawi similarly had to destroy or return doses of vaccines donated by wealthy countries because they didn’t receive them in time to distribute them before expiration.

In November, Nigeria was able to distribute 800,000 doses that were close to their expiration date, thanks to a plan that has ramped up vaccine facilities, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

One year after the global vaccination campaign started, rich countries continue to hoard vaccines, pretty much limiting their global redistribution efforts to leftover doses arriving too late for their usefulness to be fully maximized.

Former UK prime minister Gordon Brown warned in late September that 100 million surplus doses of covid-19 vaccines would go to waste in rich countries by December and urged those nations to donate them instead. Even a timely response back then would have likely left receiving countries with only a few weeks to administer the doses.

In a statement from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), on behalf of Covax, which it leads with the WHO, the organization nonetheless praised Nigeria’s success in delivering large numbers of doses in a short period of time, pointing at an important issue that limits the ability of poor nations to deliver what they receive: the lack of a vaccine supply stream that is predictable and reliable.

Although more doses of vaccines have been sent to poor countries (chiefly African) in recent weeks, the donations continue to be piecemeal and ad-hoc, with doses often received close to expiration dates, according to GAVI.

The lack of a steady stream of supply is one more challenge in countries already grappling with a lack of refrigerators or reliable electricity to store the vaccine in remote locations, a lack of health workers to administer the shots, a shortage of syringes needed to deliver the life-saving medicine into arms, and the need to conduct other large immunization campaigns alongside the one for covid-19.

So alongside other measures (such as sharing patents), wealthy countries need to get more consistent with how much they’re sending and how often, and making sure their donations have enough shelf life left to get distributed.

Responsibility is on vaccine manufacturers, too. “We’ve seen manufacturers [that] delayed their shipments to Covax while we know that they’re supplying other buyers, countries,” WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said at a recent press conference.

As the emergence of omicron has shown, until better immunity is reached globally, the whole world continues to be under threat from new variants. We need wealthy countries and drug-makers to stop treating poor countries as repositories for soon-to-expire leftovers, so that we have a chance to have some actual control over the pandemic.

QUARTZ AFRICA

Covid: Children's extremely low risk confirmed by study

CC™ Health Watch

The overall risk of children becoming severely ill or dying from Covid is extremely low, a new analysis of Covid infection data confirms.

Data from the first 12 months of the pandemic in England shows 25 under-18s died from Covid.

Those living with multiple chronic illnesses and neuro-disabilities were most at risk, though the overall risk remained low.

The conclusions are being considered by the UK's vaccine advisory group.

Currently, under-18s are not routinely offered Covid vaccines, even if they have other underlying health conditions that put them at risk.

Scientists from University College London, and the Universities of York, Bristol and Liverpool say their studies of children are the most comprehensive yet anywhere in the world.

They checked England's public health data and found most of the young people who had died of Covid-19 had underlying health conditions:

• Around 15 had life-limiting or underlying conditions, including 13 living with complex neuro-disabilities
• Six had no underlying conditions recorded in the last five years - though researchers caution some illnesses may have been missed
• A further 36 children had a positive Covid test at the time of their death but died from other causes, the analysis suggests
• Though the overall risks were still low, children and young people who died were more likely to be over the age of 10 and of Black and Asian ethnicity.

Researchers estimate that 25 deaths in a population of some 12 million children in England gives a broad, overall mortality rate of 2 per million children.

Current data shows some 128,301 people in the UK have died within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test since the pandemic started.

'Hospital stays rare'

Separately, scientists considered all children and young people in England who had an emergency hospital admission for Covid up to February 2021:

• Some 5,800 children were admitted with the virus, compared to about 367,600 admitted for other emergencies (excluding injuries)
• About 250 required intensive care
• There were 690 children admitted for a rare inflammatory condition linked to Covid, called pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome (PIMS-TS)
• Though the absolute risks were still small, children living with multiple conditions, those who were obese, and young people with heart and neurological illnesses were most at risk

Lead researcher Prof Russell Viner said complex decisions around vaccinating and shielding children required input from many sources - not their work alone.

But he said if there were adequate vaccines, their research suggested certain groups of children could benefit from receiving Covid jabs.

He added: "I think from our data, and in my entirely personal opinion, it would be very reasonable to vaccinate a number of groups we have studied, who don't have a particularly high risk of death, but we do know that their risk of having severe illness and coming to intensive care, while still low, is higher than the general population."

He said further vaccine data - expected imminently from other countries, including the US and Israel - should be taken into account when making the decision.

• What is the risk of schools spreading coronavirus?
• Will children get the coronavirus vaccine?

Dr. Elizabeth Whittaker, from the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health and Imperial College London, said it was encouraging they were seeing very few seriously unwell children in hospital.

She added: "Although this data covers up to February 2021, this hasn't changed recently with the Delta variant. We hope this data will be reassuring for children and young people and their families."

BBC NEWS