Economy lost 207,000 jobs in April, unemployment rate rises, Statistics Canada says

OTTAWA — Canada's labour market lost 207,000 jobs last month as a spike in COVID-19 variant cases led to renewed public health restrictions and raised concerns about longer-term economic consequences from the pandemic

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© Provided by The Canadian Press

The unemployment rate rose to 8.1 per cent from 7.5 per cent in March, Statistics Canada reported. It would have been 10.5 per cent had it included in calculations Canadians who wanted to work but didn’t search for a job.

Ontario led the way on losses regionally with a drop of 153,000, and British Columbia witnessed its first decrease in employment since a historic one-month plunge in the labour market in April 2020.

Nationally, losses were heavier in full-time than part-time work, with retail and young workers hit hardest as a resurgence of the virus and its variants forced a new round of restrictions and lockdowns.

With lockdowns continuing into May, CIBC senior economist Royce Mendes said more losses this month are possible.

Leah Nord, senior director of workforce strategies with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, said the latest setback in the labour market will carry a long-term impact on the workers and businesses affected, particularly in high-touch sectors that are falling further behind.

"It's not a K-shaped recovery," she said, "it's a K-shaped crisis where the up is going up and the down is going down and that's where the scarring is going."

Scarring, or longer-term economic setbacks for the country, could be seen in ranks of the long-term unemployed, which climbed to 486,000 as about 21,000 more workers crossed the threshold of being without a job for six months or more.

Among them are 312,000 workers who have been unemployed for at least one year, up from the 99,000 recorded pre-pandemic, meaning almost one in every five unemployed workers have been searching for a job for a year or more, noted Behnoush Amery, senior economist at the Lamour Market Information Council.

The concern is that as time goes on, it will become harder for those workers to find new jobs, or they may drop out of the workforce altogether and set back any recovery.

"The good news is that these individuals are still looking for work and have not left the labour market entirely," Amery said.

"The bad news is that there is a risk that they leave the labour market entirely. If that happens, encouraging them to come back ... is challenging and expensive."

With April's losses, the country was short about 503,100 jobs, or 2.6 per cent below levels in February 2020 prior to the pandemic, but Statistics Canada suggested the actual gap may be larger.

Although population growth over the last year has slowed with fewer immigrants arriving in the country, the overall workforce is still about 302,000 higher than it was in February 2020.

The gap would be closer then to 686,000 jobs to bring the employment rate even with where it was pre-pandemic.

"Getting back to pre-pandemic levels is just a milestone, but it's not victory," said Jimmy Jean, chief economist at Desjardins. "It means that there's more to be created if you want to recover."

The federal government will be keeping a close eye on the workforce numbers nearing the summer and fall to see what, if any, changes might be needed to the package of pandemic aid.

Last month's federal budget proposed extending aid through the summer to hard-hit workers, and keep easier access to employment insurance in place for another year.

"We're hoping with the economy being where we expect it to be because of where we expect vaccination levels to be that we're going to see this reopening and recovery," Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough said in a recent interview.

"If we had a fourth wave, if that isn't the case, we are absolutely able and focused on course-correcting, as we've always done, as early as possible going into the end of September when these current measures expire"

On Friday, Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole blamed the federal government's vaccination efforts for April's jobs losses when asked what level of responsibility provinces needed to take for the workforce setback.

"The provinces have done their best with limited vaccines, limited rapid tests and limited information from the federal government." O'Toole said.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh called for sector-specific support to the tourism, service and live entertainment industries, as well as more relief benefits, particularly to help women who have given up work to take care of children and loved ones.

"A lot of women are choosing — not choosing; they don’t have a choice, they can’t go back to work," he said.

— With files from Christopher Reynolds and Stephanie Taylor

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 7, 2021.

Jordan Press, The Canadian Press

Two lions test positive for Covid-19 in Indian state Uttar Pradesh

By Meenketan Jha, Manveena Swati and Eoin McSweeney, CNN 

Two lions at the Etawah Safari Park in the northern Indian state Uttar Pradesh have tested positive for Covid-19, according to officials at the park.

© pankaj.singh/Shutterstock A statue greeting visitors at Etawah Wildlife Safari park in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Two lions at the park tested positive for Covid-19, but their condition is stable.

The samples were sent for testing after both the lions were found to have high temperatures.

Authorities added that the pair were in stable condition. They have been kept in self-isolation with their health being monitored regularly.

This comes after eight lions had tested positive for the same at the Nehru Zoological Park in Hyderabad earlier this week.

The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change had previously stated that based on experience with other zoo animals who had also tested positive for Covid-19 across the globe, there is "no factual evidence that animals can transmit the disease to humans any further.

The Etawah Safari park has been closed to visitors due to the rise in Covid-19 cases across the state of Uttar Pradesh, home to 200 million people according to India's 2011 census. The country's most populous state recorded a seven day rolling average of 28,765 cases Friday, according to data from John Hopkins University.

In a strong criticism of the Uttar Pradesh government's handling of the crisis, the state's top court said Tuesday that deaths of Covid-19 patients due to lack of oxygen is a "criminal act and not less than a genocide," according to a judgement posted on the court's website.

India's second wave has hit its major cities and populous states hard. Cases in the capital, New Delhi, began climbing in late March, accelerating rapidly in April -- and as the virus spread from state to state, other parts of the country began to see their own surge in cases, sometimes weeks after the central hotspots.

The world's second most populous country reported its highest number of coronavirus deaths Saturday with 4,187 recorded over a 24-hour period, according to figures released by the country's health ministry. This is the first time the daily number of deaths has exceeded 4,000, bringing the total figure to 238,270.

India also added 401,078 new Covid-19 cases, the third day in a row that over 400,000 cases have been recorded. The total number of cases stands at 21,892,676.

Over 167 million vaccine doses have been administered in India, according to a press release issued by the health ministry on Friday evening. With over 34 million having received their second dose, 2.6% of India's 1.3 billion-strong population is fully vaccinat

Las Vegas couple finds a horse skeleton from the Ice Age during backyard pool excavation

A Las Vegas couple’s backyard turned into the site of an archeological dig when construction workers found the skeleton of a horse thought to be from the most recent Ice Age

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© Provided by National Post Pool builders found the bones about five feet deep during construction

Matthew Perkins’ plans to build a pool were put on hold last week after the workers found bones buried about five feet deep and alerted police. Perkins and his husband found out about the discovery only after the police arrived, he told CNN , but their investigation took only minutes.

“They came in, dug up the bone, saw that it was fairly large and at that point told us, ‘Too big to be human. Not our concern anymore,'” he said. Curious to learn more, Perkins decided he’d get answers from the experts.

After a few unreturned calls, Perkins was able to get ahold of palaeontologist Joshua Bonde, research director of Nevada Science Center. Bonde told CNN he gets these kinds of calls often and they usually amount to far less interesting finds. What the Perkins had stumbled into were in fact the skeletal remains of “a prehistoric horse.”

So far, the right front leg and shoulder blade, some hair, vertebrae and jaw have been unearthed, roughly four to five feet underground, per New York Times .

The remains are preserved in a way that indicates they were quickly buried, before they could be dispersed by the flow of water or hungry scavengers, according to media reports. Native horses in North America are thought to have become extinct during the Ice Age, which lasted from 2.6 million years ago until about 11,700 years ago.

Bonde estimates the bones are dated between 6,000 and 14,000 years ago. Since Las Vegas was a wetland during the Ice Age, fossils are a common find there, he told New York Times .

Researchers with the US Geological Survey are set to test the fossil to pin down a more exact date.

Perkins said kids often dream of finding a fossil and that he “didn’t really grow out of it.” He plans to pause the build while scientists can study the remains, then loan the fossil to the Nevada Science Center to display.

Newly Identified Species of Saber-Toothed Cat Was So Big It Hunted Rhinos in America

David Nield 


Using detailed fossil comparison techniques, scientists have been able to identify a giant new saber-toothed cat species, Machairodus lahayishupup, which would have prowled around the open spaces of North America between 5 and 9 million years ago.

© pixeldigits/iStock/Getty Images Plus 

The new species is related to this saber-toothed skull.

One of the biggest cats ever discovered, M. lahayishupup is estimated in this new study to have a body mass of some 274 kilograms (604 pounds) or so, and possibly even bigger. It's an ancient relative of the well-known Smilodon, the so-called saber-toothed tiger.

A total of seven M. lahayishupup fossil specimens, including upper arms and teeth, were analyzed and compared with other species to identify the new felid, with the fossils collected from museum collections in Oregon, Idaho, Texas, and California.


1920 mochairodusorcutt

Artist's impression of the new saber-toothed cat. (Roger Witter)

"One of the big stories of all of this is that we ended up uncovering specimen after specimen of this giant cat in museums in western North America," says paleobiologist John Orcutt from Gonzaga University. "They were clearly big cats."

"What we didn't have then, that we have now, is the test of whether the size and anatomy of those bones tells us anything – and it turns out that yes, they do."

The age and size of the fossils gave the researchers a good starting point. Then they used digital images and specialized software to find similarities between the relics – and differences from other cat species, which was just as important.

Points of reference on the specimens showed that they were from the same giant cat and that this cat was a species that hadn't been identified before. Additional evidence came from the teeth, although the researchers admit that the details of how early saber-toothed cats were related to each other is a little "fuzzy".

Upper arms are crucial in these cats for killing prey, and the largest upper arm or humerus fossil discovered in the study was about 1.4 times the size of the same bone in a modern-day lion. That gives you an idea of just how hefty and powerful M. lahayishupup would have been.

"We believe these were animals that were routinely taking down bison-sized animals," says paleontologist Jonathan Calede from Ohio State University. "This was by far the largest cat alive at that time."

Rhinoceroses would have been abundant at the same and may have been animals that M. lahayishupup preyed on, alongside camels and sloths significantly bigger than the ones we're used to today.

While the discoveries made of this new species so far don't include the iconic saber teeth themselves, it's significant that M. lahayishupup has been identified mostly from humerus bones, showing what's possible with the latest analysis software added to many hours of careful study.

Peering back so many millions of years into the past isn't easy, and the researchers say that a more detailed saber-tooth cat family tree is going to be needed to work out exactly where this species fits in. The findings also open up some interesting evolutionary questions about these giant cats.

"It's been known that there were giant cats in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and now we have our own giant saber-toothed cat in North America during this period as well," says Calede.

"There's a very interesting pattern of either repeated independent evolution on every continent of this giant body size in what remains a pretty hyper-specialized way of hunting, or we have this ancestral giant saber-toothed cat that dispersed to all of those continents. It's an interesting paleontological question."

The research has been published in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution.

After a six year legal battle, Aussie surfer granted the tooth of the shark that took his leg

An Australian man got the whole tooth after a six-year legal battle to retrieve a souvenir from the 18-foot Great white shark that almost killed him.

© Provided by National Post Bowles' costly tooth.

At Fishery Bay in the state of South Australia in 2015, surfer Chris Blowes lost his left leg in a shark attack that left him in a coma for 10 days.

The shark’s tooth became lodged in his surfboard but, under state law, possession of animal parts of protected species was illegal and punishable by two years’ jail time and thousands in fines.

Blowes has been granted the first legal exemption to the protected species rule after a drawn-out ordeal he described to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as “ridiculous.”

Husband punches shark to save wife in Australian shark attack

Summer of the shark: Why they are attacking and what to do if it happens to you

“It seems stupid that I wasn’t able to have it in the first place, but that’s what the law says.”

Blowes was out surfing when the great white came up behind him and attacked, BBC reported .

“It shook me about and played with me for a bit — and it ended up pulling my leg off,” he told the outlet.

Blowes was pulled ashore by two friends and treated by paramedics, then hurried to hospital.

“My heart had completely stopped and they had to administer CPR until I showed any signs of life,” he says. Police took his surfboard — and the tooth embedded in it.

He asked state officials for the tooth several times to no avail. Under the Fisheries Management Act in South Australia, possession, sale and purchase of White Sharks can result in a $100,000 fine or two years imprisonment

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Chris Blowes/ Facebook Chris Blowes, 32, back to surfing after

 he lost his leg to a Great white in 2015.

“I would never kill a shark for its tooth but it took my leg [so] I can’t see any reason why I can’t have that,” he said.

“The shark isn’t getting its tooth back [and] I’m not getting my leg back.”

Finally with the help of a local politician, the Department of Primary Industries and Regions granted Blowes the morbid memento, but it came at a huge cost, Blowes told ABC.

“It’s not a fair trade, a leg for a tooth.”

Blowes, who has also written a book about the incident, said he plans to hold on to the tooth as a story for his grandkids and carry it along for motivational speeches.

EL CONDOR PASA REDUX
Group of endangered condors take up residence outside of a California woman's home

By Lauren M. Johnson, CNN

There are only about 200 California condors in the wild in California, but for some reason, 15 to 20 of the massive birds decided to congregate in one location — on a woman's deck.

© Courtesy Cinda Mickols Condors are an endangered species and one of the largest flying birds in the world.

Cinda Mickols, who lives about two hours outside Los Angeles in Tehachapi, California, told CNN that she was coming back into town Monday when her neighbor sent her the first picture of her temporary visitors.

Mickols, 68, had seen condors on her property before, but she was not prepared for what she found.

"When I walked up to my (side) deck where they were sitting on my spa ... I waved my cane and said, "OK, guys, party's over!" and some of them started to fly away," said Mickols, who is 5-foot, 3-inches tall. "But when I went in my house and went out my back deck ... they flew away ... especially when I got the hose out."

Condors are an endangered species and one of the largest flying birds in the world. Their wingspan can spread almost 9 feet and they can weigh more than 20 pounds. In the 1970s, only a few dozen were left in the wild, according to the California Department for Fish and Wildlife.

Because of their endangered status, solutions for removal cannot include anything that could hurt the animals, but residents are allowed to make loud noises and use water to get the birds off their property.

Mickols said she has been using the tactic with other condors who have decided to perch on her roof in the last five days, mostly because of the damage they caused. The birds knocked down planters, shredded her spa cover, and pooped all over her deck.

Her daughter, Seana Quintero of San Francisco, shared images of the mess that quickly went viral on Twitter. But Mickols said she's mostly happy that the species is rallying.

"This is a good news story," she said. "The condors are coming back from extinction. They are welcome to be around, but I want them off my house now."

There is no explanation as to why they chose her home, but Mickols liked how one of her daughter's Twitter followers put it — she must live in a "condor"-minium.

"Nature is amazing," she concluded.

© Courtesy Cinda Mickols The birds knocked over planters and shredded a spa cover on Cinda Mickols' deck.

© Courtesy Cinda Mickols Condors have a wing span of up to 9 feet and can weigh over 20 pounds.

KameraOne

Fishermen surrounded by hundreds of dolphins
Duration: 01:06 

Passengers onboard a fishing boat captured this stunning footage which shows a huge pod of dolphins and a whale tucking into some food together.

Liechtenstein prince accused of killing one of Europe's biggest bears

Romanians have been bombarding the website of the family's Riegersburg Castle with abuse. Travel review site TripAdvisor says it has temporarily suspended reviews of the castle.

By Jack Guy and Tim Lister, CNN

 

© Agent Green via AP Arthur, one of Europe's biggest brown bears, is seen in Romania in this 2019 handout photo provided by NGO Agent Green.

Romanian authorities are investigating after one of Europe's largest brown bears was allegedly shot and killed by a prince from Liechtenstein.

Prince Emanuel von und zu Liechtenstein -- the 32-year-old nephew of the tiny principality's reigning Prince Hans-Adam II -- is accused of shooting 17-year-old Arthur in March during a hunting expedition.

Prosecutors opened an investigation Thursday on two grounds: The bear's killing was not licensed and some of those involved may not have had weapons permits, according to CNN affiliate Antena 3.

Environmental organization Agent Green believes the prince was granted a four-day hunting permit from the Ministry of Environment to shoot a young female bear that had been attacking farms in Covasna county, Transylvania.

Instead it is alleged that the prince shot Arthur, who lives in a protected area.

Gabriel Paun, the president of Agent Green, said in a statement on the group's website that he didn't understand how the prince could confuse a young bear that had been stealing chickens from a village with the largest male bear that existed in the depths of the forest.  

© Schneider-Press/Frank Rol/SIPA/Shutterstock Prince Emanuel von und zu Liechtenstein is the nephew of Liechtenstein's reigning prince.

Romania has the biggest bear population in Europe outside Russia and is proud of its ursine heritage.

It outlawed trophy hunting in 2016. However, exceptions are made in extreme cases, such as when a bear has damaged property or threatened human life.

This story has received widespread media attention in the country.

Romanian Prime Minister Florin Citu said media reports were incorrect and Arthur may not be the biggest brown bear in Europe. His response has been widely criticized.

The prince has said "he doesn't want to be involved in this sensitive matter," Antena 3 reports.

Romanians have been bombarding the website of the family's Riegersburg Castle with abuse. Travel review site TripAdvisor says it has temporarily suspended reviews of the castle.

They need to care about our humanity’: death of Tongan LGBTQ+ activist sparks calls for reform

After the alleged murder of Polikalepo Kefu, Pacific LGBTQI groups are calling for change, including revoking sodomy laws

Phylesha Brown-Acton, a fakafifine woman from Tonga, is calling for legislators in the Pacific nation to revoke queerphobic laws and protect LGBTIQ+ people. Photograph: Supplied

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About this content

Leni Ma'ia'i
Sat 8 May 2021 06.28 BS

The large hall of the basilica in the Tongan capital Nuku’alofa, hasn’t seen many crowds since Covid restrictions were introduced a year ago.

But on Thursday night, people from across all parts of society packed every inch of available space in the venue, clad mostly in black and the traditional woven ta’ovala dress.

Tongan authorities have granted an exemption to the 50-person cap on indoor gatherings, so that people from across the Pacific country can come together for a candlelight vigil in memory of LGBTQ+ and humanitarian activist Polikalepo “Poli” Kefu.


Outpouring of grief after alleged murder of leading Tongan LGBTQI activist

Kefu, 41, a beloved leader in Tonga, was killed on Saturday on a beach near his home in Lapaha. Police have charged a 27-year-old man with his murder. The death has sent shock waves through the small country and through its LGBTQI+ community, who hope that it will spur action to tackle homophobic attitudes and to repeal thediscriminatory laws in the country.

Among those who have come to pay tribute is a member of the country’s royal family, Princess Frederica Tuita, who struggles through tears as she speaks about her close friend of nearly 20 years.

“Being Tongan means living as Poli did, embodying our society’s values of love, humility, respect, and loyalty,” said Tuita.

Princess Frederica Tuita speaks at a candlelight vigil held in Tonga for Polikalepo Kefu. Photograph: Broadcom fm Broadcasting

As diplomatically as she can, considering her high-profile position, Princess Tuita proceeds with an indictment on Tonga for allowing Kefu’s death to happen.

“Our society has yet to take command of the responsibility required to truly commit to those [Tongan] values, and implement them where it counts.”

Where it counts, Tuita implies, is in the greater protections of leitī people against the threat of hate crime.

The Tongan word leitī is one of the many descriptors across the Pacific region to recognise the diverse sexual and gender expressions in their populations.

“It’s more of a comfort word for the LGBTQ+ community. We just call everybody leitī, whether you are trans, a lesbian, or however you identify,” says Joey Joleen Mataele, founder of the Tonga Leitīs Association, who passed down her presidency to Kefu in 2018.

A man handed himself in to police on Monday and has been charged with Kefu’s murder. Tongan Police have not commented on whether they believe Kefu was the vitim of a hate crime, or not.

The hashtag #JusticeForPoli has stayed trending as communities from around the South Pacific gather to host their own vigils. Specifically, the justice the Pacific LGBTQ+ groups are calling for is sweeping law reform, including the repeal of Tonga’s Criminal Offences Act, which makes sodomy punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

President of Tonga Leitis Association Polikalepo Kefu who was killed in Tonga. Photograph: Twitter

These legal issues are not unique to Tonga. In popular tourist destinations like Samoa and Cook Islands, homosexual sex acts are punishable by a prison sentence.

Samoa, which has hosted fa’afafine – understood in western terms as the third, non-binary gender – beauty pageants since the 1970s, only repealed laws criminalising the “impersonation” of females in 2013.

According to Phylesha Brown-Acton, a fakafifine (a Niuean gender identity designation) woman and executive director of F’ine Pasifika, these discriminatory laws empower some members of the community to feel comfortable acting in hateful ways toward leitī people.

“It gives people the permission to further treat leitī worse than dogs. I’m sorry to say, but in Tonga, Tonga has a Dog Act. Dogs have vets and doctors that look after them. There’s absolutely nothing for the leitī, we’re seen as a lower class of animals such as a dog,” said Brown-Acton.

Ymania Brown, the co-secretary of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA World), works hand-in-hand with LGBTQ+ groups in the Pacific to help lobby for law reform.

“There are many, many variables to successfully change laws and some of those variables include the cultural attitudes of different countries, which are different between Pacific nations. To know what’s right for Papua New Guinea, is not right for the Solomon Islands, or for Tonga, or Samoa,” said Brown.

‘The police told me it was my fault’

Police in most Pacific nations do not specifically record incidents of hate crime, so getting conclusive data on how frequently these cases occur is difficult, but Brown-Acton has her own harrowing story of how bad it can be.

She says in 2007 she was the victim of an attempted gang-rape by a group of about 10 men.

She says they pinned her down and tried to tear her pants off, but she was able to get free and run for help. Brown-Acton immediately went to the police to file a charge, but says her complaints were met with ambivalence.

“Basically the police were just like, ‘this is your fault, you should never have been there.’ Nothing eventuated. Nobody was held accountable,” said Brown-Acton. She believes she was attacked because she is queer and that police did not take her seriously for the same reason.

“I’m not isolated to being the only person that has had experienced this, leitī endure and experience violence, day after day”

Tongan Police deputy commissioner, Tevita Vailea said he wasn’t aware of this particular case but invited Brown-Acton to come forward to provide more information about the incident.

“Tongan police have come a long way in trying to develop our capacity and development of Tonga police,” said Vailea. “And part of that you see, is treating people in our society in a more fair and equitable way. So we are doing our best to encourage all victims of crime to come forward and report to us.”
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By all accounts, police work into Poli’s death has been thorough and efficient. The accused murderer is remanded in custody and is due to appear at the magistrates court on 19 May. Investigations into the death are ongoing.

‘We must win our battle before the church’

Beyond policing, Brown-Acton says the fraught relationships between Pacific Island nations and their LGBTQ+ communities largely stems from the introduction of Christianity into the South Pacific from the 18th century.

Before missionaries arrived in the Pacific, all Pacific cultures were known to have wide acceptance of leitīs, fa’afafine, and the many other sexual identities that make up the Pacific.

For religious institutions, which are a fundamental cornerstone of life in the Pacific Islands, the road to accepting these cultural practices has been long and complicated.

Joey, the founder of the Tonga leitīs Association, and a trans woman, remembers the shock on the faces of the congregation when in the late 1970s, she plucked up the courage to wear a dress to a busy Sunday mass. As far as she knows, she was the first first leitī to ever do it in Tonga.

“It was an electric blue pleated dress and I remember walking in that I turned a lot of heads, I was the biggest show of the day,” said Joey. “I don’t know if I was trying to make a statement, but I was just wanting to be me.”

Today, leitī in Tonga can mostly feel free to dress as they please in church, and they’re seeing acknowledgment by some religious institutions.

At Kefu’s vigil, Cardinal Soane Patita Paini Mafi, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Tonga, spoke of the community that “mourn together with the leitīs’ association.”

Ymania Brown, from ILGA World, says that while there may be some progress, there’s a long way to go.

“We need to win the battle in front of the church before we can win in front of the law reformers, because if we win it in front of the clergy, they will stand in front of us. They will actually argue for us, for our inclusion,” said Brown.

In the meantime, the Tongan Leitīs’ Association and various other LGBTQ+ groups are looking to push reform urgently in the legal system.

“It’s hard for me to say, yes, Poli’s death is going to result in wide sweeping changes, because a lot of it depends not on us, because we’re ready, it depends on legislators and parliamentarians in the Pacific to stand up and develop a backbone. They need to care enough about humanity to say, yes, this is a group of people that need protection and then we can have changes,” said Brown.

In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html

Revealed: 46m displaced people excluded from Covid jab programmes

WHO review finds many national vaccination plans exclude asylum seekers, refugees, migrants and IDPs

Among those excluded are 5.6 million Colombians internally displaced by six decades of civil war. Photograph: Raúl Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images

Michael Safi
@safimichael
Fri 7 May 2021

THE GUARDIAN

Tens of millions of asylum seekers, migrants, refugees and internally displaced people around the world have been excluded from national Covid-19 vaccination programmes, according to World Health Organization research seen by the Guardian.

The gaps mean that a scattered group numbering at least 46 million people, about the size of the population of Spain, may struggle to get vaccinated even if a global shortage of doses eases.

Among the excluded are 5.6 million people internally displaced by six decades of civil war in Colombia, hundreds of thousands of refugees in Kenya and Syria and nearly 5 million migrants in Ukraine.

India, Nigeria and Indonesia are among several large countries whose vaccination programmes exclude displaced people, according to the WHO’s review, which was conducted in March. Others, such as Pakistan, appear in the list but have since amended their plans to make them more inclusive.

International health groups have been considering the problem of excluded populations for months, and the groups behind the vaccine-sharing facility Covax approved the establishment in March of a channel of doses reserved as a source of last resort for the most vulnerable people in communities with no other pathway to a jab.


The channel, called the “humanitarian buffer”, will draw on 5% of the doses allocated to poor and lower-middle income countries through Covax, redirecting them toward the most vulnerable 20% in excluded communities, to be administered by NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières.
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Covax has estimated a maximum of about 33 million people would be eligible for vaccines from the buffer, accounting for the most at risk within these groups – health workers, older people and those with risky co-morbidities. It is unclear when, if ever, others in these excluded communities will be vaccinated and from what source.

Humanitarian groups have said that even if all migrants, refugees and other vulnerable populations were included in national plans, there would still be between 60 and 80 million people living in rebel-held territories around the world who would be out of reach.

The WHO research illustrates the scale of the gaps within government schemes. More than 70% of the 104 vaccination plans reviewed excluded migrants, leaving out more than 30 million around the world, including 4.9 million people in India and 2.6 million in the Ivory Coast.

Nor did the majority of plans studied include refugees and asylum seekers, stranding nearly 5 million people without a shot, including 1.8 million in Colombia, 590,000 in Syria and 489,000 in Kenya.

About 11.8 million internally displaced people were also omitted from most plans, leaving out 2.7 million Nigerians and more than a million Indians, according to the research.

Public health experts have argued that exclusionary vaccine plans are ultimately self-defeating, leaving large pockets of the population unprotected and still able to contract and transmit the virus, including variants that may have the potential to evade the immunity granted by vaccines.

“As we learned from the outset of Covid-19 and all the restrictions put in place, availability of testing and access to healthcare for coronavirus, no one is safe until everyone is safe, and that is absolutely the same for vaccination programmes,” said Nadia Hardman, a researcher in refugee and migrant rights at Human Rights Watch.

“What we’re seeing in India now, and what we saw in the UK, is the development of variants which rely and depend on a community not being immune, and the extent to which vaccinations are rolled out to all in a territory is critical for the containment of the virus and containment of threatening variants.”

Vaccine distribution tends to illuminate a state’s blind spots, and even some governments that putatively included refugees in their plans were doing too little to make sure they were actually vaccinated, Hardman said.

She gave the example of Lebanon, which has included the 1.5 million refugees who make up a third of its population in its national plan, “but what we’ve seen is extremely low take-up rates and an unwillingness by authorities to put forward the kinds of promises and assurances and mechanisms to get refugees and vulnerable groups to vaccination centres”, she said.

Countries can also apply to access Covax’s humanitarian buffer in extraordinary circumstances, such as the inflow of a large population of refugees.

There is also a separate “contingency provision”, drawing from the same emergency stockpile, which allows countries to apply for an immediate surge of extra doses through Covax in case of an extraordinary outbreak, potentially such as that which India has experienced over past weeks.

A spokesperson for the WHO did not comment on how many of countries named in the research had subsequently addressed the gaps in their vaccination programmes, but said: “Experience shows that despite best efforts, at-risk populations in humanitarian settings are often left behind and are at risk of being missed by government-led vaccination activities.”