French parliament debates ban on wild animals in circuses


Issued on: 26/01/2021 -

An elephant on show at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris. © Bertrand Guay, AFP

Text by: NEWS WIRES

French lawmakers on Tuesday debated an animal welfare bill that would ban using wild animals in travelling circuses and keeping dolphins and whales in captivity in marine parks, amid other restrictions.

Circus workers held a protest against the bill outside the National Assembly, saying the measure would cause circuses and jobs to vanish, if it becomes law.

“That’s death for circuses,” Royal Circus director William Kerwich told The Associated Press.

The bill, which also bans the use of wild animals in television shows, nightclubs and private parties, calls for a transition period of five to seven years depending on the location.

The wild animal ban would not apply to permanent shows or to zoos.

Another provision of the legislation is aimed at shutting down mink farms within the next five years. The bill would also require new pet owners to obtain certificates guaranteeing they have the specific knowledge needed to care for their animals.

It would stiffen for penalty for committing abuse that leads to the death of pet animals to up to three years in prison and a maximum fine of 45,000 euros ($54,750.)

Protesting circus workers said French law is already strict enough to ensure the welfare of the animals appearing in their shows.

Kerwich, the Royal Circus director, said he is worried about what would happen to the 800 or so animals owned by French circuses.

“They are alive, we won't be able to reintroduce them in nature and we won't be able to keep them. Who will pay?” he asked. “We don't want to abandon them.”

Kerwich said that about 14 million spectators attend traditional circuses featuring animals in France while 1 million go to circuses with only human acts.

Frederic Edelstein, a lion trainer for the Pinder Circus, advocated for “an art that is part of our country's culture.”

“A trainer doesn't hurt an animal, he seeks complicity, respect between humans and animals," Edelstein said. “I have 12 magnificent white lions. They love me....It is out of question for me to let my animals go away.”

France to ban wild animals from travelling circuses 'gradually'

01:46

Animal rights activists also organized a gathering near the National Assembly on Tuesday, saying they think the proposed law does not go far enough.

“There's nothing about hunting. There’s nothing about intensive farming....So we are here to demand that these gaps be filled,” Muriel Fusi, a representative of the Animalist Party in Paris, said.

One Voice, an animal defense organization, called the bill “a big step in the right direction” but said it wants the wild animal ban to be extended to non-travelling circuses and shows.

“Maybe we won’t see elephants, lions and hippopotamuses on the roads any more, but a new category of sedentary circuses will be allowed to multiply,” it said in a statement.

A vote on the bill is set to take place by Friday. Lawmakers in French President Emmanuel Macron’s party, which has the majority at the National Assembly, support the measure. After the lower chamber votes, the bill will go to the Senate.

Most European countries have partially or totally banned the use of wild animals in circuses. In recent years, some major circuses in France announced they were voluntarily ending such acts.

An amusement park north of Paris announced Monday it was shutting down its dolphin show. The Asterix park said its eight dolphins would be transferred within two months to other aquariums in Europe because they could not be reintroduced into their natural environment.

(AP)

With flags on India’s Red Fort, farmers challenge Modi and protest movement unity

Issued on: 26/01/2021 -

Protesters on the ramparts of the Red Fort in New Delhi as farmers demonstrated against new agricultural laws on Jan. 26, 2021  Photo by Sajjad HUSSAIN / AFP

Text by: Leela JACINTO

Farmers protesting against new market-friendly agrarian laws on Tuesday stormed India’s historic Red Fort, posing a major challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and potentially threatening the unity of one of India's longest protest movements.

The main act in India on Tuesday was supposed to be the Republic Day parade marking the anniversary of the adoption of the country’s constitution on January 26, 1950.

The pandemic had forced a shortening of the traditional programme this year but even the truncated ceremonies had enough pomp and splendour to dominate the news.

The 72nd Republic Day parade featured the usual colourful displays of India’s diversity capped by a military parade that included, for the first time, a showcasing of India’s Rafale jets, newly bought from France, making a daring debut of “Vertical Charlie” formations over the majestic Rajpath ceremonial boulevard in New Delhi.

But a buildup of slow-tech farm tractors rained on the military parade on Tuesday, stealing the thunder of sophisticated fighter jets and dominating news coverage.

Tens of thousands of farmers protesting against new market-friendly farm laws broke through police barricades to reach the historic, Mughal-era Red Fort in the heart of the Indian capital in the afternoon, after the official parade had ended.

On the ramparts of the 17th century red sand stone fort, where the Mughals, colonial British and independent Indian administrations have raised their flags, some of the protesters hoisted a myriad mix of farm union and religious community banners.

After more than two months of demonstrations, farmers on Tuesday answered the call for a Republic Day protest, gathering around 8am local time at border points on the National Highway No. 1 linking the Indian capital to the neighbouring state of Haryana. Chanting slogans, dancing to protest songs, and showered with traditional flower petals, the scenes at capital’s border points looked more like harvest festivals than angry protests.

Protesting Indian farmers at a tractor rally in New Delhi on January 26, 2021. 

(Photo by Money SHARMA / AFP) 

By noon, the live coverage headlines had switched to police firing tear gas as farmers broke through barricades preventing their entry into New Delhi. As the hashtags #KisanTractorRally (Farmers’ Tractor Rally) and #KisanTractorRallyLive trended on Twitter, news footage showed farmers surging past overwhelmed police lines, tearing down roadblocks in some places, as police fired tear gas and conducted baton charges in some places.

Police said one protester died after his tractor overturned but farmers said he was shot. Protesters laid the victim’s body, draped in the Indian tricolour flag, on the road for a while and sat around the corpse. Television channels showed several bloodied protesters and at least 86 police officers were injured, according to an official statement..

One of India’s longest-running farmer protest movements reached an alarming peak on Republic Day, exposing Prime Minister Narendra Modi's failure to comprehend the level of opposition to the controversial new agricultural laws and to address the issues that have united powerful, and often competing, voting blocs against his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

“Modi has harvested decades of agrarian anger with the farm laws. Today’s events show that the state underestimated the might of the people. The state should have known better,” said Amandeep Sandhu, a writer who documented agricultural practices in India’s Punjab farming heartland in his book, “Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines”.

Songs, vendors add a fairground flair

The farmers crisis was sparked in September 2020, when the government crammed complex legislative changes into three new laws and pushed them through parliament during an opposition walkout. They were passed as Covid-19 rages through India, with the country reporting the world’s second-highest number of cases.

The new laws make farmers sell their produce on the open market – including agribusiness corporations and supermarket chains – instead of through state-run institutions that guarantee a minimum price.

Modi maintains the “reforms are needed for development", and has warned that, “we cannot build the next century with the laws of the previous century."

>> For more: Why Indian farmers are not convinced by Modi’s promised market miracle

Since he came to power in 2014, Modi has opted for shock policy announcements with little preparedness that have left the populace scrambling to cope with the fallout – humanitarian and economic – of his populist moves.

Early last year, the prime minister sparked a mass exodus on foot of migrant workers from cities to villages across the country when he suddenly announced a lockdown without coordinating emergency services, giving people just four hours to prepare for one of the world’s strictest nationwide confinements.

By the end of November, with the lockdown lifted, a reverse human flow saw farmers from the North Indian agricultural heartland streaming toward New Delhi, answering a call to protest the discredited farm reform laws.

Over the past two months, the farmers have held a sit-in on the outskirts of New Delhi, setting up outdoor kitchens to feed tens of thousands of protesters making up one of India’s largest sustained protests.

The protest camp – complete with vendors plying snacks, thermal underwear, soap, hair oil bottles and other essentials – have had a fairground atmosphere, sparking a rich counter culture of literature and protest songs released by leading Punjabi singers.

But the protest has also had a human cost. Camping outdoors in the North Indian winter, through chilly rain has claimed more than 160 lives, according to an independent researcher. Indian media have attributed the deaths to the weather, illness or suicide.

Unfazed by these challenges, the farmers of the Punjab and neighbouring states have stuck to their demands, with their protest, garnering support from farmers across the nation and capturing the imagination of Indians opposed to Modi’s Hindu supremacist policies but lacking the mobilisation to confront his government.

For months, the protest movement managed to unite farmers and landless agricultural labourers regardless of their caste, class, gender and bridging ideological divides between leftist unions and traditional community organisations.

Enter the Supreme Court

Caught unprepared by the sheer scale and determination of the protesters, the government has held 10 rounds of talks with farm union representatives, with the issue moving up to the country’s highest court.

The farmers are demanding a complete repeal of the new laws, which they fear will remove the scant protection they have enjoyed, leaving them at the mercy of corporate giants without the means to ensure they get fair treatment.

Earlier this year, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the laws should be temporarily halted until a committee of experts, appointed by the court, could consult with government officials and protesting farmers to try to find a solution to the dispute.

It failed to break the impasse. Farm union representatives questioned the makeup of the experts committee, noting that all four members were in favour of the agricultural laws and sparking a Supreme Court statement expressing disappointment over the “unnecessary aspersions” cast on the court-appointed panel.

The government’s offer to temporarily halt the laws for 18 months was viewed by the farmers as an attempt to “buy time", according to Sandhu. “By pushing the issue by 18 months, the government was trying to buy time to break the protests, and probably buy the protest leaders. It also meant pushing the issue to 2022, closer to the 2024 general elections, which suits the BJP since they can then make election promises, as they did in 2014, and win the election,” he explained.

A tale of competing protest trails

In the lead-up to Tuesday’s planned rally, the Supreme Court last week asked the government to withdraw its plea against the tractor rally on Republic Day and reiterated that it will not pass orders against the protest march.

In the absence of a court ruling, the government attempted to block the January 26 rally into the heart of the Indian capital, opting instead for a march to a site in Haryana, well outside the city.

As protest leaders and the authorities haggled over march routes, an umbrella group of 32 farmers unions – the Sanyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) – agreed to the government’s plan on Monday.

Another umbrella group – the Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh Committee (KMSC) – however stuck with the original plan to march peacefully into the heart of the Indian capital.

In a statement issued late Tuesday, the SKM condemned the violence on Republic Day, blaming “antisocial elements” as well as the KMSC for the breaking the “rules and routes”.

There were no statements about a planned farmers’ march on foot to Parliament on February 1, when the country’s new budget will be presented.

'Power creeps up' protester ranks

Following the Republic Day events, Sandhu worried that “the farmers’ factions are falling into a trap” of breaking the extraordinary unity between diverse groups within the protest movement.

“Nobody understood why the decision was made to route the protest by keeping farmers on the outskirts of Delhi. The SKM didn’t spend enough effort to make the people understand. I think the SKM also underestimated the farmers by deciding everyone should follow the route. This is how power creeps up,” he noted.

By the end of the day, Twitter posts on the farmers protest had lost some of the morning's sparkle. “Violence in a protest either by protestors against the state, or the state against protestors must be condemned. This is not a neutral position, this is a facet of democracy. Arson is illegal, it’s not a right. Disrespecting national symbols is not symbolic it’s illegal,” tweeted lawyer Sherbir Panag.

The #KisanTractorRally hashtag also drew posts from Modi’s supporters calling on the government to react to “terrorists” and “anti-nationalists” who used “tractors as weapons”.

Sandhu declined to predict how Tuesday’s events could affect the farmers movement in the immediate future. “It’s clearly too early to say,” he insisted. But he was convinced the chatter on Twitter, including calls for a government crackdown, would not end the crisis. “Twitter talk does not change the reality on the ground for the farmers. They will continue to push for their demands. The support the SKM instituted could get questioned, I think. But the farmers aren’t going anywhere, the government can’t simply wish them away.”

Pandemic disarmament: Why France was ready for Covid-19 a decade too soon

Issued on: 08/05/2020 - 

France's stock of face masks declined from a high of 2.2 billion a decade ago to just over 100 million on the eve of the Covid-19 crisis. © Benoît Tessier, REUTERS

Text by: Benjamin DODMAN

An investigation by French daily Le Monde has uncovered the extraordinary chain of events that led successive French governments to build an ambitious pandemic response strategy and then dismantle it almost entirely, leaving the country dangerously exposed to the Covid-19 disease.


In late 2004, the cardiologist-turned-politician Philippe Douste-Blazy, then France’s health minister, unveiled a pandemic response plan at a cabinet meeting before an audience of puzzled, distracted and somewhat amused ministerial colleagues.

The plan detailed a host of drastic measures to be implemented in the event of an epidemic threatening France. They included the closure of national borders, limits on people’s movement, a ban on gatherings, sports and cultural events, the implementation of social distancing rules, and the nationwide distribution of masks – surgical, for the public, and the more protective FFP2 type, for health workers.

“In a nutshell, the plan contained everything the current French government scrambled to put in place, in a hurry and without the equipment, in mid-March 2020,” write journalists Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme in a lengthy, five-part reconstruction of France’s pandemic “disarmament”, published by Le Monde this week.

The extraordinary rise and fall of pandemic planning in France was rooted in the troubled dawn of the new century, when Western nations obsessed with the threat of terrorism, and the hunt for elusive weapons of mass destruction, suddenly woke up to the risk of deadly epidemics.

First came the fearsome SARS, emerging in China in 2002 and escalating the next year, followed by an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in southeast Asia in 2004. Later that year, the deadly chikungunya disease spread rapidly in France’s overseas territories, eventually threatening the mainland.

“Asian countries were deeply shaken by SARS,” says Pierre-Yves Geoffard, a professor of health economics at the Paris School of Economics (PSE), in an interview with FRANCE 24. “They were lucky in the end as the virus eventually disappeared. But they didn’t lower their guard, making sure instead that they would be ready for the next one.”

Amid the many unknowns of pandemic planning, Geoffard says health strategists in Asian countries based their preparations on two certitudes: that further pandemics were bound to occur and that no-one could anticipate their shape or form.

“This implies being capable of reacting quickly to outbreaks of which very little is known in the beginning,” he says. “In this respect, the model to follow is Taiwan’s response to the present crisis: detecting, isolating and tracing cases – but it only works if you do it right away.”

Geoffard says the French government tried to follow the same model in its initial strategy against the coronavirus. But by then it was already too late, the virus having spread far and wide.

“Countries react to crises and learn that speed is of the essence, but then their memory fades,” he says. It would not be the only lesson unlearnt by France’s decision makers.

French independence

Back in 2005, Douste-Blazy had given a prescient warning about “our modern Western societies’ tendency to forget” during an audition before French senators.

The SARS epidemic, the health minister said, “has proven to what extent the sudden occurence of an unknown infection – I insist on the word unknown – capable of spreading across the planet thanks to modern communication networks, can disseminate fear, and destabilise the most developed societies and health systems.”

Weeks later, the senators who auditioned Douste-Blazy released a report detailing their recommendations to prepare the country for future outbreaks. In particular, they stressed the need to constitute stocks of masks for both health workers and the general public, noting that surgical masks would offer only limited protection and should therefore be replaced by more protective gear.

This “would certainly entail a high cost, but would help limit the country’s paralysis,” they wrote, adding: “In this light, the cost must be put into perspective.”

Alarmed by another classified report, exhumed by Le Monde’s investigators, which warned that France was woefully unprepared for a pandemic, Douste-Blazy’s successor at the health ministry, Xavier Bertrand, set off on a tour of East Asian countries in late 2005 to learn from their strategies. Calling in Beijing, he asked his Chinese counterpart whether France could order masks from China in the event of a crisis. Though affirmative, the answer cautioned that “Chinese demands would naturally come first” should the country need masks too.

Convinced of the need to strengthen France’s strategic independence, Bertrand and his successors would embark on a vast effort to make the country pandemic-proof and self-reliant – a strategy that spanned the final years of Jacques Chirac’s presidency and the start of Nicolas Sarkozy's tenure.

A cornerstone of the new strategy was the establishment of a national mask-production capacity, overseen and generously funded by a new entity, known as the Eprus, modelled on the US Centers for Disease Control and prevention (CDC).

At the end of 2006, France could boast of a stock of 600 million FFP2 masks, making it one of the world’s best prepared countries, according to the World Health Organization. By May 2009, a Senate report said the Eprus stock had reached more than 720 million units, supplemented by more than a billion surgical masks.

It was just as well, because a new deadly epidemic, this one coming from Mexico, was about to test the arsenal’s worth.

Crying wolf

The French government’s zealous response to the H1N1 influenza marked the climax of the precautionary approach championed by Douste-Blazy and his successors. But in hindsight, it also sounded its death knell.

As the influenza spread beyond Mexico in the summer of 2009, the new health minister, Roseline Bachelot, decided to further ramp up the production of masks, leading to a peak of 2.2 billion units (surgical and FFP2) by the end of the year. Under government guidelines, businesses were advised to constitute stocks of protective gear, including the high-protection FFP2 masks for workers “in close contact with members of the public”. Kits containing surgical masks and antiviral treatments were distributed freely in pharmacies across France.

Controversially, the government ordered 94 million vaccine doses and requisitioned gymnasiums for its nationwide vaccination campaign, bypassing doctors.

But the health crisis failed to materialise, and when state auditors, politicians and the media started to delve into the cost of the operation, Bachelot was lambasted for splashing out a whopping one billion euros in taxpayers’ money – part of it to reimburse pharmaceutical labs – on a virus that killed “only” 342 people in France.

“When dealing with epidemics, one is easely accused after the facts of having botched the response,” says Geoffard of the Paris School of Economics. “Either one does too much prevention and little happens, or one does too little and everything goes wrong.”

According to Geoffard, the H1N1 backlash was “one of the key reasons it later became impossible to justify maintaining a highly costly prevention policy.”

Reflecting on her public castigation, Bachelot told Le Monde that the debacle had “led to a general disarmament and decrediblised politicians.” She added: “The public decided we had overreacted. And for us politicians, the risk of doing too much came to dwarf that of doing too little.”

Former Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot talks to the press after being vaccinated for the H1N1 influenza on November 12, 2009. © Bertrand Guay, AFP

Writing in the same paper in late March of this year, the renowned health economist Claude Le Pen, who would die of cancer only weeks later, said Bachelot’s actions had instilled among high-ranking civil servants “a sense that the government had overestimated the crisis and, ultimately, squandered public funds for the benefit of pharmaceutical laboratories”.

Hoping to deflect responsibility for the “disarmament” that left France so dangerously exposed a decade later, the health minister’s successors have blamed those civil servants – the “deep state” – and each other for gradually stripping France of its defences.

After Bachelot’s demotion to a junior cabinet role in late 2010, Bertrand was put back in the saddle. But the context had changed dramatically since his first stint as health minister. These were the scandal-plagued twilight years of Sarkozy’s presidency. On top of pandemic fatigue, Bertrand had to grapple with stringent belt-tightening measures amid a global economic downturn and a European "debt crisis".

In late 2011, a government directive signalled a change of doctrine, splitting the state’s reserves of protective gear into two: a “strategic” stock of surgical masks for the general public, held by the state, and a “tactical” stock of FFP2 masks for health workers, to be held and replenished by regional health authorities and individual hospitals.

The change of direction was cemented by subsequent reforms implemented under the Socialist administration that came to power in 2012. They effectively devolved the management of “tactical” reserves to institutions focused on short-term-imperatives and struggling with budget cuts – with the effect that France’s precious FFP2 reserves expired and were never replaced.

“In the space of just two years, the state had passed on the baton, in the name of decentralisation and, above all, budgetary constraint,” write Le Monde’s Davet and Lhomme. As for the Eprus, it was incorporated and diluted in a much larger structure, known as Santé publique France, reversing a decade-long policy modelled on the American CDC.

A bonfire of masks

France is not the only country to have rolled back or “forgotten” its pandemic response plans along the way.

An investigation by British daily The Times found that preparations for a pandemic had been a top priority of the UK government for a decade after the September 11 attacks, before falling victim to austerity cuts.

“We were the envy of the world,” an unnamed source in the prime minister’s office told the newspaper. “But pandemic planning became a casualty of the austerity years when there were more pressing needs.” The source added that preparations for a no-deal Brexit “sucked all the blood out of pandemic planning”.

Likewise, years of neglect sucked the blood out of France’s once ambitious pandemic strategy, leaving the state largely powerless to protect its citizens from the coronavirus.

On March 17 of this year, the day France began a two-month nationwide lockdown, former health minister Agnès Buzyn spoke candidly about the extraordinary twist that had seen her plucked out of the ministry a month earlier, despite the worsening coronavirus outbreak, to lead President Emmanuel Macron’s party in Paris mayoral elections.

“I knew the tsunami wave was coming for us,” she said, referring to the looming pandemic. “We should have stopped the elections, it was a travesty.”

Addressing senators two days later, Buzyn’s successor as health minister, Olivier Véran, summed up the bewildering haemorrhage of equipment that had left France so desperately exposed.

“In 2010, the state had a stock of one billion surgical masks,” he said. “When I took over at the ministry, there were 150 million.”

As he spoke, and in the months preceding the crisis, millions of masks were simply being torched, based on the assumption that they had expired or were ineffective.

According to French daily Libération, a Belgian company tasked with testing a sample of the masks had concluded that they no longer met certain standards. However, subsequent tests carried out on masks that were saved from the bonfire at the last minute showed that they were perfectly usable.

Officials interviewed by Le Monde suggested that contradictory messages on the utility of masks – with the government at one point arguing that they were of no use to the general public – had helped seal the fate of the discarded stock.

The result of this stunning fiasco has been amply documented: a desperate shortage of protection for even frontline workers, a frantic – and costly – race to fly in masks from China, and a belated effort to revive a national production capacity that was abandoned in recent years.

“It’s baffling that nothing at all was anticipated, when we had it all ready as early as 2004,” a dejected Douste-Blazy told Le Monde, reflecting on France’s Covid-19 disaster.

He added: “This must be one of the most mind-blowing examples of how the French administration can produce such a plan and then fail to use it!”

'Humiliation': French see Covid-19 vaccine flops as sign of decline

France, the land of vaccine pioneer Louis Pasteur, has a long and celebrated history when it comes to medical breakthroughs.

Issued on: 26/01/2021 

French pharma giant Sanofi was an early frontrunner in the vaccine race, until a lab mistake left it months behind schedule. © Joël Saget, AFP

Text by: FRANCE 24

France's slip from frontrunner to laggard in the race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine has sparked dismay among politicians, reigniting a debate about the country's scientific prowess and its global standing.

France, the land of vaccine pioneer Louis Pasteur, has a long and celebrated history when it comes to medical breakthroughs.

With the world-renowned research centre that bears his name in Paris, the Pasteur Institute, as well as leading pharma group Sanofi, the country looked well positioned in the race to produce a jab against the novel coronavirus.

But the Pasteur Institute announced Monday that it was abandoning research on its most promising prospect, while Sanofi – an early frontunner in the vaccine race – has said its candidate for inoculation will not be ready before the end of 2021 at best.
France's Pasteur Institute abandons Covid-19 vaccine

"It's a sign of the decline of the country and this decline is unacceptable," François Bayrou, a close political ally of President Emmanuel Macron, said Tuesday.

Bayrou, head of the centrist MoDem party and named by Macron last year as commissioner for long-term government planning, said the problem was a brain-drain from France to the United States.

Speaking on France Inter radio, he said it was "not acceptable that our best researchers, the most brilliant of our researchers, are sucked up by the American system".

He referred to Stéphane Bancel, a Frenchman who heads US-based biotech firm Moderna, whose vaccine was the second to be approved for use in the United States and Europe.

Experts say the US government has invested more in vaccine research in the previous decades, while innovative companies are also drawn to the country because raising funds from private investors is easier and quicker.

Long-time Socialist minister Ségolène Royal, on the other hand, blamed "liberal ideology" for reductions in public funding for vaccine research, while Communist Party head Fabien Roussel called the setbacks a "humiliation".

Standing up to les anglo-saxons

The failure of French Covid vaccine research so far touches on several sensitive issues for the country.

The political class and many voters have long worried about France's relative decline in power and influence – the ominous "déclassement" – in an increasingly globalised world.

This tendency is seen by many analysts as part of the explanation for strong support for the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, whose rhetoric is tinged with nostalgia for the past.

Since World War II, French governments have always had a strong industrial policy which has seen the promotion and protection of national champions to rival "les anglo-saxons" in Britain and America.

Sanofi, the only remaining major French pharma group, has come in for fierce public criticism, particularly in May last year when CEO Paul Hudson – a British citizen – said the United States would get first access to a future vaccine because it invested more in research.

His words kicked up a storm in France, and the company's managers were duly summoned by President Macron and his ministers.

Sanofi followed up this public relations disaster at home by announcing 1,700 job cuts a month later, including 1,000 in France.

Chance

The vaccine flops come at the height of a pandemic that has rattled the self-confidence of many of the world's richest nations, exposing a lack of preparedness and huge gaps in their manufacturing capabilities.

Amid the self-criticism and introspection, some experts and politicians have called on France to avoid taking the vaccine setbacks too hard.

Chance plays a major role in cutting-edge research, evident in the work of the most celebrated past French researchers from Pasteur to Nobel Prize-winning chemist Marie Curie.

Nathalie Coutinet, an economics of medicine researcher at the Sorbonne University in Paris, said many different approaches were being taken by scientists worldwide in the Covid fight.

The Pasteur Institute bet on adapting a measles vaccine to fight Covid, while Sanofi tried to tweak one of its flu jabs – only for a lab mistake to throw it off track.

The most successful approach among Western researchers turned out to be "messenger RNA," which was harnessed by German biotech group BioNTech as well as Moderna, whose jabs have been approved.

"If everyone had opted for RNS Messenger and it hadn't worked, we would have said it was stupid," Coutinet told AFP.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

UK
Vaccinated people could still spread virus, warns Van-Tam

Deputy chief medical officer hits back at doctors who criticised decision to extend gap between vaccine doses

Gavin Cordon
2 days ago

Deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van Tam
(POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Coronavirus vaccines may not fully prevent people from passing the virus on to others and people who have had the jab should still continue to abide by lockdown restrictions, the deputy chief medical officer for England said.

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said that if those who have been vaccinated begin easing off because they are protected, they are potentially putting at risk those further down the priority list who still need inoculation.

His warning came as the latest Government figures showed the number receiving the first dose of the vaccine across the UK has passed 5.8 million, with a record 478,248 getting the jab in a single day.

Prof Van-Tam, writing in the Telegraph, said it was still not known if people who had been vaccinated could still pass on the virus to others, even though they were protected from falling ill themselves.

"So even after you have had both doses of the vaccine you may still give Covid to someone else and the chains of transmission will then continue," he wrote.

Florida Is Cracking Down On Canadians Flying There To Get COVID-19 Vaccines

© Mariia Boiko | Dreamstime, Marc Bruxelle | Dreamstime

When it comes to COVID-19 vaccines in Florida, local officials are cracking down.

This week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis confirmed that people from outside the state will no longer be able to get a COVID-19 vaccine there, including Canadians.

“We’re not doing vaccine tourism."
Ron DeSantis

“To just kind of come in from another country or whatever, we don’t support that and we’re not going to allow that… we’re not doing vaccine tourism,” he explained on Tuesday.

Anybody who owns property in Florida and lives there at least part-time will still qualify.

However, travellers and vacationers will no longer have access to the state’s supply of COVID-19 vaccines as of Tuesday, January 19.

Those wanting to get the vaccine in Florida will now be asked to provide evidence that they live there permanently or semi-permanently.

Before this, anybody aged 65 and over was eligible, leading some Canadians to cross the border to get vaccinated early.

According to CTV News, some Canadians even took private planes to the U.S. to get vaccinated.

The Canadian federal government continues to urge against all non-essential travel outside of the country, with Justin Trudeau even advising those with upcoming vacations to cancel them.

PUBLIC OWNERSHIP OF BIG PHARMA

Drug firms ‘must deliver’ on Covid-19 vaccine obligations, EU chief says

CENTRAL PLANNING & GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION

Issued on: 26/01/2021 - 

EU Chief Ursula von der Leyen says pharma companies must ‘honour their obligations’ to supply the bloc with Covid-19 vaccine. © John Thys AFP / file picture

Text by: NEWS WIRES|

Video by: Yena LEE

The European Union on Tuesday warned pharmaceutical giants that develop coronavirus vaccines to honor their contractual obligations after slow deliveries of shots from two companies hampered the bloc’s vaunted vaccine rollout in several nations.

The bloc already lashed out Monday at pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, accusing it of failing to guarantee the delivery of coronavirus vaccines without a valid explanation. It also had expressed displeasure over vaccine delivery delays from Pfizer-BioNTech last week.

“Europe invested billions to help develop the world‘s first COVID-19 vaccines. To create a truly global common good,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the World Economic Forum’s virtual event in Switzerland . “And now, the companies must deliver. They must honor their obligations.”

The statement Tuesday highlighted the level of distrust that has grown between the 27-nation bloc and pharmaceutical companies over the past week. On Monday, the EU threatened to impose strict export controls on all coronavirus vaccines produced in the bloc to make sure that companies honor their commitments to the EU.

The EU said it provided 2.7 billion euros to speed up vaccine research and production capacity and was determined to get some value for that money with hundreds of millions of vaccine shots according to a schedule the companies had committed to.

“Europe is determined to contribute to this global common good, but it also means business,” von der Leyen said Tuesday via videolink.

And Germany was firmly behind von der Leyen’s view.

“With a complex process such as vaccine production, I can understand if there are production problems—but then it must affect everyone fairly and equally,” German Health Minister Jens Spahn told ZDF television. “This is not about EU first, it’s about Europe’s fair share.”

The EU, which has 450 million citizens and the economic and political clout of the world’s biggest trading bloc, is lagging badly behind countries like Israel and Britain in rolling out coronavirus vaccine shots for its health care workers and most vulnerable people. That’s despite having over 400,000 confirmed virus deaths since the pandemic began.

The EU has committed to buying 300 million AstraZeneca doses with option on 100 million extra shots. Late last week, the company said it was planning to reduce a first contingent of 80 million to 31 million.

The shortfall of planned deliveries of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is expected to get medical approval by the bloc on Friday, combined with hiccups in the distribution of Pfizer-BioNTech shots is putting EU nations under heavy pressure. Pfizer says it was delaying deliveries to Europe and Canada while it upgrades its plant in Belgium to increase production capacity.

The European Medicines Agency is scheduled to review the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine Friday and its approval is hotly anticipated. The AstraZeneca vaccine is already being used in Britain and has been approved for emergency use by half a dozen countries, including India, Pakistan, Argentina and Mexico.

The delays in getting vaccines will be make it harder to meet early targets in the EU’s goal of vaccinating 70% of its adults by late summer.

The EU has signed six vaccine contracts for more than 2 billion doses, but only the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have been approved for use so far.

(AP)

PUBLIC OWNERSHIP OF BIG PHARMA

Vaccine nationalism could cost global economy $9 trillion, ICC report says



Issued on: 25/01/2021 - 

By: Kate MOODY

The risk of vaccine nationalism is a moral quandary that could also have huge economic consequences. A new report from the International Chamber of Commerce says unequal distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine could cost the global economy $9 trillion, with wealthy countries having to shoulder half the cost.

 John Denton, Secretary General of the ICC, tells FRANCE 24 that supporting equitable distribution of vaccines is not an act of charity; "it's absolutely economic common sense".

>> Covid-19: Melinda Gates warns against 'vaccine nationalism'

Ottawa residents seek to dump Trump street name

Issued on: 27/01/2021

The 'Trump Avenue' sign is seen in a west side neighborhood

 in Ottawa on January 26, 2021 Michel COMTE AFP

Ottawa (AFP)

Residents of an Ottawa neighborhood are looking to distance themselves from Donald Trump by renaming their street, which bears his name -- once a source of intrigue, but now an embarrassment.

Trump Avenue on the Canadian capital's west side is lined with brick homes, each with two-car garages and kids playing hockey in driveways.

The Central Park neighborhood, known for New York City-themed street names, was built in the late 1990s -- long before a certain Big Apple real estate mogul entered politics.

There's also a Madison Park, Bloomingdale Street, Manhattan Crescent, and Staten Way in the area.

Bonnie Bowering moved here in 2008.

"When I used to tell people I live on Trump Avenue and I would add, 'Yes, it is The Donald,' people would smirk, some offered sympathies, that sort of thing," she told AFP.

"But now -- after he's undermined democracy, and incited an insurrection, a violent attack on the US Capitol -- it's time to change our street name," she said.

"Trump doesn't deserve the honor and I think it's inappropriate to have a street named after him in Canada's capital."

Ottawa city councilor Riley Brockington started gathering support for the name change from people who live on the street this week.

Some residents had been petitioning the city for years to change it, but Brockington resisted, saying he feared offending Trump while he was in office.

"I was concerned that there might be ramifications against Canada, that Trump would take punitive measures if word got out that Canada's national capital wanted to take his name off a street sign," Brockington said.

"With his exit from the White House, I felt now was a good time to try it."

At least 50 percent of residents must agree to the name change to trigger a process that would take several months.

That's not soon enough for Diane Hosker, who was out walking her dog Tuesday afternoon.

"It was a novelty at first, a fun way to start off a conversation when you told people where you lived," she said. "Now it's an embarrassment."

"The man's an idiot and I don't like his brand of politics," she added.

Nearby, a father stuck his head out of his front door to call his son in from the cold, and nodded in agreement.

Changing the street's name would require new signage, but also new maps and postal addresses for 62 homes.

And then there's the matter of selecting a new name.

Most other New York names are already taken in Ottawa, and numbered street names such as Fifth Avenue won't do. "We already have one of those in Ottawa," Bowering explained.

"I hope we end up with a name that everybody is happy with," she concluded. "Of course, some people say 'Anything would be better.'"

© 2021 AFP

Africa

Can the ‘Great Green Wall’ carry out Sankara’s ecological, pan-African dream?

Issued on: 17/01/2021 - 

Women build dikes to hold water in a drought-prone area of eastern Burkina Faso. © Raphaël de Bengy, AFP

Text by: Benjamin DODMAN 

Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s folk-hero president, once marshalled a nation to halt the spread of the Sahara. Decades after his brutal death, a pan-African project of epic scale and ambition is aiming to reverse the creeping desertification that threatens to engulf a vast region, accelerating climate change, migration and conflict.

Burkina Faso, a landlocked country lashed by the hot and dusty winds of the Sahara, was once a land of lush forests, high grass and impetuous rivers, Captain Thomas Sankara, its revolutionary leader, was fond of saying.

“Back then, it was the roots of our trees and grass that bound together the soil’s fertiles humus, withstanding the force of torrents and floods,” said the “African Che Guevara” in a landmark speech detailing his plans to reforest the country.

“Today, all the rain that falls on Burkina Faso runs away to other countries, to the sea,” Sankara added in his 1985 address. “We will hold it back through our struggle.”

The man who renamed the former French colony of Haute-Volta as Burkina Faso – meaning the “Land of the Honest”, or “Upright” – was ahead of his time in recognising climate change and desertification as the single biggest threat to the wellbeing of its people. “The desert is at our gates, it’s already upon us, ready to engulf us,” he warned.

A baobab tree pictured at Nedogo village, near Burkina Faso's capital Ouagadougou. © Luc Gnago, REUTERS

In order to turn back the tide, Sankara launched a massive tree-planting drive to “regreen” the country, halt soil erosion and foster sustainable agriculture. His “fight against the desert” was both “ideological” and “existential”, a means to empower the impoverished nation and guarantee its survival.

“Step by step, tree by tree, we will create this great park of 10 million trees,” he promised. “Even if it takes 10 million years.”

Just two years later, aged 37, Sankara was mowed down by soldiers in a military coup. But his vision of a “wall of trees” holding back the encroaching desert has taken root in a pan-African project of breathtaking scale, a cross-continental barrier stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.

Halting the desert

An African-led project, the Great Green Wall aims to buttress the fragile ecosystems of countries in the Sahel region south of the Sahara. Its advocates say it will restore huge swathes of degraded land, capture carbon emissions, create millions of green jobs, stem mass migration and reduce conflict in a hotbed of jihadist militancy.

This week, the ambitious but underfunded initiative received a much-needed shot in the arm with donors at a conference in Paris pledging more than $14 billion to speed up the Wall.

“We are now standing shoulder to shoulder with the entire African continent,” said French President Emmanuel Macron, who hosted the One Planet Summit on Monday. "The future of the Sahel region depends on the Great Green Wall," added Akinwumi Adesina, the head of the African Bank for Development. "Without it, the Sahel region as we know it may disappear."

A train station swallowed by the encroaching desert in Sudan. 

© Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah, Reuters

Sankara was long dead when the Great Green Wall was launched in 2007, but the project is in many ways his brainchild, argues Sylvestre Bangré Ouédraogo, a former environment minister who grew up in the same town as the revolutionary leader.

“Sankara began building Burkina Faso’s own barrier against the desert and worked hard to inspire other countries,” he says. “He would warn them, ‘Today the desert is creeping into Burkina Faso, but tomorrow it will be Ivory Coast’s turn and then Liberia’s'.”

The centrepiece of Sankara’s barrier was a vast reforestation drive that required every household, village, school and business to plant saplings and tend to tree nurseries. Both Burkinabes and foreigners were expected to plant trees on special occasions, such as weddings. At times the president would personally roll up in his trademark Renault 5 – the cheapest car of the day (he famously banned ministers from using luxury cars) – to make sure they did.

Ouédraogo, who served as head of environmental affairs in the Ouagadougou area during Sankara’s time, recalls frantic preparations to ensure venues were always decked in green whenever the president was due: “When he arrived and saw plants on the stage he was happy; when there were none he frowned and summoned us to do better.”

Sankara declared drastic curbs to tree-felling and livestock grazing, the main drivers of deforestation. He even considered marshalling the air force to “bomb” the country with tree seeds in the hope some would sprout. “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness,” he would say when challenged over his unorthodox practices.

Thomas Sankara celebrates the second anniversary of Burkina Faso's revolution on August 4, 1985, with a suitably green backdrop. © Daniel Laine, AFP

“Some of his methods were, let’s say, ‘empirical’, but there is no disputing the vision and ambition,” Ouédraogo says. “He never missed an opportunity to stress that however poor Burkina Faso may be, it had a purpose and a mission. Sadly, he did not have a chance to carry it out.”

Sankara’s pioneering environmentalism was not entirely abandoned after his death, but the impetus and urgency vanished.

“He would ride his bicycle incognito to visit people’s homes and discuss trees,” Ouédraogo recalls. “It’s that kind of enthusiasm that went missing after he was gone.”

No to prêt-à-porter, yes to bespoke

Sankara was perhaps most insightful in his belief that the “fight against the desert'' would only bear fruit if local communities were empowered and invested with the responsibility to improve their lot and that of their children. For this reason, he argued, development of the Sahel region must necessarily be African-led and community-led.

“No to ready-to-wear aid, yes to bespoke aid,” was one of the many slogans coined by the staunch anti-imperialist, whose antics irked the former colonial power, France.

Ouédraogo, a 20-year veteran of the UN Development Programme, says the same concern underpins the Great Green Wall, a vastly ambitious but unsung project led by the African Union with support from international donors.

“When I joined the UNPD, donor countries would say, ‘You’re only getting the money if you do so and so’. They did not get the communities involved and interested, and rode roughshod over local specificities,” he says. “Fortunately, that’s changed now. Investments are focused on local needs and expertise.”

When the Great Green Wall was launched, Ouédraogo worked with international charity Tree Aid to help restore degraded land in some of the poorest parts of the country. This involved fostering new techniques to improve water conservation, increase yields in a sustainable way, and find alternative fuels to wood.

Of course, it also involved planting, nursing and protecting trees, from the mighty baobab to the supple moringa, a drought-resistant plant sometimes referred to as a “miracle tree” because of its nutritious and pharmacological properties.

“Every action is based on local needs, assessments and expertise,” Ouédraogo explains. “Local actors are responsible for its implementation – otherwise, it just doesn’t work.”

Healing ecosystems

Tree Aid was set up in 1987, the year of Sankara’s assassination, in response to famine in Ethiopia. It now operates in several countries of the Sahel, including Burkina Faso’s neighbours Mali and Niger. Its chief executive, Tom Skirrow, says the charity has long found it difficult to push its work up the agenda of international leaders and donors.

“It’s important that the Great Green Wall is African-led and inspiring a grassroots movement across the continent. But, as a result, international leaders and donors tend to take a back-seat and to date haven't engaged in a meaningful way,” he says. “In this respect, we’re delighted to see growing momentum for support and investment in this epic movement,” he adds, referring to the pledges made at the Paris summit.


Tree Aid’s CEO is also thrilled by the start of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2021-30), a global initiative aimed at strengthening cooperation to restore damaged ecosystems and thereby safeguard biodiversity, food security and water supplies. The 10-year project has opened with the world in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic – a timely and ominous reminder of the direct link between biodiversity loss and vital threats to humanity.

>> ‘Humanity is bullying nature – and we will pay the price,’ WWF chief says

The UN says around two billion hectares of degraded lands worldwide have potential for ecosystem restoration. Most of the rehabilitation work could take the form of “mosaic restoration”, in which forests are combined with protected areas, sustainable agriculture, water bodies and human settlements.

That is precisely the model envisioned for the Great Green Wall, but progress has been frustratingly slow.

According to a status report published last September, the scheme has covered only 4 percent of its initial target area despite being more than halfway towards its 2030 completion date. The figure rises to 15 percent when including other initiatives, including a vast reforestation programme in Ethiopia, which are now part of an expanded Great Green Wall.

“Either way, it’s clearly not enough to ensure the Great Green Wall fulfils its ambition for the millions of people living on the frontline of the climate crisis,” says Skirrow. “But it was always going to take time to get started. The skills and tools are in place to scale up, now we need the funds to drive it forward.”

Tree Aid's chief executive says the Great Green Wall has already had a huge impact on communities that are part of the programme, restoring their land, securing food supplies, and nurturing activities that are both sustainable and profitable.

“Obviously, we still need to reach many more people who are living with the devastating effects of desertification,” he adds. “The Wall will only work if it’s undertaken by, literally, millions of people on the ground. It won’t work if the money gets stuck in conferences and bureaucracies. As Macron put it, ‘we need to make things simpler’, to streamline the process so the funds arrive more quickly where they are urgently needed.”

‘The roar of women’s silence’

The UK-based charity says experience has shown that people will get behind the Great Green Wall if they can identify a tangible benefit. That is especially the case for women who bear a disproportionate share of the burden in a country that is still 80 percent rural.

Women “carry the other half of the sky”, Sankara would say – on top of the wood that fuels stoves and cookers and the water that feeds their families, their crops and their livestock.

  

Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso's largest city. 

Thomas Sankara said every household should plant a tree, including in urban areas.

 © Luc Gnago, REUTERS

Clémence Ouédraogo, Tree Aid’s head of gender equality and inclusion, says women’s empowerment is a core driver of the green wall project, “in the spirit championed by Sankara”. It rests on three pillars: giving women leadership roles, restoring their environment and allowing them to profit from it too.

“When women have a voice, it is easier to identify and address problems,” she says. “We can then help them to reduce their dependence on unsustainable practices that hurt both them and the environment, like the wood burning that breaks their backs and damages their lungs. This, in turn, frees up time to grow nutritious foods and process other products, like shea butter, for an income.”

Clémence Ouédraogo says she must tread delicately to ensure women’s empowerment does not lead to social rifts of the kind Sankara encountered when he promoted gender equality in a very male-dominated society.

“We must do so with agility, adapting our efforts to local frameworks that are sometimes very rigid,” she explains. The benefits, she adds, are soon obvious: “We can see from experience that when women are involved from the decision-making stage to the project’s accomplishment, you end up with the added blessing that the project is looked after in time.”

Desert and jihad

There can be no social revolution without the liberation of women, Sankara would stress in his fiery speeches up and down the country. “May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence,” he once said. “I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.”

Another storm has been rumbling in the arid drylands of the Sahel, this one sowing chaos and death – and threatening to stop the wall in its tracks.

More than six years after a popular uprising chased away strongman Blaise Compaoré, a worsening jihadist insurgency has blighted Burkina Faso’s hopes of freedom and prosperity, and wreaked havoc in rural areas worst affected by desertification.

“We think carefully before sending teams into some areas, which are often the worst affected by desertification,” says Sylvestre Bangré Ouédraogo. “Some places we have stopped going to altogether, including areas where we were successfully experimenting new technologies to foster tree growth. It’s tragic, because they are the people most in need.”

A pregnant woman carries a jerrycan of water at a camp for people displaced by conflict in Kaya, Burkina Faso. © Zohra Bensemra, REUTERS

Youths with no hope or job prospects are easy prey to jihadist recruiters, which is why aid workers are touting the Great Green Wall as crucial to conflict prevention. More trees on the ground today, they argue, means fewer peacekeeping troops in future. Conversely, rising instability results in population displacement, increased demographic pressure, more land degradation and mass emigration.

Ouédraogo is hoping the violence will not end a UN-funded programme designed to improve the livelihoods of women and youths in some of Burkina Faso’s poorest provinces, which is now up for renewal.

“The programme has already had a significant impact,” he says. “We’ve seen some militants lay down their weapons and this give us hope for the struggle against the jihadist scourge. We cannot abandon these people.”