Login to BlackFacts.com using your favorite Social Media Login. Click the appropriate button below and you will be redirected to your Social Media Website for confirmation and then back to Blackfacts.com once successful.
Enter the email address and password you used to join BlackFacts.com. If you cannot remember your login information, click the “Forgot Password” link to reset your password.
THE fear and confusion surrounding the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine donated by China and brought into the country this week reflects the failure by government to relay information to the citizens. Health practitioners, teachers and trade unionists have expressed fears over being used as guinea pigs to prove the efficacy of the vaccine amid reports that it had resulted in complications in some countries it has been rolled out. Among some of the concerns, the drug has not been approved by the World Health Organisation (WHO), but is still undergoing tests and the highest efficacy rate it has had is 75% compared to other drugs that are now in wide use, AstraZeneca, Modena, Pfizer, the Russian Sputnik 5 which have had higher efficacy rates. Suddenly, the Sinopharm drug received amid much pomp and fanfare, is now presenting more headaches for government than solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic that has wreaked havoc in the country, claiming more than 1 400 lives since March last year. Government can only blame itself for the dearth of information around the Chinese vaccine. Comments by the head of monitoring and evaluation in the Health and Child Care ministry, Robert Mudyiradima, which circulated widely on social media, to the effect that they still didn’t have full knowledge of the vaccine have worsened the uncertainty over its safety. A well-organised and detailed information campaign about the drug will go a long way in allaying fears over the safety of the vaccine. This should include the public vaccination of President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his two deputies Constantino Chiwenga and Kembo Mohadi. Government’s messaging deficit has long been its Achilles heel and could severely hamper its efforts to curb the pandemic. Its pathetic messaging and double standards have not only been limited to the Sinopharm vaccine. Doesn't it raise eyebrows that while government is preaching the need to limit movement of people and public gatherings, the ruling Zanu PF party continues to hold face-to-face meetings? The glaring double standards were also laid bare when First Lady Auxillia Mnangagwa ignored her husband’s order to avoid public gatherings by organising a cooking contest in Chinhoyi in blatant defiance of the national lockdown regulations. That this was held a day after government warned citizens to brace for more restrictions in light of the highly fatal and fast-spreading South African variant, not only exhibits absence of leadership, but is also an insult to the country’s citizens. With such deplorable messaging, the government can forget about successfully curbing the COVID-19 pandemic.
A November 26 letter from the presidency asked the head of Uganda's national drug authority to 'work out a mechanism' to clear the importation of the vaccines.
China has about five COVID-19 vaccine candidates at different levels of trials. It was not clear what vaccine was being imported into Uganda.
One of the frontrunners is the Sinopharm vaccine developed by the Beijing Institute of Biological Product, a unit of Sinopharm’s China National Biotec Group (CNBG).
On Wednesday, the United Arab Emirates said the vaccine has 86% efficacy, citing an interim analysis of late-stage clinical trials.
China has used the drug to vaccinate up to a million people under its emergency use program.
On Tuesday, Morocco said it was ordering up to 10 million doses of the vaccine.
Record cases
Uganda on Monday registered 701 new COVID-19 cases, the highest-ever daily increase, bringing its national count to 23,200.
The new cases were out of the 5,578 samples tested for the novel coronavirus over the past 24 hours, the country's health ministry said in a statement.
Tuesday's tally was 606, the second-highest ever number of new infections, bringing the cumulative number of confirmed cases in the east African country to 23,860.
Health authorities have blamed ongoing election campaigns which have drawn huge crowds for the rise in infections.
The World Health Organisation recognises the need to include women in outbreaks preparedness and response such as the global Covid-19 policy spaces but other than the disaggregation of the disease burden by gender, response measures have not addressed the gendered impacts.
During the West African outbreak of Ebola virus disease, women’s voices were ignored thus resources for reproductive and sexual health were diverted to the emergency response, contributing to a rise in maternal mortality.
During the Zika virus outbreak, women did not have autonomy over their sexual and reproductive lives, which was compounded by their inadequate access to health services.
Gendered measures should include: disaggregation of the coronavirus data by sex, age, and disability; country strategic plans for preparedness and response must be grounded in strong gender analysis; strengthening leadership and meaningful participation of women in addressing Covid-19 including budgeting.
Paying attention to respiratory illnesses in pregnant women; issuing clinical guidelines for treating pregnant women with Covid-19 infection; addressing the growing mental health and psychosocial needs of females; providing financial incentives for families and girls to resume their education when the confinement ends.
The justified uprisings we see erupting across the nation — from New York City to Philadelphia to Atlanta to Minneapolis to Louisville to Salt Lake City to Los Angeles — are in fact the rebellion of a people who are responding to the daily massacres that they have experienced for generations in a long list of past and present injuries that include abusive police tactics, stagnant wages, lack of contracts with black businesses, growing health disparities, discriminatory housing practices, the denial of mortgages and loans, and other offenses that are repeatedly addressed only with symbolic gestures rather than substantive action.
Today, black people are fighting battles seemingly on every front, from ensuring we can survive the health and economic stresses that COVID-19 has put on our businesses and communities, to fighting that other virus that this nation has long given up finding the vaccine for: systemic racism.
In the long history of black rebellion in the United States, protests have never been solely about police violence, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophies and the policies that produce and condone this violence.
On behalf of the leadership of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, we send our deepest sympathies and warmest embrace to the families of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and the countless others not ingrained in our mental catalogs as hashtags or videos whom we have lost to police violence.
Segun Idowu is the executive director of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts (BECMA).
Botswana has signed an agreement with the global vaccine distribution scheme co-led by the World Health Organisation, giving it the option to buy coronavirus vaccines for 20% of its population, a senior health official told Reuters
Sex Clinic host Sarah Mulindwa: it’s time to get clued up about HIV prevention pill...
The post Preventing HIV is essential – that’s where Prep comes in appeared first on Voice Online.
[Vanguard] With the approval of the COVID-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech, and Mordena Inc., mass vaccinations have since commenced in the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
[This Day] The World Health Organisation (WHO) has advised Nigeria not to go to sleep on the fact that poliomyelitis has been finally eradicated.
South Africa, along with all southern hemisphere nations, is reporting almost no influenza cases so far this winter.
Founded in 1963, the aim of the Organization of Africa Unity, the precursor of Africa Union (AU) was to safeguard the interests and independence of all African states, encourage the continent's development, and settle disputes among member states.
I agree with the President of Namibia, Dr. Hage Geingob, that African Union (AU) had achieved \"what some thought would be impossible - a free, democratic, self-governing and most importantly an Africa without incessant civil wars\" .
Indeed Africa has come of age as articulated by Nigeria's General Murtala Ramat Muhammed in his \"Africa Has Come of Age\" speech at the OAU Summit Summit on Angola which categorically mobilised African Heads of State for the recognition of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) as the authentic government of the Angolan people contrary to the preference of United States of America and the West in general.
The chair of the Africa Union, South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa hit the nail on the head when in his anniversary speech he observed that \"As Africans we will continue to stand on the side of justice and support the people of the Western Sahara in their enduring struggle for freedom and self-determination\".
It's time for genuine collaboration and unity of purpose between African states in combating the impact of the pandemic within the new normal and within the context of the African Union's Agenda 2063.
The African Union obtains 270 Million coronavirus vaccines in efforts to surmount the second wave of the pandemic.
\"Test, test, test\" has been the mantra for defeating the novel coronavirus, but African countries are finding themselves at the end of a long global queue for the chemical reagents and other commodities necessary for administering diagnostic tests, according to public health experts.
Although mass testing is seen as a key component to slowing transmission, African health authorities are struggling to compete with richer, more powerful countries when it comes to procuring the scarce testing material on the global market, notes a new commentary published in The Lancet scientific journal.
Building self-sufficiency
Many African researchers foresaw this scarcity and the consequent need for African countries to be as self-sufficient as possible when it comes to diagnostic tests.
Given the global shortages - particularly the reagents necessary to run polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, which remain almost exclusively the basis for diagnosis - African countries need to take two paths forward, suggests Dr. Misaki Wayengera of Uganda's Makerere University.
But there are only a few diagnostics manufacturing facilities across Africa that have developed RDTs and could work on COVID-19 solutions, acknowledged Dr. Moses Alobo of the African Academy of Sciences, who is leading the effort to coordinate elite researchers across the continent.
\"There are over 123,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases on the African continent - with more than 50,000 recoveries and 3,600 deaths,\" it said.
The figures show that South Africa, Algeria and Nigeria have the highest reported cases in the continent.
According to the report, South Africa has 25,937 cases and 552 deaths, followed by Algeria with 8,857 cases and 623 deaths, while Nigeria has 8,733 confirmed cases and 254 deaths.
It said that Lesotho had only two confirmed cases with zero death.
Seychelles had 11 reported cases and zero death, while Namibia recorded 22 confirmed cases with no death.
In light of a warning by the World Health Organisation with regard to the reopening of schools while Covid-19 is approaching its peak, President Cyril Ramaphosa says the matter is currently under discussion.
JUSTICE minister Ziyambi Ziyambi yesterday said government would not be swayed by recommendations from World Health Organisation (WHO) to lift a ban on by-elections, insisting the environment was not yet safe to hold polls. BY VENERANDA LANGA Quizzed by opposition legislators over the legality of a statutory instrument (SI) used by Vice-President Constantino Chiwenga, who is Health minister, to suspend the by-elections, Ziyambi said government would not be forced to adopt WHO recommendations hook, line and sinker. This came after WHO executive director for health emergencies programme Michael Ryan last week said it was possible to hold safe elections during COVID-19 if proper measures were put in place. The WHO boss said elections were a key human right which governments should not block under the guise of enforcing COVID-19 safety measures. But Ziyambi insisted that local conditions were not ripe for electoral activities. “When we make regulations, we make them according to our enabling legislation and we take advice as and when we see it fit according to our local conditions,” he said. “We do not just take advice for the sake of advice, otherwise it won’t be advice, but a directive. In our case, we analyse other issues by international organisations and we apply them to our conditions. Let us not worry about what WHO said, we do what is applicable to our conditions.” He added: “Coming to by-elections, we have a COVID-19 declaration which is ending in January pursuant to the SIs we enacted to give effect to that declaration in order for us to control the pandemic. “One of the SIs was to do with holding of by-elections. In other words, they were suspended for some time, but when the conditions are now right, we can go for elections. You must also consider that there is a curfew in place and when people are campaigning and there is a curfew, we are bound to criminalise several of our people. “We do not take everything that they say. We cannot endanger our people. At such a time when the pandemic improves, then we are going to talk about exercising the right to vote.”
HEALTH experts and civil society organisations have warned of a possible spike in COVID-19 cases due to reckless behaviour by citizens who are moving around without masks and ignoring social distancing regulations.
Since Monday, Bulawayo experienced an influx of people in the city centre as police removed roadblocks which helped restrict movement and enforce wearing of face masks.
While it has been easier for the urban populace to adhere to lockdown regulations, rural communities are going out in their large numbers to give a send-off to their departed and in most instances failing to exercise social distancing and wearing masks,” the trust said in a report on Tuesday.
Community advocacy action team members who also attended the funeral expressed concern over the limited understanding of the need to adhere to the COVID-19 precautionary regulations.
They observed that few people were wearing face masks and social distancing was not being practised at the funeral.”
[Lesotho Times] Health workers will be prioritised when Lesotho receives its consignment of the Covid-19 vaccine in April this year Ministry of Health expanded programme on immunisation (EPI) nurse, 'Mamonaheng Posholi has said.
President Cyril Ramaphosa said the decision on whether to suspend academic activities amid the COVID-19 pandemic will be made soon.
South Africa currently has a cumulative COVID-19 caseload of 1 492 909 along with 48 094 deaths and 1 391 155 recoveries.
The African Union (AU) will test the controversial herbal remedy for Covid-19 from Madagascar.
“I am excited to update you that the Republic of Madagascar, through its Ministry of Health, has agreed to collaborate with the African Union and Africa Centres for Disease Control (Africa CDC) to explore further the remedy they have discovered for the treatment of Covid-19 to benefit the continent at large,” Mr Kwesi said on Twitter.
Last week, South Africa’s health minister Zweli Mkhize confirmed that they had received a scientific research request from Madagascar on the remedy.
Last week, the AU received data on the remedy for review based on global technical and ethical norms.
“Once furnished with the details, the Union, through the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, will review the scientific data gathered so far on the safety and efficacy of the Covid-19 Organics.
