Trying to close out major unfinished business, the Trump administration issued regulations Friday that could lower the prices Americans pay for many prescription drugs.But in a time of political uncertainty, it’s hard to say whether the rules will withstand expected legal challenges from the pharmaceutical industry or whether President-elect Joe Biden’s administration will accept, amend or try to roll them back entirely.”The drug companies don’t like me too much. But we had to do it,” President Donald Trump said in announcing the new policy at the White House. “I just hope they keep it. I hope they have the courage to keep it,” he added, in an apparent reference to the incoming Biden administration, while noting the opposition from drug company lobbyists.The two finalized rules, long in the making, would:— Tie what Medicare pays for medications administered in a doctor’s office to the lowest price paid among a group of …

The World Health Organization (WHO) Friday said more COVID-19 cases have been reported worldwide in the last four weeks than in the first six months of the pandemic. In his regular news briefing from WHO headquarters in Geneva, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said hospitals and intensive care units are filling up or full across Europe and the United States. Tedros said it was good news this week that at least two vaccine candidates have shown to be effective in tests and one is near emergency approval and provides hope. But he stressed that people must continue to use the tools currently available to interrupt the chains of transmission and save lives. Medical staff members wait for citizens to be tested for coronavirus at a school gym that was set up as a testing facility in Bolzano, northern Italy, Nov. 20, 2020.The WHO director-general also introduced a new report published by the U.N. agency …

The World Health Organization says the antiviral drug remdesivir is not beneficial and should not be used in treating patients hospitalized with COVID-19.   A WHO panel of international experts who reviewed the results of clinical trials have concluded there currently is no evidence that remdesivir improves survival of COVID-19 patients, no matter how severely ill they are.      Janet Diaz, head of Clinical Care at the World Health Organization,  says the panel conditionally recommends against the use of remdesivir in hospitalized COVID-19 patients regardless of the severity of their illness. The panel says the evidence shows the drug has possibly no effect on mortality.   “Now, this does not prove that remdesivir does not have a benefit at all. That is why it is a conditional recommendation. There can still be potential small benefit maybe in a health sub-group, which is why the panel also recommended continued trials, …

Pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, said Friday they have filed for emergency authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to use their COVID-19 vaccine, saying they are poised to begin distribution within hours after authorization. The application comes after the companies said testing shows the vaccine has an effectiveness rate of 95 percent, with no serious safety concerns observed to date. In a news release, the companies say in addition to their submission to the FDA, they are seeking authorization from authorities in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and the U.K., and plan to submit applications immediately to other regulatory agencies around the world. FILE – A worker passes a line of freezers holding coronavirus disease vaccine candidate BNT162b2 at a Pfizer facility in Puurs, Belgium, in an undated photograph.With the COVID-19 pandemic surging around the world, the regulators will be under pressure to make a quick decision on …

The U.S. space agency, NASA, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), is set to launch a satellite Saturday designed to monitor rising sea levels, the latest in a series of orbiting spacecraft monitoring the status of the world’s oceans.   NASA says the satellite, called the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, is scheduled to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California early Saturday.  Named after former NASA Earth Science Division Director Michael Freilich, the U.S.-European satellite will be carried into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.   The Sentinel-6 is about the size of a small pickup truck, and it will measure sea-surface height, wave-height and windspeed, allowing scientists to monitor changes in sea levels caused by climate change.     The data that it collects on sea level variations near coastlines will provide information to support coastal management and with planning for floods, while its atmospheric …

Activists in Cameroon held events and marches for Thursday’s World Toilet Day, calling on authorities to provide more public bathrooms. Cameroonian authorities say 60% of its 25 million people lack toilets, fueling the spread of diseases such as cholera and dysentery.School authorities at Yaoundé’s Government Primary School Efoulan say they have close to 2,000 children and teachers but only five toilets, which are often unusable as they run short of water and toilet paper.The Cameroon Association to Improve Hygiene organized this and similar events in 30 schools in the capital to mark this year’s World Toilet Day.The group’s head, Edmond Kimbi, said hundreds of their members also marched in Yaoundé and coastal cities to demand more and better public toilets.”It is actually too regrettable that schools and universities have very few toilets, which lack water and are always dirty,” he said. “It is worse when you visit markets, where thousands …

The National Science Foundation announced Thursday that it would close the huge telescope at the renowned Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in a blow to scientists worldwide who depend on it to search for planets, asteroids and extraterrestrial life. The independent, federally funded agency said it was too dangerous to keep operating the single-dish radio telescope — one of the world’s largest — given the significant damage it recently sustained. An auxiliary cable broke in August, tearing a 100-foot hole in the reflector dish and damaging the dome above it. Then on November 6, one of the telescope’s main steel cables snapped, leading officials to warn that the entire structure could collapse. NSF officials noted that even if crews were to repair all the damage, engineers found the structure would still be unstable in the long term. The main entrance of the Arecibo Observatory is seen in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Nov. 19, 2020.”This decision is not …

Just as the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold, in February, four people set sail for one of the most remote places on Earth – a small camp on Kure Atoll, at the edge of the uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.There, more than 1,400 miles from Honolulu, they lived in isolation for eight months while working to restore the island’s environment. Cut off from the rest of the planet, their world was limited to a tiny patch of sand halfway between the U.S. mainland and Asia. With no television or internet access, their only information came from satellite text messages and occasional emails.Now they are back, emerging into a changed society that might feel as foreign today as island isolation did in March. They must adjust to wearing face masks, staying indoors and seeing friends without giving hugs or hearty handshakes.”I’ve never seen anything like this, but I started reading the …

The head of Germany’s disease control agency said Thursday that while the coronavirus infection rate in the country remains serious, there are signs a partial lockdown is working.Germany implemented restrictive measures in early November to curb a nationwide surge in cases, closing bars, restaurants and other leisure venues but keeping schools and shops open.Speaking to reporters in Berlin, Robert Koch Institute chief Lothar Wieler said the number of new infections has since plateaued, with 22,609 reported on Thursday – roughly the same number as a week ago. He said the fact they are not rising is good news but cautioned that it was too early to say if this is a trend.Wieler said the overall number of cases is still too high, and there is a risk that hospitals may become overwhelmed. Wieler, however, also expressed optimism the numbers will start to go down now that they have stabilized.Wieler also …

Thursday brought further good news from the global effort to produce a safe and effective vaccine against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.  A report published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet says that a potential vaccine developed by British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca in collaboration with the University of Oxford was safe and produced a strong immune response in both younger and older participants.  The two-dose vaccine was given to 560 healthy adult volunteers in a second-stage clinical trial, including 240 volunteers 70 years of age and older.  Dr. Maheshi Ramasamy, a  University of Oxford researcher and co-author of the study, described the antibody and T-cell responses in the older volunteers as “robust.”  Pfizer Says Its Coronavirus Vaccine is 95% EffectivePfizer to seek approval within days for emergency use of vaccine COVID-19 poses the greatest risk for older adults and people with preexisting health conditions.  “We hope that this means our vaccine …

The United States has surpassed 250,000 coronavirus deaths as new cases surge in many parts of the country.New York City on Wednesday announced the closure of its school system, the nation’s largest, with the city recording a seventh consecutive day with a COVID-19 positivity rate above 3%.“Public school buildings will be closed as of tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 19, out [of] an abundance of caution. We must fight back the second wave of COVID-19,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wrote on Twitter.New York City has reached the 3% testing positivity 7-day average threshold. Unfortunately, this means public school buildings will be closed as of tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 19, out an abundance of caution. We must fight back the second wave of COVID-19.— Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) November 18, 2020In-person school resumed for New York children between late September and early October, when the seven-day positivity rate was under 2%.Other …

The World Health Organization’s emergencies program director said Wednesday that vaccines alone would not end the COVID-19 pandemic and would do nothing to stop the current global surge in coronavirus infections.Mike Ryan made the comments during a virtual question-and-answer session from the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.His comments came the same day that pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech announced that final results from the late-stage trial of their COVID-19 vaccine showed it was 95% effective.The companies said they had the required two months of safety data and would apply for emergency U.S. authorization within days.On Monday, Moderna released preliminary data for its vaccine, showing similar effectiveness.Ryan said the world would have to get through this current wave of COVID-19 infections without vaccines, which he said were not the total answer.”Some people think that vaccines will be, in a sense, the solution, the unicorn we’ve all been chasing. It’s …

The World Health Organization has officially declared an end to the Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo’s Equateur Province, nearly six months after the first cases were reported. Health officials are hailing the end of this outbreak as a milestone and cause for celebration.  Combating Ebola in the remote, heavily forested region posed numerous logistical challenges, not least of which was reaching communities scattered across this geographically vast area and then gaining their trust.Bob Ghosn is head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Ebola Response Operation in the DRC   Speaking on a telephone line from Goma, he tells VOA tackling Ebola in itself is difficult enough.   But tackling two epidemics, Ebola and COVID-19, at the same time has proven to be a nightmare.“It also made the supply chain for Ebola response much more difficult because everything slowed down, borders have closed,” Ghosn said.  “There obviously …

Thousands of demonstrators rallied Wednesday in central Berlin to protest the parliamentary vote that would give Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government powers to enforce restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19.Germany’s lower and upper houses of parliament are due to vote and pass laws Wednesday that could allow the government to impose restrictions on social contact, rules on mask-wearing, drinking alcohol in public, shutting shops and stopping sports events.   Although most Germans accept the latest limited lockdown to tackle a second wave of the virus, a minority of right-wing critics say the law gives the government too much power. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has even compared the measures to the Enabling Act of 1933 that paved the way Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship.  Germany Sees Signs for Cautious Optimism in COVID-19 Cases Infectious-disease expert says while new numbers are still high, the infection rate is down Berlin police, bolstered …

Iota continues to pound Nicaragua with strong winds and heavy rains even after weakening from a hurricane to a tropical storm. As of late Tuesday night, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said Iota was carrying maximum sustained winds of 65 kilometers an hour on a path towards Tegucigalpa, Honduras.  Forecasters say Tropical Storm Iota will dump between 7 to 20 kilometers of rain on a stretch of Central America from southern Nicaragua to southern Belize overnight, leading to “significant, life-threatening flash flooding and river flooding,” along with mudslides in higher areas. The storm is expected to weaken to a tropical depression through the night before dissipating sometime Wednesday.A woman sits near her house damaged the passing of Hurricane Iota, in Puerto Cabezas, Nov. 18, 2020.Iota made landfall Monday on the northeastern coast of Nicaragua Monday carrying maximum winds of 210 kilometers an hour, then grew in speed to 250 kilometers an …

An agreement announced Tuesday paves the way for the largest dam demolition in U.S. history, a project that promises to reopen hundreds of miles of waterway along the Oregon-California border to salmon that are critical to tribes but have dwindled to almost nothing in recent years. If approved, the deal would revive plans to remove four massive hydroelectric dams on the lower Klamath River, creating the foundation for the most ambitious salmon restoration effort in history. The project on California’s second-largest river would be at the vanguard of a trend toward dam demolitions in the U.S. as the structures age and become less economically viable amid growing environmental concerns about the health of native fish. Previous efforts to address problems in the Klamath Basin have fallen apart amid years of legal sparring that generated distrust among tribes, fishing groups, farmers and environmentalists. Opponents of dam removal worry about their property values and …

A group of major U.S. utilities, Tesla, Uber and others said on Tuesday they are launching a new group to lobby for national policies to boost electric vehicle sales. The new Zero Emission Transportation Association wants to boost consumer electric vehicle (EV) incentives and encourage the retirement of gasoline-powered vehicles. It also advocates for tougher emissions and performance standards that will potentially enable full electrification by 2030. Under President Donald Trump, the White House rejected new tax credits for electric vehicles as it proposed to kill existing credits and made it easier to sell gas-guzzling vehicles. President-elect Joe Biden promises new tax incentives, including new rebates to buy EVs and a dramatic expansion of charging stations for electric vehicles – policy measures automakers have long advocated. “We can own the electric vehicle market – building 550,000 charging stations – and creating over a million good jobs here at home – with the federal government …

The World Health Organization’s 194 member states have agreed to push for the global elimination of cervical cancer, a disease that every year affects 570,000 women and kills more than 300,000. A new strategy to accelerate the elimination of cervical cancer was adopted at this year’s World Health Assembly.Cervical cancer is a vaccine-preventable disease and curable if detected early and adequately treated. Health officials say the tools are available to eliminate this disease, the fourth most common cancer among women globally.   WHO’s three-point strategy calls for all girls to be vaccinated for HPV or human papillomavirus before age 15. It says women should be screened twice between the ages of 35 and 45 and those found to have the cancer should receive treatment. WHO’s assistant director-general, Princess Nothemba Simelela, says new technology based on artificial intelligence can be used to screen women for cervical cancer.    “If these technologies are used, …