At a local Covid-19 vaccination center in Yaoundé, Cameroon just a few people have come to get the jab. Among them is Menan Germain an expatriate.

After learning about the procedure, he is ready to be injected with the Chinese dose, called Sinopharm. For him, taking this vaccine is a matter of trust.

Despite the struggle to get an appointment, Germain finally got through.

“We can’t destroy a whole population, so I’m confident about the vaccine. I tell myself that it is a safe product, otherwise it would not be put it on the market”, Germain said.

Like him, other Chinese expatriates have been jabbed here. Unfortunately, no Cameroonian in sight. 90% of those who come for the vaccines are non-citizens.

Chinese and the nationals of other countries were counted among those who received their dose during this first vaccination campaign, and according to a source at this regional vaccination center, Cameroonians were in the minority of those who took the vaccine.

For the few Cameroonians who come to be vaccinated, it’s only for travel reasons. As a result, out of the 700,000 doses that the country has received, only 45,000 people have been inoculated.

Dr. Shalom Tchokfe Ndoula is Permanent Secretary of the Expanded Program of Immunization of Cameroon (EPI).

“We vaccinated more than 45,000 people in Cameroon for the first phase of our vaccination campaign. In reality, this did not reach our maximum capacity to offer services, which means that we could have vaccinated more for the same period”, Dr. Tchokfe Ndoula said.

He said they’ve hardly reached the 10% of the expected numbers for this first month of vaccination. According to the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI), the low number of vaccination centers in the country, is due to the fact that social media users have managed to make Cameroonians believe that the Covid-19 vaccine is dangerous for people of color.

As a result, vaccination centers are empty and on the street, Cameroonians openly express their opposition to this vaccine. This is the case of Guillaume Paul Mouté, a believer in medicinal herbs.

‘’I find the vaccine very controversial. Because for most of the time for a vaccine there should be time, there is not enough time and barely 6 months we start to vaccinate people. When you go to the hospital you don’t find BCG (Bacille Calmette-Guérin, a vaccine for Tuberclosis disease), nor any other vaccine, but you find this one. Why do we give it so much importance?”, Paul Mouté queried.

Mass sensitization campaign

In addition to these poor results, an internal EPI survey revealed that 37% of doctors and medical staff are unwilling to receive any vaccine, casting doubt on its reliability.

The situation has prompted the EPI to review its strategy through a mass sensitization campaign, even if it means employing door- to- door campaign to explain to the population about the safety of the vaccines.

The campaign comes at a time when a report of the Cameroonian Chamber of Commerce has found authorities and ministers guilty for dubiously mismanaging funds intended for the fight against Covid -19 in this Central African nation.

While the country awaits a third shipment of vaccines to arrive, the program is concerned about what will happen if the first tranche is not utilized.

Source: Africa News

Ireland’s health authority said Friday it had shut down its computer systems after experiencing a “significant ransomware attack”, a week after the largest US fuel pipeline network was also targeted.

The Irish attack was blamed on international criminals and was said to be targeting healthcare records.

Officials said patient safety was not at risk however the Health Services Executive (HSE) said it is currently unable to make referrals for coronavirus testing.

Government minister Ossian Smyth told RTE it is “possibly the most significant cybercrime attack on the Irish State”, calling it an “international attack” but “not espionage”.

“These are cyber criminal gangs, looking for money,” he told Ireland’s state broadcaster.

Shut down all IT systems

The HSE said it shut down all its IT systems as a precaution but said the country’s coronavirus vaccination programme was unaffected, as were emergency service calls.

But the referral system used to book Covid-19 tests was down.

Health minister Stephen Donnelly said the attack was having a “severe impact” but “individual services and hospital groups are impacted in different ways”.

On Twitter he claimed that “Covid-19 testing and vaccinations are continuing as planned”.

Liz Canavan, a top official in prime minister Micheal Martin’s office, said the outage was also affecting child protection services, which are hosted on HSE servers.

She urged people needed urgent treatment to attend hospital as normal but HSE chief operations officer Anne O’Connor warned of disruption if the outage continued.

“If this continues to Monday we will be in a very serious situation, and we will be cancelling many services,” she said.

Another ransomware attack last Friday forced the shutdown of the United States’ largest fuel distribution system, leading to some panic buying at gasoline stations along the east coast.

Moscow has rejected US accusations that a Russia-based group was behind the cyberattack.

Ransomware attacks use a type of malware that encrypts files on an infected computer, normally via an email attachment or download, and demands money to unlock them.

“We are at the very early stages of fully understanding the threat,” said HSE chief executive Paul Reid.

The authority was working with police, the army and its major IT security providers to “contain” the attack, he added.

‘Industrial-scale vandals’

The Rotunda maternity hospital in Dublin said that “due to a serious IT issue”, it was only admitting emergency cases and women who are at least 36 weeks pregnant.

Hospital chief Fergal Malone said the attack had targeted computers storing patient records.

Life-saving equipment is operating fine, “there’s no problem for patient safety”, and the hospital has switched to backup paper records, he told RTE.

“But obviously throughput will be much slower,” he said, urging out-patients with routine appointments to stay away.

The HSE said the attack was an adaptation of ransomware known as “Conti”, in which hackers have already compromised a computer system and lie low until springing their trap.

Health care institutions have been frequent victims of ransomware attacks. In Los Angeles, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center revealed in 2016 it paid $17,000 to hackers to decrypt important data.

Last October, it emerged that the then-CEO of Finnish company Vastaamo had covered up a data breach that exposed the confidential treatment records of tens of thousands of psychotherapy patients.

Many patients reported receiving emails with a demand for 200 euros ($240) in bitcoin to prevent the contents of their discussions with therapists being made public.

In 2017, the United States and Britain blamed North Korea for the “WannaCry” ransomware attack that infected some 300,000 computers in 150 countries, including one-third of British hospitals.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab this week called for a global effort to counter online threats as he slammed countries including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea over cyberattacks.

Authoritarian states “are the industrial-scale vandals of the 21st century”, he said.

Source:AFP

US President Joe Biden’s administration on Wednesday announced support for a global waiver on patent protections for Covid-19 vaccines, offering hope to poor nations that have struggled to access the life-saving doses.

India, where the death toll hit a new daily record amid fears the peak is still to come, has been leading the fight within the World Trade Organization (WTO) to allow more drugmakers to manufacture the vaccines—a move pharma giants opposed.

US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said that while intellectual property rights for businesses are important, Washington “supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines” in order to end the pandemic.

“This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures,” she said in a statement.

Biden had been under intense pressure to waive protections for vaccine manufacturers, especially amid criticism that rich nations were hoarding Covid-19 vaccines.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization (WHO), called the US decision “historic” and marked “a monumental moment in the fight against COVID19.”

Tai cautioned said that negotiations “will take time given the consensus-based nature” of the WTO.

The aim “is to get as many safe and effective vaccines to as many people as fast as possible,” she said.

With supplies for Americans secured, the Biden administration will continue efforts “to expand vaccine manufacturing and distribution,” and will work to “increase the raw materials needed to produce those vaccines.”

For months the WTO has been facing calls to temporarily remove the intellectual property protections on Covid-19 vaccines, known as a TRIPS waiver in reference to the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property.

WTO chief Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on Wednesday described as the “moral and economic issue of our time.”

But that notion has been fiercely opposed by pharmaceutical giants and their host countries, which insist the patents are not the main roadblocks to scaling up production, and warned the move could hamper innovation.

“A waiver is the simple but the wrong answer to what is a complex problem,” the Geneva-based International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations lobby group said, describing the US move as “disappointing.”

Tai in recent weeks has met with executives from all the major US vaccine producers—Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson—to discuss the issue.

Devastating surge

While the United States has reached the point of offering donuts and beer to vaccine holdouts, India reported 3,780 new pandemic deaths and not enough doses to inoculate its people.

India has in recent weeks endured a devastating surge in coronavirus cases, with more than 380,000 infections reported on Wednesday.

K Vijay Raghavan, the Indian government’s principal scientific advisor, said the country of 1.3 billion people had to prepare for a new wave of infections even after beating down the current wave, which has taken the country’s caseload above 20 million infections.

In an effort to boost the country’s collapsing health system, India’s reserve bank announced $6.7 billion in cheap financing for vaccine makers, hospitals and health firms.

India’s crisis has been partly fueled by a lack of vaccines. This has in turn exacerbated the global shortage as India is the world’s biggest producer of Covid shots.

In London, foreign ministers from the Group of Seven wealthy democracies committed to financially support the vaccine-sharing program, Covax.

But there was no immediate announcement on fresh funding.

Though his country is not a group member, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar was in London for the G7 talks but had to hold his meetings virtually after possible exposure to virus cases.

Vaccine inequity

The pandemic has claimed more than 3.2 million lives worldwide since it first emerged in late 2019, but many wealthy nations have made progress in suppressing the virus as mass vaccination campaigns gather steam.

More than 1.2 billion doses have been administered globally, but fewer than one percent in the least developed countries.

Vaccine shortages are not an issue in the United States, which could soon be sitting on as many as 300 million extra doses—nearly equivalent to its entire population.

Biden on Tuesday said he wanted 70 percent of US adults to have received at least one shot by the July 4 Independence Day holiday.

He also said his administration was “ready to move immediately” if regulators authorize the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds.

Experts question the wisdom of devoting limited vaccine supplies to a low-risk group instead of sharing them with high-risk groups abroad.

“Vaccinating more people in the US is not going to help us if the variants in India, Nepal and South Asia get out of control and hit our shores,” said Priya Sampathkumar, chair of Infection Prevention & Control at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

UCSF physician and epidemiologist Vinay Prasad slammed the idea of vaccinating low-risk American adolescents before 70-year-olds globally as “a terrible error.”

In the Middle East, Egypt announced a partial shutdown of malls and restaurants and called off festivities for the Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr to curb rising coronavirus cases.

Serbia’s president meanwhile said his country would pay each citizen around $30 to get vaccinated, in what could be the world’s first cash-for-jabs scheme.

(AFP)

As the COVID-19 pandemic tore through Western Europe and the USA, many infectious disease experts warned that when the pandemic eventually reached Africa, the consequences would be devastating.

In addition, the experts warned that as many African countries had poor healthcare infrastructure, there would not be enough oxygen ventilators available to those who would need them.

The ‘do-nothing policy’ adopted by many African countries on many issues has been the approach of these countries even as this pandemic spreads across the entire continent.

Such is the case with Cameroon now as workers at two major mortuaries in Yaoundé have told Cameroon Concord News Group that they have never seen so many dead bodies before.

One of the sources who have worked at a morgue for over 30 years said, “the government is playing politics by hiding the devasting effects of COVID-19 pandemic from the public.”

He added that “what is annoying to us is the climate that we are working in, many COVID-19-related are not recorded due to the government’s obsession with keeping the official death toll low”.

At another mortuary, an insider said, “We are expected to wash corpses of people who died of COVID-19 without the appropriate protective equipment. Our lives and those of our families are at risk. When we ask for proper protective gear, we are blackmailed as being unpatriotic and ungrateful.”

“The pandemic is going through Cameroon like a hot knife through butter. In a country where superstition, illiteracy and poverty provide a deadly cocktail, the population is still not adhering to the guidelines outlined by the WHO,” he said.

In dealing with the pandemic, Cameroonian authorities are woefully out of their depth,” he added.

Like many things in the country, the authorities are now hoping for divine intervention. At the General Hospital in Douala, an overwhelmed doctor said that “this is simply appalling. Our government is committing genocide by neglect. People are partying, and no one is wearing a mask. When you break the sad news that people are dying or died of COVID-19, their families say you are lying as they insist that they died of witchcraft. It’s a pity.”

With the second wave of the virus rolling many people into an early grave in Cameroon, the government must start taking real and appropriate measures that would help stem the tide of death that is destroying lives across the country.

The government must stop performing its mincing dance around the truth. The virus is decimating communities in urban areas. Lawyers, law-makers, magistrates and other professionals are all being rolled into an early grave by a virus that is no respecter of persons.

By Asu Vera Eyere

The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — who has become the face of the agency’s battle against the pandemic — will run for a second term, Stat News reported Monday.

The 56-year-old former Ethiopian health minister and minister of foreign affairs has not said publicly whether or not he plans to seek another term.

But an unnamed source close to Tedros told the US health news site that the director-general intends to stand for re-election when his term expires next year.

When contacted by AFP, the WHO did not say whether Tedros would indeed run for a second term, only that the nomination period opened last month.

“Member states may nominate candidates between now and September,” the agency said in an email.

“All proposals are sent in sealed envelopes to the Chair of the Executive Board and are strictly confidential until opened in due course,” it added.

Tedros was elected as the head of WHO in 2017, becoming the first African to ever take the helm of the UN health agency.

WHO director-generals may serve a maximum of two five-year terms, and must be elected by WHO member states each time.

Tedros was thrust onto the global stage with a number of high-profile health emergencies — most notably the Covid pandemic, but also several fresh Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in West Africa.

The WHO has found itself at the heart of efforts to coordinate the global pandemic response.

Its handling of the crisis has been widely praised, but has also met harsh criticism from some quarters, and in particular from the administration of former US president Donald Trump.

Trump accused the organisation of being a puppet to China and began withdrawing the United States from the organisation in protest — a decision immediately rescinded by President Joe Biden when he took office in January.

Source: AFP

The vaccination campaign against COVID-19 has been launched in the North-West and South-West.

All the health districts in the North-West and South-West have reported a positive case.

Distribution of vaccines to all the health districts in the North-West and SouthWest.

Briefing of health personnel in the NorthWest and South-West on the available vaccines by the central level.

First consignment of medical equipment (ventilators) and office equipment for the North-West and South-West received by WHO.

Source: UN

SAMUEL ETO’O has proved just what the doctor ordered for his fellow countrymen… by donating 10 AMBULANCES to Cameroon’s health service.

The former Chelsea and Everton striker has been dismayed by the coronavirus pandemic’s effects on his home country.

Big-hearted Eto’o, 40, has now paid 400 million West African francs – £530,000 – to fund the fleet of emergency vehicles.

The ex-Barcelona and Inter Milan star presented them to Cameroon’s public health ministry last week.

He wrote on social media: “Donating 10 ambulances to the Ministry of Health in Cameroon.

“Was such an honour to be able to do this for my country, so more people can be helped in emergency situations.”

Eto’o donated almost £1million to build a children’s wing at the Laquintinie hospital in his home town Douala four years ago.

His charity foundation also provided face masks and food supplies last year.

Chelsea signed Eto’o from Russian club Anzhi in 2013. He scored a dozen goals in 35 Blues appearances.

The Cameroon international moved to Everton a year later, but struck just four times in 20 games.

He hung up his boots in 2019 following spells in Italy, Turkey and Qatar.

Last year, he was hospitalised with a head injury after being involved in a car crash that reportedly saw his 4×4 vehicle hit a bus.

Source: The Sun.co.uk

Progress against the mosquito-borne infection remains fragile and African countries suffering an unprecedented epidemic of coronavirus are particularly at risk of seeing a resurgence of malaria. But a researcher from Cameroon, a country that carries a high burden of malaria, claims she has invented “atypical larvicide” to fight the deadly disease in her country.

In 2020, UNESCO and the L’Oréal Foundation listed Antoinette Ntoumba among the 20 young female scientists in Africa in recognition of her efforts to combat malaria. There are an average of 4,000 deaths from the disease reported in Cameroon yearly.

Ntoumba has spent the last seven years inventing a groundbreaking larvicide made from a secret selection of plants. This pesticide is intended to kill the larvae of mosquitos that carry malaria. She collects material for her research in the bush outside Douala.

The scientist says that her work offers a unique solution to the problem of mosquitoes’ increasing resistance to chemical pesticides. Her natural insecticide is also cheaper than many alternatives.

“What we are proposing today is innovation, because we are using plants and we are not using just one plant,” says Ntoumba, speaking with FRANCE 24. “What we are proposing will increase mosquitoes’ resistance to pesticides and create a natural, cheap product.”

Source: France 24