16, July 2020
‘Sick of lies and scamming’: Southern Cameroonians urge disgraced Sako Ikome and Chris Anu to shut up 0
Southern Cameroonians in Nigeria and in Ground Zero have joined those in the diaspora calling on the disgraced former Acting leader Sako Ikome and his con man Chris Anu to take a back seat amid anger over both men’s mishandling of some two million US dollars donated by Ambzonians to finance the liberation struggle and the deteriorating humanitarian situation created by the war in Southern Cameroons.
From Taraba, Cross River and Benue states in Nigeria to all the counties in Ambazonia, thousands of Southern Cameroonians have opined that Sako Ikome and Chris Anu were completely detached from the reality and that the Ambazonia leader, President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe took a wise decision to get rid of them from the Interim Government.
Many Southern Cameroonians contacted by our cream of reporters both in Nigeria and in the homeland said they were fed up with the lies coming from Sako Ikome and his gang and that Sako’s exploitation of the struggle for his own financial gains makes them sick.
A 79 year old woman in the Akwaya sub constituency in Manyu who received a face mask that was donated by Vice President Dabney Yerima in line with the Interim Government’s policy of combating the coronavirus outbreak, chanted “shame, shame to Dr Sako.”
Another Southern Cameroonian refugee in Douala, who declined to be named, said the so-called Sako-IG’s complete absence in the numerous crises in Ground Zero despite claiming to have raised more than two million US dollars recently pushed her to the conclusion that “Southern Cameroons leaders are in French Cameroun jail and those truly representing Ambazonia in the West are with Dabney Yerima.”
A senior Amba commander in the Meme County was quoted as saying that “the most deadly virus in Southern Cameroons is not COVID-19, but Sako’s corruption.”
By Isong Asu with files from Oke Akombi Ayukepi Akap
16, July 2020
Covid-19 vaccine developed by US biotech firm Moderna enters final stage trial 0
US biotech firm Moderna said Tuesday it would enter the final stage of human trials for its Covid-19 vaccine on July 27, to test how well it protects people in the real world.
The announcement came as the results from an earlier trial intended to prove the vaccine was safe and triggered antibody production were published.
The upcoming Phase 3 trial will recruit 30,000 participants in the US, with half to receive the vaccine at 100 microgram dose levels, and the other half to receive a placebo.
Researchers will then track them over two years to determine whether they are protected against infection by the virus. Or, if they do get infected, whether the vaccine prevents symptoms from developing.
If they do get symptoms, the vaccine can still be considered a success if it stops severe cases of Covid-19.
The study should run until October 27, 2022, but preliminary results should be available long before.
The announcement came shortly after the New England Journal of Medicine published results from the first stage of Moderna’s vaccine trial, which showed the first 45 participants all developed antibodies to the virus.
Moderna is considered to be in a leading position in the global race to find a vaccine against the coronavirus, which has infected more than 13.2 million people and killed 570,000.
But scientists caution that the first vaccines to come to market may not be the most effective or safest.
Encouraging results
Moderna had previously published “interim results” from the first stages of its trial, called Phase 1 in May.
The early results were called “encouraging” by Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is co-developing the vaccine.
But some in the scientific community said they would reserve judgment until they saw the full results in peer-reviewed form.
According to the paper, 45 participants were split into three groups to test doses of 25 micrograms, 100 micrograms and 250 micrograms.
They were given a second dose of the same amount 28 days later.
After the first round, antibody levels were found to be higher with higher doses.
Following the second round, participants had higher levels of antibodies than most patients who have had Covid-19 and gone on to generate their own antibodies.
More than half the participants experienced mild or moderate side effects, which is considered normal.
The side effects included fatigue, chills, headache, body ache and pain at the injection site.
Three participants did not receive their second dose.
They included one who developed a skin rash on both legs, and two who missed their window because they had COVID-19 symptoms, but their tests later returned negative.
Amesh Adalja, an infectious diseases specialist at Johns Hopkins University, said it was encouraging that the participants developed high levels of an advanced class of antibodies.
He added, however: “You have to be very limited in how much you can extrapolate from a phase one clinical trial, because you want to see how this works when a person is exposed to the actual virus.”
The Moderna vaccine belongs to a new class of vaccine that uses genetic material – in the form of RNA – to encode the information needed to grow the virus’s spike protein inside the human body, in order to trigger an immune response.
The spike protein is a part of the virus that it uses to invade human cells, but by itself the protein is relatively harmless.
The advantage of this technology is that it bypasses the need to manufacture viral proteins in the lab, helping to ramp up mass production.
No vaccines based on this platform have previously received regulatory approval.
Early work using this technology backfired by making hosts more, not less, susceptible to infection, David Lo, a professor of biomedical sciences at University of California Riverside told AFP.
“One of the things we certainly want to look out for is whether there is a long term effect where the immune response… potentially develops an immunologic tolerance which would actually be detrimental to protection,” he said.
(AFP)