Some 523,200 doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford COVID-19 vaccine procured by the COVAX Facility – a partnership co-led by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the World Health Organization (WHO) were handed over to the Government of the Lao PDR in an official ceremony held in Vientiane on Tuesday.

The new doses of COVID-19 vaccine will help the Lao PDR achieve its 2021 goal of 50 per cent vaccination coverage.

Deputy Prime Minister Kikeo Khaykhamphithoune received the aid package from WHO Officer-in-Charge to the Lao PDR Jun Gao in the presence of Deputy Minister of Health Sanong Thongsana, UNICEF Representative to the Lao PDR Pia Rebello Britto and representatives of key development partners.

“The Government of the Lao PDR greatly appreciates the support of the COVAX Facility in procuring these life-saving vaccines for the people of the Lao PDR, beginning with the first shipment of doses supported by the COVAX Facility in early 2021 up until now, and we commend their commitment to ensuring global equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines. This new shipment of vaccines will accelerate the efforts to reach 50 per cent of the population in 2021,” said Deputy Prime Minister Kikeo Khaykhamphithoune.

The vaccines will be primarily used for those who are at high risk of severe COVID-19 but have not received all recommended doses yet.

The priority groups include frontline workers including healthcare workers, elderly aged 60 years or above, people with underlying health conditions, pregnant people, and essential workers including school teachers and staff across the country in line with the National Deployment and Vaccination Plan.

“This is another very important moment in the Lao PDR’s COVID-19 response efforts. We are now close to our vaccination target for the end of this year and this new shipment is a great contribution from the COVAX Facility to help us achieve this goal and will enable us to further control community transmission in the Lao PDR. This vaccine is safe and effective in preventing severe disease and death, including against the delta variant,” said WHO Officer-in-Charge to the Lao PDR Jun Gao.

As of Nov 3, more than 6.5 million people have been vaccinated against Covid-19 with 3.3 million people given first doses of Covid-19 vaccine and 2.8 million people administered with second doses.

“UNICEF is proud to be part of the COVAX Facility and to support the COVID-19 response in the Lao PDR. We will continue working with our partners to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines in the country, playing a leading role in supplying COVID-19 vaccines to the Lao PDR and contributing to strengthening the country’s capacity to handle the pandemic. We are particularly grateful to our partners for their contributions to Gavi and COVAX which are helping to vaccinate the Lao population. We all have to continue working together in solidarity as nobody is safe until everyone is safe,” stated UNICEF Representative to the Lao PDR Pia Rebello Britto.

Gavi board members represented in the Lao PDR include Australia, Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, Japan, The Republic of Korea, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.

COVAX is co-led by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, WHO and CEPI, working in partnership with UNICEF as well as the World Bank, civil society organizations, manufacturers, and others. COVAX is part of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, a ground-breaking global collaboration to accelerate development, production, and equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines.

The AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured in the Republic of Korea by SK Bioscience Co. Ltd (SK Bio) has been authorised for emergency use by WHO and the Food & Drug Department, Ministry of Health.

Source: Lao News Agency

No in-person school. Isolation from friends. Lost rites of passage like graduation ceremonies. The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of many children in the United States.

“A lot of children’s joy comes from being with friends or from play, and from social interaction. When you ask kids, ‘What’s making you happy?’ 90% of the time, it’s being around friends or doing things with friends,” says Elena Mikalsen, head of the Psychology Section at the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio in Texas. “That was kind of taken away during the pandemic. … For the longest time, all kids had was the academics and no joy.”

A recent report finds that the uncertainty and disruption caused by COVID-19 has negatively affected the emotional and mental health of about one-third of America’s youth. So much so that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), along with other children’s health organizations, has declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health.

“Elevated symptoms of anxiety, depression or stress,” says Nirmita Panchal, a senior policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a nonprofit organization focusing on national health issues. “There’s also been a number of changes in behavior that parents have reported with some children having a poor appetite and difficulty sleeping. For others, it may be fear or irritability and clinginess.”

Panchal co-authored the report, which found that 8% of children between the ages of 3 and 17 currently have anxiety. That number rises to 13% among adolescents ages 12 to 17.

“During the pandemic, children, just like everybody else, have experienced a number of changes and disruptions,” Panchal says. “That includes school closures, possibly financial difficulties at home, isolation, perhaps the loss of loved ones and then difficulty accessing health care. So, all of these factors may be contributing to increased mental health issues among children.”

Rates of children’s mental health concerns and suicide steadily increased between 2010 and 2020, according to the AAP, which says the pandemic has made the crisis worse with “dramatic increases” in the number of young people visiting hospital emergency rooms for mental health-related concerns, including possible suicide attempts.

Maryland psychologist Mary Karapetian Alvord says uncertainty, as well as losing out on school activities, provoked varying levels of grief in young people.

“Particularly high school students, who really lost out on all of the fun activities, the fun clubs, and also graduations and homecoming, football games and all the social as well as the outlets that they have,” says Alvord, who is also an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at The George Washington University School of Medicine. “So, those are themes that have dominated this pandemic, I think, grief, loss on all those different levels, and then just constant uncertainty. And we then get a rise in anxiety.”

Alvord says the young people being seen at her practice have a sense that they’re not moving forward, which has led to anger, frustration, sadness and anxiety.

“It runs the gamut, but kids have lost time,” she says. “They have a sense that they have lost time, and not in terms of only maybe some academic skills, which a lot of the schools are concerned about, but in terms of maturity. How do you mature as a kid? It’s not by being home 24/7.”

And while children missed being in school with their friends, the idea of returning to in-person classes also triggered some anxiety.

“Some kids were scared to go back to school because they were afraid of contracting COVID. They were afraid of what school might look like and what that would entail, especially kids that already were more predispositioned to have anxiety or depression,” says psychologist Nekeshia Hammond, former president of the Florida Psychological Association. “It basically made that process a lot more stressful. And not just school but going back into social situations.”

The pandemic has shaken the sense of safety most children feel. More than 140,000 children in the United States lost a primary and/or secondary caregiver to COVID-19.

“The majority of kids just have this innocence, in a way, that the world is safe. ‘I’m going to be OK. People are here to protect me,’” Hammond says. “And that got stripped away for a lot of kids who don’t feel the world is safe.”

Children of color have been disproportionately impacted by the losses caused by the pandemic. And not solely because they were more likely to lose a loved one to the virus.

Mikalsen, who works primarily with minority youth and inner-city youth in Texas, found that many of the children she spoke to were forced to use their smartphones for their schooling because they didn’t have computers at home. Spotty internet connections made it difficult to stay in touch with their schoolwork and to get their assignments.

Some of Mikalsen’s young patients were home alone all day because their parents are essential, front-line workers.

“A lot of the kids that I was talking to during the pandemic, they were completely alone at home, left to be there by themselves and, ‘Hey, if you can get connected to school, that’d be great, but if you don’t, no big deal,’” Mikalsen says. “So many kids that I talked to, they just slept all day and had nobody to talk to. Things like that can really cause a lot of depression and anxiety.”

And then there was the societal upheaval caused by the police murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man in Minneapolis. Video of police officer Derek Chauvin pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck while Floyd struggled to breathe went viral, sparking nationwide protests against police brutality.

“All of that affects kids of color in a different way, on top of a global pandemic, on top of, ‘You can’t go to school, and you lost a loved one.’ It was basically more compounded,” Hammond says. “There were so many different stressors all at one time, which made it extremely difficult as far as coping, and as far as mental health.”

The AAP is calling for more federal funding for mental health screenings and treatment for all children from infancy through adolescence, with an emphasis on making certain kids from less privileged homes get the services they need.

“We don’t want to wait until it’s unmanageable. We want to have scaffolding and services in place to catch kids when they’re having that much trouble,” Alvord says. “We’re all tied to one another, and if your family is doing better, then those kids get sent to school and they’re doing better in school. Which helps the whole health of the classroom. Which helps the teachers do better to teach and do what they need to, instead of having to deal with the mental health crisis.”

Source: Voice of America

Chinese President Xi Jinping called on other nations to “step up cooperation” and act on climate targets, but offered no new commitments in a statement to the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, known as COP26.

“Visions will come true only when we act on them. Parties need to honor their commitments, set realistic targets and visions, and do their best according to national conditions to deliver their climate action measures,” said Xi, who is not attending the talks in person. China is the world’s biggest carbon emitter.

China has been facing an energy shortage that sparked widespread power outages over two-thirds of the country in late September. This was one of China’s worst power shortages in a decade. The outages affected factories, leading to concerns about disruptions to global supply chains. China, meanwhile, said it has increased its production of coal — a fossil fuel — to ease the power crunch.

The Chinese leader’s long-anticipated statement shows that China cannot abandon fossil fuels during a power crunch without more infrastructure, analysts said.

Households may lack heating, while manufacturing could suffer due to the power shortage, said Jane Nakano, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“I am a little disappointed that President Xi Jinping didn’t really go ahead and answer some of the key questions that many of us have had,” Nakano said. “I wonder if the power crunch that China is facing at the moment has really gotten in the Chinese leadership’s way of wanting to have perhaps a much broader commitment.”

Xi noted an earlier Chinese government plan to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030.

Last month, China announced a focus on green energy in a new version of its Belt and Road Initiative for infrastructure projects stretching from Asia to Europe.

Biggest global polluter

While most economies saw a CO2 emission drop of five to 10 percentage points in 2020 over recent years, China stood out as the only major economy to log an increase, the Paris-based International Energy Agency said. Its 2020 total reached 75 metric tons per kilowatt hour.

The research firm Rhodium Group reports more than 27% of total global emissions in 2019 came from China.

Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst with the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Helsinki, recently said China’s CO2 emissions grew an unusually fast 15 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2021. She linked the surge to a post-COVID-19 rebound from lockdowns of the past year and an economic recovery that has “been dominated by growth in construction, steel and cement.”

At previous U.N. events and in its economic blueprints, China has said it will transition to greener, cleaner fuels while controlling coal consumption. It’s aiming for carbon neutrality by 2060.

But China isn’t ready yet, said Scott Harold, Washington-based senior political scientist with RAND Corporation, another research group.

“They recognize a desire to shift their energy mix away from coal and toward renewables, but in fact their energy mix keeps shifting the other way because it’s really, really hard to do and they have not invested in or owned the technologies that would enable to them to make some of those changes,” Harold said.

Xi said in his 500-word statement to COP26 that all countries should throttle rising temperatures by building on old U.N. agreements.

Xi’s statement seeks to cast China as a country that has championed a major world ambition after the United States pulled out of the Paris climate accord in 2017, Harold said. Current U.S. President Joe Biden apologized Monday for his predecessor’s decision to withdraw.

The U.S. is the second biggest greenhouse gas emitter after China. During the talks Tuesday, Biden announced plans to reduce methane emissions.

The Chinese leader said multilateralism, including U.N. agreements, is “the right prescription” for addressing problems such as climate change, which is seen as an existential threat for much of the world.

Analysts say it’s not clear whether China will make more statements during COP26, which is due to last through November 12.

Source: Voice of America