China OKs first homegrown vaccine as COVID-19
surges globally
BEIJING — China authorized its first homegrown COVID-19 vaccine for general use Thursday, adding another shot that could see wide use in poorer countries as the virus surges back around the globe.
The Sinopharm vaccine had already been given to groups such as health care professionals and essential workers under emergency-use guidelines as part of China’s program to inoculate 50 million people before the Lunar New Year holiday in February. But the go-ahead should allow it to be supplied more broadly at home and moves Beijing closer to being able to ship it abroad. It comes one day after British regulators authorized AstraZeneca’s inexpensive and easy-to-handle vaccine.
Both shots have been closely watched by developing countries, many of which have been unable to secure the Pfizer and Moderna doses being snapped up by rich nations. Pakistan’s science minister said Thursday that his government will buy 1.2 million doses of a Sinopharm shot, two days after its death toll topped 10,000.
The greenlight came a day after the state-owned company announced that preliminary data from last-stage trials had shown it to be 79.3% effective. That announcement did not detail the size of the control group, how many people were vaccinated and at what point the efficacy rate was reached after injection, and experts have cautioned that trial data needs to be shared.
Officials have said the vaccine standards were developed in “close cooperation” with the World Health Organization. Securing WHO’s so-called pre-qualification could go some way toward assuring the rest of the world about the quality of Chinese vaccines, which already face a reputation problem back home. It would also open the path for the shots to be distributed in the global vaccine consortium, COVAX, and potentially in countries that don’t have their own regulatory agencies.
New Year’s revelries muted by virus as 2020 closes out
This New Year’s Eve is being celebrated like no other in most of the world, with many bidding farewell to a year they’d prefer to forget.
From the South Pacific to New York City, pandemic restrictions on open air gatherings saw people turning to made-for-TV fireworks displays or packing it in early since they could not toast the end of 2020 in the presence of friends or carousing strangers.
As midnight rolled from Asia to the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Americas, the New Year’s experience mirrored national responses to the virus itself. Some countries and cities canceled or scaled back their festivities, while others without active outbreaks carried on like any other year.
Australia was among the first to ring in 2021. In past years, 1 million people crowded Sydney’s harbor to watch fireworks. This time, most watched on television as authorities urged residents to stay home to see the seven minutes of pyrotechnics that lit up the Sydney Harbor Bridge and its surroundings.
Melbourne, Australia’s second-most populated city, called off its annual fireworks show to discourage crowds. Officials in London made the same decision. And while the ball was set to drop in New York’s Times Square like always, police fenced off the site synonymous with New Year’s Eve.
Chief: Police didn’t show care for Andre Hill after shooting
COLUMBUS, Ohio — In the minutes that ticked by after a police officer shot Andre Hill inside his friend’s garage, officers scoured the driveway for shell casings, strung crime scene tape around the house and blocked off the street.
At one point, two Columbus officers rolled Hill over and put handcuffs on him before leaving him alone again. None of them, according to body camera footage released Thursday, offered any first aid even though Hill, a 47-year-old Black man, was barely moving, groaning and bleeding while laying on the garage floor.
Roughly 10 minutes passed before a police supervisor showed up and asked, “Anybody doing anything for him?” It wasn’t until then that an officer began pumping the chest of Hill, who later was pronounced dead at a hospital on Dec. 22.
From wire sources
While Officer Adam Coy, who is white, was fired this week over accusations of incompetence and gross neglect of duty in the fatal shooting, the officers who failed to treat Hill also are under investigation for failing to follow department policy.
Police Chief Thomas Quinlan said he was horrified by the lack of compassion shown in the bodycam videos.
Census: Early analysis shows false data was rare
Responding to criticism that a shortened schedule jeopardized data quality, the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday said less than a half percent of census takers interviewing households for the 2020 head count may have falsified their work, suggesting such problems were few and far between.
The statistical agency said in a statement that a preliminary look at the data suggests 0.4% of the hundreds of thousands of census takers, also known as enumerators, may have either falsified data or performed their jobs unsuccessfully.
“Therefore, enumerators who may have falsified data or performed poor quality work were very rare,” the statement said.
The Census Bureau issued its statement after a report from its watchdog agency Wednesday that expressed concerns over lapses in quality control checks on the data used for deciding how many congressional seats each state gets and how $1.5 trillion in federal funding is distributed each year. The lapses raised concerns about the quality of the census data, according to the report by the Office of Inspector General.
The report said the Census Bureau failed to complete 355,000 reinterviews of households to verify their information was accurate. Reinterviews also were not conducted with more than a third of the census takers who completed a household interview, and 70,000 cases that were red-flagged for reinterviews were given a pass even though a census clerk was unable to determine if the original interview data was correct, the report said.
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Sen. Perdue quarantines for virus exposure before GA runoff
SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Republican Sen. David Perdue was forced into quarantine Thursday in the home stretch of Georgia’s high-stakes Senate runoffs, disclosing just five days before the election that he had been exposed to a campaign worker infected with the coronavirus.
Perdue’s campaign did not say how long he plans to stay in quarantine, but guidelines of the federal Centers for Disease Control say those exposed to the virus can resume normal activities after seven days if they have a negative test result.
It’s bad timing for Perdue and fellow Republicans heading into critical runoffs that will determine control of the Senate. Following the CDC’s guidance would keep Perdue in isolation for the remainder of the campaign, including a planned Georgia rally Monday with President Donald Trump.
“This morning, Senator Perdue was notified that he came into close contact with someone on the campaign who tested positive for COVID-19,” the Perdue campaign’s statement said. “Both Senator Perdue and his wife tested negative today, but following his doctor’s recommendations and in accordance with CDC guidelines, they will quarantine.”
The statement went on to say Perdue’s campaign “will continue to follow CDC guidelines.”
Microsoft says hackers viewed source code, didn’t change it
Microsoft said Thursday in a blog post that hackers tied to a massive intrusion of dozens of U.S. government agencies and private companies sneaked further into its systems than previously thought, although the intrusion doesn’t appear to have caused any additional harm.
The company said the hackers were able to view some of the code underlying Microsoft software, but weren’t able to make any changes to it.
Microsoft played down any risk associated with the additional intrusion, noting that its software development relies on code sharing within the company, a practice called “inner source.” Likewise, Microsoft said it doesn’t rely on keeping program code secret as a security measure and instead assumes that adversaries have seen its code and uses other defensive measures to frustrate attacks.
The company said it found no evidence of hacker access to customer data and no indication that its systems were used to attack others.
The hack began as early as March when malicious code was snuck into updates to SolarWinds software that monitors computer networks. Microsoft helped respond to the breach with cybersecurity firm FireEye, which discovered the hack when the security firm itself was targeted.
