China has begun a nationwide drive to vaccinate some 50 million front-line workers against the coronavirus before the Lunar New Year travel rush next month, in hopes of avoiding a repeat of last year’s grim holiday season.
Workers in a range of industries will receive their first of two vaccine shots by the middle of this month, with the next shot two to four weeks afterward, according to the national plan. The nine prioritized groups include health sector workers, delivery workers, people whose jobs require overseas travel, public servants and utilities employees.
China’s target of vaccinating 50 million people in a month is an ambitious goal, more than the populations of California and Michigan combined. In the United States, where the Trump administration has touted its “Operation Warp Speed” to fast-track delivery of vaccines, 4.2 million people have received a first dose since distribution began on Dec. 14, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid Data Tracker.
There’s urgency to complete these vaccinations before Lunar New Year – often called the world’s largest annual human migration – which takes place Feb. 11-17. Last year, some 1.5 billion trips were made over the holiday in China, half the normal number, as people sheltered in place against the growing coronavirus outbreak.
After scuttled reunion plans for many families last year, there is pressure on Chinese authorities to make the country safer for holiday travel this time around. For many in China who work far from home, Lunar New Year is the only time they can gather with their families for celebration and feasting.
“We can’t require people to stay at home and not go out during Lunar New Year,” prominent Shanghai infectious-disease expert Zhang Wenhong was quoted saying in the official People’s Daily on Saturday, even as he said controls may be necessary in higher-risk areas.
Millions in priority groups had already received shots as part of an earlier “urgent use” push, before regulators gave the green light to a vaccine from Sinopharm, a state-owned drugmaker, last week. Now, vaccines are being rolled out by municipal authorities to all prioritized workers willing to take them, and should begin to reach some other demographics by next month.
China’s approval of Sinopharm’s vaccine has given confidence to some other countries. Egypt said Saturday it had approved Sinopharm’s vaccine for emergency use, while a Pakistan minister said the country would purchase 1.2 million doses from Sinopharm.
However, Sinopharm has also come under criticism for lack of transparency, with scant detail released about its Phase 3 clinical trials. Wu Yonglin, the president of the Sinopharm unit that developed the vaccine, has said that the company will provide detailed data after more observation.
Within China, state media on Monday was awash with reports of the vaccination drive. In the capital city, Beijing, municipal officials reported that 73,537 people received their first dose of vaccine in the first two days of the new year.
State broadcaster CCTV showed footage of people standing in line over the weekend at pop-up vaccination sites in Beijing, and sitting in socially distanced seats afterward for monitoring for any adverse symptoms. The broadcaster said there were more than 200 vaccination sites in the capital.
Other cities across the country have also announced drives to vaccinate front-line workers over the past two weeks.
Health Times, a state-run newspaper, quoted vaccine expert Tao Lina last month as saying the government planned to vaccinate 50 million people by Lunar New Year, with the first shot by Jan. 15 and second shot by Feb. 5.
Front-line workers eligible for this round of vaccination include those aged 18 to 59 employed in ports, delivery companies, the transportation industry, health and sanitation, public servants, police and firefighters, utilities, elder care, telecommunications, and people whose work or studies takes them overseas.
Besides the vaccine push, officials have issued some restrictions for the Lunar New Year holiday to try to prevent another surge in coronavirus cases. Several cities limited the size of gatherings to 10 people. Chinese Communist Party members in Beijing have been ordered not to leave the city without permission.
These restrictions are still mild compared with last year’s Lunar New Year season, when authorities put swaths of China under lockdown to try to control the rapidly spreading virus. Wuhan, where the virus emerged in late 2019, was sealed off from the rest of the country for more than two months. In many other cities, residents were prevented from leaving their homes without an approved reason.
Brian Pinker receives the AstraZeneca Plc and the University of Oxford Covid-19 vaccine in Oxford, on Jan. 4.Photographer: Steve Parsons/PA Wire/Bloomberg
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Eric Pfanner
Britain gave the first shots of a coronavirus vaccine from AstraZeneca Plc and the University of Oxford, in a race against a faster-spreading coronavirus variant that’s prompted new restrictions on movement across much of the country.
The first injection was administered Monday morning to an 82-year-old kidney dialysis patient at Oxford University Hospital.
Britain is stepping up its vaccine campaign as coronavirus infections surge across the country, putting the country on the brink of another national lockdown. It’s moved more rapidly on approvals and rollouts than the U.S. or the European Union, clearing the AstraZeneca-Oxford product despite clinical trials that involved a smaller number of participants and that were complicated by a dosing error. A regulatory decision to lengthen the interval between doses of the two-shot vaccines to as many as 12 weeks has prompted further questions.
A new strain that’s estimated to be as much as 70% more transmissible is fueling the pandemic’s resurgence in the U.K. Schools have been closed across much of the country, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned that tougher restrictions may be on the way.
U.K. regulators cleared the AstraZeneca-Oxford shot last week, marking its first approval worldwide. It’s the second injection to be authorized for emergency use in Britain, after one from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE received the go-ahead in early December.
More than a million people in Britain have received injections of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to the Department of Health and Social Care.
The U.K. has raced ahead of France, where only about 500 people had got initial shots as of this weekend. President Emmanuel Macron has come under fire for the slow pace of that country’s rollout, which has been hampered by caution amid high levels of vaccine skepticism. France is behind not just European neighbors such as Britain and Germany, but also Israel, where more than 12% of the population has already received injections.
In the U.K., more than 500,000 AstraZeneca-Oxford doses will be available as of Monday, and they will be delivered at hospitals for the first few days. The U.K. aims to expand the number of vaccination sites to more than 1,000, with as many as 100 more hospitals and 180 general practitioner-led services coming online this week.
Although the newly approved vaccine has shown lower effectiveness than the Pfizer-BioNTech one in clinical trials, it has some key advantages: It’s cheaper and easier to transport and store, requiring only refrigerator temperatures rather than deep freezing. That makes it crucial for the broader global vaccination push.
David Nabarro, World Health Organization special envoy for covid-19, called for caution amid the global rush to vaccinate populations.
“I really would like to appeal to every leader just to really slow down a bit on the rush to get the vaccine into as many arms as possible and put more time into systematic planning on what has to be a really effective global operation,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
The NHS is administering the first injections under a two-shot regime approved by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. The second can be given as many as 12 weeks later, as the U.K. seeks to maximize the number of vulnerable people who receive the first portion, which provides some protection from infection.
The U.K. has also taken a more flexible approach to the two-dose regimen, saying that in certain circumstances — such as when it’s not known which vaccine a patient received the first time around — the second shot can be administered with a different company’s product.
The U.K. regulator has yet to publish full data backing its decision to allow a greater time interval between shots, which has drawn opposition from the British Medical Association.
“It is grossly and patently unfair to tens of thousands of our most at-risk patients to now try to reschedule their appointments,” said Richard Vautrey, chairman of the association’s General Practitioners Committee.
อย่างไรก็ตาม ผู้เชี่ยวชาญขององค์การอนามัยโลก (WHO) ซึ่งเดินทางไปประเทศจีนในปีที่ผ่านมากลับไม่ได้รับอนุญาตให้เข้าไปในอู่ฮั่นซึ่งเป็นศูนย์กลางของการแพร่ระบาด โฆษกของ WHO กล่าวเมื่อเดือนที่แล้วว่า WHO หวังว่าคณะกรรมการผู้เชี่ยวชาญที่ตรวจสอบต้นกำเนิดจะสามารถเยือนอู่ฮั่นได้ในเดือนมกราคม
สำนักข่าว Hawaii News Now รายงานว่ามีผู้คนพบเห็นวัตถุบินได้ลักษณะประหลาดที่น่าจะเป็นจานบิน UFO ปรากฏบนท้องฟ้ายามเย็นเหนือเกาะโออาฮู ซึ่งเป็นที่ตั้งของเมืองโฮโนลูลู และผู้พบเห็นพยายามแจ้งให้ให้ตำรวจได้รับทราบ
Hawaii – An unidentified flying object spotted in the evening sky over Leeward Oahu prompted witnesses to call 911. Multiple witnesses reported seeing a large blue object fall out of the sky and into the ocean.#Hawaii#UFOpic.twitter.com/hvdry0zyN0— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) January 2, 2021
ทรัพย์สินที่ลดลงเกิดขึ้นในช่วงที่แจ็ค หม่าถูกทางการจีนตรวจสอบอย่างหนักเรื่องการทำธุรกิจผูกขาด โดยเฉพาะอย่างยิ่งการที่ทางการจีนสั่งระงับการเปิดขายหุ้นครั้งแรกของบริษัท Ant Group ที่หม่าปั้นขึ้นมาให้เป็นฟินเทคชั้นนำของโลก ซึ่งหากขาย IPO สำเร็จหม่าจะกลายเป็นคนที่รวยที่สุดในเอเชียแทบจะทันที
WASHINGTON – Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and other top Democrats swiftly denounced remarks that President Donald Trump made during an extraordinary hour-long phone call with Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, in which the president pressures Brad Raffensperger to “find” votes that will overturn the results of the presidential election in the state in his favor.
Bob Bauer, a senior adviser to President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, said the conversation provides “irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place.”
The Washington Post obtained a recording of the call, in which the president repeatedly states that there is “no way I lost Georgia.” He makes threats about vague criminal consequences and tells the secretary of state that he’s taking a “big risk.”
Bauer added: “It captures the whole disgraceful story about Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy.”
Speaking in Georgia on Sunday, Harris called Trump’s conversation a “baldfaced, bold abuse of power by the president of the United States.”
“It was certainly the voice of desperation, most certainly that,” she said.
Harris was there to campaign for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock ahead of Senate runoff elections on Tuesday in the state.
During the call, Trump urged Georgia’s election officials to act quickly, and suggested that not doing so could endanger the political fate of Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both Georgia Republicans.
“You would be respected, really respected, if this thing could be straightened out before the election,” Trump said during the call. “You have a big election coming up on Tuesday.”
The two Democratic Senate candidates were among those who quickly condemned Trump for the call.
“When the president of the United States calls up Georgia’s election officials and tries to intimidate them to change the results of the election, to disenfranchise Georgia voters,” Ossoff said, speaking to supporters, “. . . that is a direct attack on our democracy.”
He added: “If David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler had one piece of steel in their spine, one piece of integrity, they would be out defending Georgia voters from that assault.”
In a statement, Warnock called on Loeffler to “speak out against the unsubstantiated claims of fraud, to defend Georgia’s elections, and to put Georgia ahead of herself. She has not and never will.”
Trump was joined on the call by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, as well as longtime conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell and Georgia-based lawyer Kurt Hilbert. Ryan Germany, who is general counsel for Raffensperger’s office, and Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs were also on the call.
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, who will be the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee if his party does not take the chamber, said the call was “more than a pathetic, rambling, delusional rant.”
“His disgraceful effort to intimidate an elected official into deliberately changing and misrepresenting the legally confirmed vote totals in his state strikes at the heart of our democracy and merits nothing less than a criminal investigation,” Durbin said in a statement. “The President is unhinged and dangerous.”
Trump vaguely threatened Raffensperger and Germany, suggesting that they would be subject to criminal liability if they do not find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County were illegally destroyed to block investigators, a baseless allegation.
“You are going to find that they are – which is totally illegal – it is more illegal for you than it is for them, because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it,” he said. “That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.”
Michael Bromwich, who served as the Justice Department inspector general from 1994 to 1999, suggested that Trump’s threats against Raffensperger and Germany could violate federal law that prohibits efforts to deprive voters of a fair election.
“His best defense would be insanity,” Bromwich tweeted, adding: “The entire call is astonishing. The bullying, the threats, the insults, the credulous embrace of discredited conspiracy theories. Like a crime boss, Trump occasionally says that all he wants is the truth. But he doesn’t – he wants the win.”
In a tweet, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., suggested to his fellow lawmakers that any “member of Congress considering objecting to the election results, you cannot – in light of this – do so with a clean conscience.”
Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., appeared to jab at some of his Senate colleagues across the aisle who have said they will not certify Biden’s win without an investigation of voter fraud allegations, which have been unsubstantiated.
“I heard there’s a group of Senate Republicans eager to investigate election fraud,” he tweeted.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who has pledged to contest the electoral college vote certification, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump’s conversation; neither did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
InternationalJan 04. 2021Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., exits the Senate floor following a vote Friday. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Amanda Voisard
By The Washington Post · Mike DeBonis, Paul Kane · NATIONAL, POLITICS, CONGRESS
WASHINGTON – A new Congress convened Sunday with Republicans in open warfare as several GOP senators unleashed salvos against at least a dozen Republican colleagues who are planning to challenge the results of the presidential election this week.
Vice President Mike Pence attends a ceremony at the Capitol on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Katherine Frey
The bitter split among Republicans, virtually unprecedented during the tenure of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., came as the traditionally celebratory moment unfolded instead against the backdrop of a pandemic that is killing thousands of Americans each day.
The conflict played out in public as dissenting senators said they only wanted to “get the facts out” and critics said they were sabotaging democracy. Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., called the challenge “a very, very, bad idea,” adding: “I’m concerned about the division in America – that’s the biggest issue – but obviously this is not healthy for the Republican Party, either.”
It was the starkest illustration of the conflict that could engulf the Republican Party in the post-Trump era as factions prepare to battle over whether the party will continue down the unorthodox, scorched-earth path forged by President Donald Trump or return to a more traditional brand of conservative politics. The back-and-forth came two days before a pair of special elections in Georgia that will determine whether the GOP retains control of the Senate.
Sunday’s clash was triggered by the plans of 12 senators to challenge as many as six states’ electoral vote tallies at Wednesday’s joint session of Congress, a usually routine procedure that this year is shaping up as the final opportunity of Trump loyalists to insist, without evidence, that President-elect Joe Biden’s win was somehow illegitimate.
In the House, a similar split developed: Several dozen GOP members have signaled that they will question the results, prompting a top Republican leader to call the idea “an exceptionally dangerous precedent.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who was narrowly elected to a fourth term as speaker Sunday, was among those noting that the challenge was almost certain to fail. But she said lawmakers have a responsibility to counter the dissenters’ claims.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was elected speaker of the House on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Katherine Frey
“Our choice is not to use the forum to debate the presidency of Donald Trump,” she wrote in a letter to colleagues. “While there is no doubt as to the outcome of the Biden-Harris presidency, our further success is to convince more of the American people to trust in our democratic system.”
While the chances of derailing Biden’s victory are virtually nonexistent – doing so would require the Democratic-controlled House, for instance, to reject electoral votes for Biden – the event provides a stage for Republican lawmakers seeking to court Trump loyalists, who may be influential in the GOP for years to come, by proclaiming their fealty to the president.
The conflict began Saturday evening, when a group of 11 Republican senators announced that they would join Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., in challenging the electoral tally of one or more states, making it clear that the revolt would not be a minor affair but would involve more than one-fifth of Senate Republicans.
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said in a statement that the effort “directly undermines” Americans’ right to choose their leaders, and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, called it an “egregious ploy.” Hawley shot back that Toomey and others were engaging in “shameless personal attacks.”
The contention spread through the party on Sunday as lawmakers returned to the Capitol for the swearing-in. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., among the challengers, argued that the effort was no different from Democratic objections to the 1969 and 2005 counts. In those instances, however, the losing candidate had long since conceded, and the dissent was marginal.
“Our democracy is strong enough to handle conversations about electoral integrity issues,” Lankford said.
Should the challenges be rejected Wednesday, Lankford said he would “absolutely” accept Biden as the rightful president. “Our goal is obviously to try to get the facts out, more than to be able to vote against the electors,” he added.
Lankford and Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., a former House member who was sworn in Sunday as a senator, said they were signing on to the challenge as a response to concerns from constituents worried about electoral improprieties.
“I think the people of Kansas feel disenfranchised,” Marshall said. “They want us to follow through on the many irregularities that they saw in this particular election.”
He brushed off the near-unanimous finding of courts and state officials, including Republicans, that the election was fair. “I don’t think that the courts have heard all the facts,” Marshall said. “And I think that my responsibility is to fulfill my duty to the Constitution, the oath that we just took.”
But many Republicans appeared distraught that the move would put party members on record as fighting the clear outcome of a democratic election.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said lawmakers had “a solemn responsibility to accept these electoral college votes that have been certified” by state officials. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., added, that “the overwhelming weight of the evidence is that Joe Biden defeated my candidate, Donald Trump, and I have to live with it.”
Late Sunday, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., issued a statement saying that he shares the “concerns of many Arkansans about irregularities in the presidential election,” but that the Founders “entrusted our elections chiefly to the states – not Congress,” and that he therefore will not oppose the counting of certified electoral votes.
The rare open conflict was an embarrassing spectacle for McConnell, who has for weeks urged Republicans to refrain from disputing the electoral tally. McConnell fears it will force his members into a politically difficult choice of either defying Trump or rejecting the electorate’s verdict.
While that is not expected to create an immediate problem for McConnell’s authority – he was reelected GOP leader by acclamation in November – it demonstrates that Trump’s departure from the White House will not diminish the intraparty tensions that made the past four years a high-wire act for many Republicans.
McConnell himself declined on Sunday to address the dissension in his ranks. “We’ll be dealing with all of that on Wednesday,” he said.
Democrats warned that the dissenters’ actions could damage the country for years to come.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Republicans are “hurting themselves and hurting the democracy . . . to try to please somebody who has no fidelity to elections or even the truth.”
Democrats have been particularly exasperated by Trump supporters’ tactic of groundlessly claiming the election was unfair, then citing the voter doubts fueled by those claims as a reason for further investigation. Dozens of judges, including several appointed by Trump, have summarily rejected allegations that any fraud capable of changing the outcome occurred.
“There’s a political invasion of the body-snatchers which is taking place,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. “Donald Trump and his supporters are now actually able to create a situation this coming Wednesday where people who are senators and House members are going to vote for something that is absolutely and totally untrue.”
The GOP turmoil also reached into the House, where Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the third-ranking House Republican, circulated a 21-page memo rebutting the case made by the dissenting senators. She urged members not to go down the path of questioning states’ voting tallies.
“Such objections set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states’ explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the President and bestowing it instead on Congress,” Cheney wrote. “This is directly at odds with the Constitution’s clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans.”
Former House speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., weighed in as well, saying “it is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections.”
The turmoil reflected the rocky path that probably lies ahead for what will be the most closely divided Congress in memory. The Senate would be split 50-50 if Democrats prevail in both Georgia races Tuesday, while the Democrats’ advantage in the House has dwindled to several seats.
On Sunday, Pelosi became the second lawmaker in the past 34 years to win a fourth term as speaker, claiming 216 votes to the 209 that Republicans cast for their leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. Five moderate Democrats either voted “present” or supported another Democrat.
Pelosi’s vote total fell below the usual 218-vote threshold for a House majority in part because three lawmakers missed the vote because of illness, including two who recently tested positive for the novel coronavirus.
Two House members voted even though they were still technically in quarantine, using a special, newly constructed alcove in the House gallery sealed off by plexiglass. Republicans accused Democrats of bending the quarantine rules to boost Pelosi’s vote total, but the change did not alter the outcome: Two Democrats and one Republican – Reps. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, and Frederica Wilson, D-Fla. – used that area to vote.
Scores of Democratic members have used new proxy voting procedures to weigh in from afar during the past seven months, but those procedures were not allowed for Sunday’s vote, so lawmakers had to appear in person.
The proceedings began on a somber note, with the announcement of an unexpected vacancy due to the death last week of Rep.-elect Luke Letlow, a 41-year-old Louisiana Republican who had been hospitalized with covid-19, the illness that the novel coronavirus can cause.
Veteran lawmakers, accustomed to the joyous pomp and packed House chamber for their swearing-in, found the restrictions jarring. Only first-time members were allowed to bring a guest, for example.
Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., first elected in 1986, called the atmosphere “real different” after leaving the Capitol’s coronavirus testing site. “First time I’ve been without my family,” he said. “My wife’s always up in the gallery.”
The selection of the new speaker – historically made with all members on the floor and lawmakers rising one at a time in alphabetical order to shout their selection – was instead done in shifts, with 72 lawmakers called to the floor at a time.
Shortly before 5:30 p.m., Pelosi took the rostrum to speak before a chamber with fewer than 150 members as the other two-thirds of lawmakers watched on television.
She began by noting that a new Congress’s first day usually begins with a bipartisan service at a Capitol Hill church – but not this year.
“Until that is possible, let us pray personally.” Pelosi said. “Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with us.”
รัฐมนตรีต่างประเทศของจีนกล่าวว่าการแพร่ระบาดนอกประเทศจีนอาจทำให้เกิดการระบาดของโรคโควิด -19
หน่วยงานของรัฐบาลกลางสหรัฐยืนยันว่าในวันนั้นไม่มีอะไรผิดปกติเกี่ยวกับอากาศยานเลย
เป็นอีกครั้งที่คริปโทเคอร์เรนซีรายนี้ทำให้เกิดความกังขาเกี่ยวกับราคาที่พุ่งขึ้นมาแรงจัด
นอกจากนี้เมื่อปลายปีที่แล้ว แจ็ค หม่ายังสูญเงินกว่า3แสนล้านใน2เดือน
กาสรแก้ไขกฎหมายใหม่มีนัยสำคัญด้านการป้องกันประทเทศจีนรวมถึงการให้อำนาจกับประธานาธิบดีมากขึ้น
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., exits the Senate floor following a vote Friday. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Amanda Voisard
