Nation & World: ‘This is not a game’: Global virus death toll hits 2M

photo by: Associated Press

In this Jan. 6, 2021 file photo, cemetery workers bury 89-year-old Abilio Ribeiro, who died of the new coronavirus, at the Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery in Manaus, Amazonas state, Brazil. (AP Photo/Edmar Barros)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The global death toll from COVID-19 topped 2 million Friday, crossing the threshold amid a vaccine rollout so immense but so uneven that in some countries there is real hope of vanquishing the outbreak, while in other, less-developed parts of the world, it seems a far-off dream.

The numbing figure was reached just over a year after the coronavirus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The number of dead, compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the population of Brussels, Mecca, Minsk or Vienna. It is roughly equivalent to the Cleveland metropolitan area or the entire state of Nebraska.

“There’s been a terrible amount of death,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, a pandemic expert and dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. At the same time, he said, “our scientific community has also done extraordinary work.”

In wealthy countries including the United States, Britain, Israel, Canada and Germany, millions of citizens have already been given some measure of protection with at least one dose of vaccine developed with revolutionary speed and quickly authorized for use.

But elsewhere, immunization drives have barely gotten off the ground. Many experts are predicting another year of loss and hardship in places like Iran, India, Mexico and Brazil, which together account for about a quarter of the world’s deaths.

“As a country, as a society, as citizens we haven’t understood,” lamented Israel Gomez, a Mexico City paramedic who spent months shuttling COVID-19 patients around by ambulance, desperately looking for vacant hospital beds. “We have not understood that this is not a game, that this really exists.”

Mexico, a country of 130 million people, has received just 500,000 doses of vaccine and has put barely half of those into the arms of health care workers.

That’s in sharp contrast to the situation for its wealthier northern neighbor. Despite early delays, hundreds of thousands of people are rolling up their sleeves every day in the United States, where the virus has killed about 390,000, by far the highest toll of any country.

All told, over 35 million doses of various COVID-19 vaccines have been administered around the world, according to the University of Oxford.

While vaccination drives in rich countries have been hamstrung by long lines, inadequate budgets and a patchwork of state and local approaches, the obstacles are far greater in poorer nations, which can have weak health systems, crumbling transportation networks, entrenched corruption and a lack of reliable electricity to keep vaccines cold enough.

Also, the majority of the world’s COVID-19 vaccine doses have already been snapped up by wealthy countries. COVAX, a U.N.-backed project to supply shots to developing parts of the world, has found itself short of vaccines, money and logistical help.

As a result, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist warned it is highly unlikely that herd immunity — which would require at least 70% of the globe to be vaccinated — will be achieved this year. As the disaster has demonstrated, it is not enough to snuff out the virus in a few places.

“Even if it happens in a couple of pockets, in a few countries, it’s not going to protect people across the world,” Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said this week.

Health experts fear, too, that if shots are not distributed widely and quickly enough, it could give the virus time to mutate and defeat the vaccine — “my nightmare scenario,” as Jha put it.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said the 2 million milestone “has been made worse by the absence of a global coordinated effort.” He added: “Science has succeeded, but solidarity has failed.”

Meanwhile, in Wuhan, where the scourge was discovered in late 2019, a global team of researchers led by WHO arrived Thursday on a politically sensitive mission to investigate the origins of the virus, which is believed to have spread to humans from wild animals.

The Chinese city of 11 million people is bustling again, with few signs it was once the epicenter of the catastrophe, locked down for 76 days, with over 3,800 dead.

“We are not fearful or worried as we were in the past,” said Qin Qiong, a noodle shop owner. “We now live a normal life. I take the subway every day to come to work in the shop. … Except for our customers, who have to wear masks, everything else is the same.”

It took eight months to hit 1 million dead but less than four months after that to reach the next million.

While the death toll is based on figures supplied by government agencies around the world, the real number of lives lost to is believed to be significantly higher, in part because of inadequate testing and the many fatalities inaccurately attributed to other causes, especially early in the outbreak.

“What was never on the horizon is that so many of the deaths would be in the richest countries in the world,” said Dr. Bharat Pankhania, an infectious diseases expert at Britain’s University of Exeter. “That the world’s richest countries would mismanage so badly is just shocking.”

BRIEFLY

NRA declares bankruptcy, plans to move to Texas

AUSTIN, TEXAS (AP) — The National Rifle Association announced Friday it has filed for bankruptcy protection and will seek to incorporate the nation’s most politically influential gun-rights group in Texas instead of New York.

The announcement came months after New York’s attorney general sued the organization over claims that top executives illegally diverted tens of millions of dollars for lavish personal trips, no-show contracts for associates and other questionable expenditures.

The coronavirus pandemic has also upended the NRA, which last year laid off dozens of employees. The group canceled its national convention and scuttled fundraising. The NRA’s bankruptcy filing listed between $100 million and $500 million in assets and between $100 million and $500 million in liabilities. Still, the NRA claimed in announcing the move that the organization was “in its strongest financial condition in years.”

The NRA filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in federal court in Dallas and said it planned to incorporate in Texas, where records show it formed a limited liability corporation, Sea Girt LLC, in November 2020. Sea Girt LLC made a separate bankruptcy filing Friday, listing fewer than $100,000 in liabilities.

McConnell calls Trump trial ‘vote of conscience’

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial is likely to start after Joe Biden’s inauguration, and the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, is telling senators their decision on whether to convict the outgoing president over the Capitol riot will be a “vote of conscience.”

The timing for the trial, the first of a president no longer in office, has not yet been set. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it clear Friday that Democrats intend to move swiftly on Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID aid and economic recovery package to speed up vaccinations and send Americans relief. Biden is set to take the oath of office Wednesday.

Pelosi called the recovery package a “matter of complete urgency.”

The uncertainty of the scheduling, despite the House’s swift impeachment of Trump just a week after the deadly Jan. 6 siege, reflects the fact that Democrats do not want the Senate trial proceedings to dominate the opening days of the Biden administration.

Feds back away from claim of assassination plot at Capitol

PHOENIX (AP) — Federal prosecutors who initially said there was “strong evidence” the pro-Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol last week aimed to “capture and assassinate elected officials” backed away from the allegation after the head of the investigation cautioned Friday that the probe is still in its early stages and there was no “direct evidence” of such intentions.

The accusation came in a court filing by prosecutors late Thursday in Phoenix in the case against Jacob Chansley, the Arizona man who took part in the insurrection while sporting face paint, no shirt and a furry hat with horns.

“Strong evidence, including Chansley’s own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States Government,” a prosecutor wrote in a memo urging the judge to keep Chansley behind bars. But at a hearing for Chansley later in the day in Phoenix, another prosecutor, Todd Allison, struck the line from the memo.

Allison said the statement may very well end up being appropriate at Chansley’s trial, but said prosecutors didn’t want to mislead the court and don’t have to rely on the stricken statement to argue that he should remain in jail. Ultimately, a judge on Friday ordered Chansley to be jailed until his trial.

Dorothy Schmidt Cole, oldest living Marine, dies at 107

KANNAPOLIS, N.C. (AP) — Dorothy Schmidt Cole, recognized last year as the oldest living U.S. Marine, has died at age 107.

Beth Kluttz, Cole’s only child, confirmed Friday that her mother died of a heart attack at Kluttz’s home in Kannapolis, North Carolina, on Jan. 7.

The Charlotte Observer reports Cole enlisted as one of the earliest female Marine reservists following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Cole learned how to fly an airplane and persuaded the Marine Corps to let her be a pilot.

In July 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve into law, giving women the chance to fill positions left open by men headed to combat.

Despite putting in 200 hours in the cockpit of a Piper Cub, Cole completed six weeks of boot camp at Camp Lejeune with the Women’s Reserve’s First Battalion and wound up “behind a typewriter instead of an airplane.”

Abbas calls for 1st Palestinian vote in 15 years

GAZA CITY, GAZA STRIP (AP) — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Friday decreed parliamentary and presidential elections for later this year in what would be the first vote of its kind since 2006, when the Islamic militant group Hamas won a landslide victory.

Elections would pose a major risk for Abbas’ Fatah party and also for Hamas, which welcomed the decree. Both have faced protests in recent years over their inability to reconcile with one another, advance Palestinian aspirations for statehood or meet the basic needs of those in the territories they govern.

Fatah and Hamas have been publicly calling for elections for more than a decade but have never been able to mend their rift or agree on a process for holding them, and despite Friday’s decree, it remained far from clear whether the voting would actually be held.

Elections could also complicate President-elect Joe Biden’s plans to restore aid to the Palestinians and to revive the peace process with Israel.

Pfizer temporarily reduces European vaccine deliveries

Copenhagen, Denmark (ap) — U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer confirmed Friday it will temporarily reduce deliveries to Europe of its COVID-19 vaccine while it upgrades production capacity to 2 billion doses per year.

The EU Commission chief said she’d immediately called Pfizer’s CEO. But in an indication the issue might go beyond Europe, Canada’s government said it was also affected.

Line Fedders, a spokeswoman for Pfizer Denmark, said that to meet the new 2 billion dose target Pfizer is upscaling production at its plant in Puurs, Belgium.

“As a consequence, fewer doses will be available for European countries at the end of January and the beginning of February,” she said.

“This temporary reduction will affect all European countries,” she said in a statement to The Associated Press.

Judge: Alabama transgender license policy unconstitutional

MONTGOMERY, ALA. (AP) — Alabama’s policy requiring a transgender person to undergo full gender reassignment surgery before they can change the sex on their driver’s license is unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson said Alabama policy’s that people “can only change the sex designation on their driver licenses only by changing their genitalia” is unconstitutional. He directed the state to give new licenses to the three transgender women who filed the lawsuit “reflecting that they are women.”

The federal judge said the policy subjects people to harassment and even the risk of violence when they have a license that does not match their daily appearance. In 2019 arguments in the case, Thompson said Alabama was essentially marking people with a “scarlet T.”

Pence speaks at memorial service for Yeager in West Virginia

CHARLESTON, W.VA. (AP) — Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager was remembered at a memorial service Friday as a hero, legend and friend who would go out of his way to help others.

Vice President Mike Pence started the service in Yeager’s home state of West Virginia by calling him “America’s greatest aviator” during a 15-minute address that detailed Yeager’s military career.

During numerous video tributes, others spoke of the human side of Yeager, who died Dec. 7 at the age of 97. His love for growing tomatoes. For hunting and fishing. His work as a conservationist. And his love for the Oak Ridge Boys.

Friend Sean Duffy said Yeager was involved in conservation fundraising efforts that allowed a generation of children to enjoy the outdoors.

“He was a class act,” Duffy said.

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