China gives its first COVID-19 vaccine approval to Sinopharm

BEIJING: China approved a COVID-19 vaccine developed by an affiliate of state-backed pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm on Thursday, its first approved shot for general public use as it braces for increased transmission risks over winter.

No detailed efficacy data of the vaccine has been publicly released but its developer, Beijing Biological Products Institute, a unit of Sinopharm subsidiary China National Biotec Group (CNBG), said on Wednesday its vaccine was 79.34% effective in preventing people from developing the disease based on interim data.

The approval comes after the United Arab Emirates this month became the first country to roll out the vaccine to the public.

While China has been slower than several other countries in approving COVID-19 vaccines, it has been inoculating its citizens for months with three different shots still undergoing late-stage trials.

China launched an emergency use programme in July aimed at essential workers and others at high risk of infection and as of the end of November, had administered 1.5 million doses using at least three different products – two developed by CNBG and one by Sinovac.

While the efficacy of the Sinopharm shot trails the more than 90% success rate of rival vaccines from Pfizer Inc and its partner BioNTech and Moderna Inc, it points to progress China has made in the global race to develop successful COVID-19 vaccines.

The regulatory approval is a conditional, given to vaccines deemed urgently needed to cope with major public health emergencies even though complete clinical trials have yet to be completed, China’s National Medical Products Administration said on Thursday.

The approval came as Britain on Wednesday approved a second COVID-19 vaccine, a shot developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, as it battles a major winter surge driven by a new variant of the virus.

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WATCH: Small plane makes emergency landing on Florida beach

A small plane made an emergency landing on the sand off Dania Beach, Florida after developing engine fault shortly after takeoff.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the single-engine Cessna 172, owned by a Dania Beach marketing firm, took off from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport about 2 p.m. Tuesday and was in the air for about 10 minutes before making an emergency landing.

“The aircraft makes regularly scheduled trips from Fort Lauderdale to the Bahamas,” Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue spokesman Michael Kane told WSVN-TV. “It appears that, in this case, the aircraft had possibly just taken off from Fort Lauderdale when it experienced engine trouble and was unable to return to Fort Lauderdale.”

Beach visitor Derek Thompson captured video of the plane’s landing.

“He landed on the beach right in front of me, and I saw people down the beach, a few people, just run to get out of the way of the plane. The plane went up, and it’s nose kind of dug into the sand a bit when it finally came to a stop, and it came back down on its wheels,” Thompson said.

The pilot was able to exit the plane uninjured.

“To say that this was a miraculous landing would be a great understatement,” Kane told WPLG-TV.

The FAA investigation into the incident is ongoing.

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Dense fog disrupts air, road traffic in Punjab

LAHORE: Air and road traffic have disrupted owing to poor visibility owing to dense fog in different parts of Punjab including Lahore while the visibility rate at Allama Iqbal International Airport reduced to as low as 50 metres, ARY News reported on Thursday.

Seven flights were cancelled and 13 delayed due to poor visibility caused by heavy fog.

Some sections of motorways have been closed as traffic was halted at M-2 from Thokar Niaz Baig to Pindi Bhattian, Lahore to Sialkot Motorway and Lahore to Jaranwala M-3, according to Motorway Police spokesperson.

Moreover, the fog blankets different routes of National Highway including Thokar Niaz Baig, Chaung, Maraka, Bhattian, Manga Mandi, Pattoki, Jambar and Phool Nagar which reduces visibility rate to 30 metres.

In Punjab’s Farooqabad, the visibility rate decreased to 10 metres as well which caused disruption in road traffic in the city and its surrounding areas. The residents of Daska are also facing trouble in travelling as the visibility rate reached zero in the city and its adjoining areas amid extremely cold weather.

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Deadly discovery after schoolboy eats popcorn

A schoolboy in Scotland suffered a collapsed lung after choking on a piece of popcorn. 

Two-year-old, Jordy Gordon from Fort William, Scotland, was just two years old when he choked on the snack and unknowingly inhaled a kernel, which obstructed his airways.

His mum took him to the hospital when he couldn’t stop coughing, wrongly suspecting he had a chest infection.

But scans revealed the tiny piece of popcorn had caused one of Jordy’s lungs to completely collapse and he was kept in for treatment.

But a follow-up scan to check his lung function revealed he had a potentially-fatal heart condition where his pulmonary veins were in the wrong place.

Jordy wasn’t getting enough oxygen and without open-heart surgery could “drop dead” at any moment, doctors warned.

His mum Shona Macgillivray, 35, fears the heart condition would never have been discovered if Jordy hadn’t inhaled the snack.

The early years practitioner, from Scotland, said: “I now think of that popcorn as both a blessing and a curse, as it showed us what was wrong.”

Shona added: “We spoke to the doctors who told us that loads of things can go wrong during surgery, but if he didn’t have it he could just drop dead at some point maybe in his late teens or early twenties.”

Doctors said there was a chance he might not survive the operation or be left disabled by it, but he went under the knife in July 2016.

The 12-hour surgery at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow saw doctors cut through his chest to reposition his pulmonary veins.

Shona said: “It was the worst day of my life. It was awful – I walked in, burst into tears, and then walked back out again.

“It was like he was comatose and wasn’t really aware of what was going on.”

Six days after he was admitted for his surgery, Jordy came home to his mum, dad and older brother Rhys, now 10, after making a full recovery.

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Oil set for 20% drop in 2020 as lockdowns weigh, market eyes more stimulus

SINGAPORE: Global crude oil markets have lost about a fifth of their value in 2020 as strict coronavirus lockdowns paralysed much of the global economy, but prices have rebounded strongly from their lows as governments rolled out stimulus.

On Thursday, the last trading day of 2020, Brent was trading down 25 cents, or 0.5%, at $51.38 a barrel, as of 0246 GMT and U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) lost 0.2%, or 11 cents, to $48.29 a barrel.

“It is kind of year-end quiet but a weaker dollar is helping keep a floor under markets,” said Stephen Innes, chief global market strategist at Axi.

Brent and WTI have more than doubled from decade-lows seen in April, putting past a year which marked the first negative prices for WTI that shocked investors globally.

Asian shares are set to end a tumultuous 2020 by hovering near record highs on Thursday while riskier currencies cruised near 2-1/2-year peaks, buoyed by hopes that COVID-19 vaccine rollouts will help the world beat the pandemic.

The dollar was ending 2020 in a downward spiral on Thursday with investors wagering a global economic recovery will suck money into riskier assets even as the yawning U.S. twin deficits argue for an ever cheaper currency.

In the short-term, concerns over coronavirus lockdowns are likely to cap gains.

A new variant of the virus in the United Kingdom has led to the reimposition of movement restrictions, hitting near-term demand and weighing on prices, while hospitalizations and infections have surged in parts of Europe and Africa.

On the supply front, U.S. energy firms this week added 3 oil and natural gas rigs to the best quarter for boosting the rig count since the second quarter of 2017, according to data from Baker Hughes.

A Jan. 4 meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies, including Russia, a group known as OPEC+, is set to boost output by 500,000 barrels per day in January.

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2,475 new cases, 58 deaths reported within 24 hours: NCOC

ISLAMABAD: The statistics of National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) has shown that the coronavirus pandemic claims 58 more lives, whereas, 2,475 new infections were reported during the last 24 hours, ARY News reported on Thursday.

In the past 24 hours, 58 more people succumbed to the disease, taking the death toll to 10,105. 4,960 patients have recovered from the virus in a day and 2,206 patients are in critical condition.

The total count of active cases is 34,537.

According to the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC), with fresh inclusion of the infections in the country the national tally of cases now currently stands at 479,715.

A total of 39,695 tests were conducted across the country during this period. Overall 435,073 people have recovered from the deadly disease so far while 6,696,068 samples have been tested thus far.

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Dissecting the actions of PTI’s online brigade

In 2019, while the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Maryam Nawaz was speaking at a huge rally in Mandi Bahauddin, a party stronghold, a Twitter trend, “#رنڈی_اِن_منڈی” (Prostitute in Mandi) was becoming viral. The disgusting trend was thoroughly misogynistic and was being propagated by none other than some ‘educated’ supporters of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Disgusted, I took to Facebook to express my outrage. One of my cousins, another PTI supporter, while ‘condemning’ such behaviour, commented that “What goes around comes around because Nawaz had done the same to Benazir Bhutto. Allah kee lathi beawaz hoti hai. (God’s retribution is silent). It’s a punishment for Nawaz from Allah”. He was referring to an alleged incident in the late 1980s when photo-shopped nude pictures of Benazir Bhutto had allegedly been air dropped over several cities in Sindh. At that point I realised that perhaps my cousin was even worse than the propagators of the aforementioned trend. Instead of condemning them he was actually rationalising their behaviour and framing it as some kind of retribution from God. It escaped his otherwise rich imagination that the supporters of PTI were behind the trend and that they were in no way trying to ‘avenge’ Benazir Bhutto but simply targeting Maryam Nawaz for being an opponent of their leader. I found it funny that Benazir Bhutto herself eventually had become very close to Nawaz Sharif and had no qualms in signing the famous “Charter of Democracy”, yet somehow the PTI trolls, who hate the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) with an equal intensity, were avenging what Nawaz Sharif had allegedly done. The PPP’s own supporters however were fine. In fact, they were cheering Maryam Nawaz on.   The trend and subsequent justification by some perfectly demonstrates the collective mind-set of some supporters of the PTI: abusive and reeking of self-righteousness – a combination which precludes any introspection.   That was more than a year ago. A few days ago, during the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) rally in Multan, there was another trending hash tag, #رائیونڈ_کی_رنڈی (Prostitute of Raiwind), once again targeting Maryam Nawaz. Apart from her, another favourite target of such vile behaviour is Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who is constantly called a transgender by individuals who claim allegiance to the PTI. One can dismiss this attitude by just brushing it aside as ‘typical’ of Pakistani politics and argue that it is not fair to single out PTI. After all, abusive behaviour and misogyny are rampant in all parties. This is true to a certain extent, but some parties appear to be guiltier of indulging in such behaviour than others. According to statistics compiled by “The Coalition for Women Journalists”, social media accounts relating to PTI supporters are behind 42% of the incidents of online abuse aimed at female journalists. In contrast, PML-N – PTI’s foremost rival in the political realm – accounts for merely 3% of such online behaviour, and PPP for less than 1%. Moreover, PTI trolls not only target critics but often abuse their family members also. For example, I still remember when the anchor-person Mansoor Ali Khan’s daughters and wife were abused in the comments section of his Twitter account. Likewise, Mohammad Hanif, while writing for the BBC, shared an incident when PTI trolls posted a pic of his wife in his Twitter comments section and called her a traitor. In a similar incident, journalist Hasan Zaidi was forced to lodge a formal complaint to Bank Alfalah when one of its employees, a PTI supporter, abused his mother on social media. The said employee was fired by the bank, prompting another abusive online campaign against Zaidi by angry PTI supporters. Even Malala Yousafzai, who has never said a word against PTI, is regularly targeted by the PTI trolls. But such behaviour becomes even more of an anomaly given the fact that many of these PTI supporters belong to the white collar, urban middle class and might be more ‘educated’ than supporters of other parties. Perhaps there are multiple reasons behind this phenomenon.   Firstly, such behaviour is actively encouraged by the PTI leadership, including Imran Khan who has constantly indulged in the usage of derogatory language against his opponents and has also gone to the extent of deliberately addressing Bilawal as “sahiba” (madam). Moreover, PTI has deliberately appointed foulmouthed individuals such as Shahbaz Gill, Faisal Vawda, Fayaz Chohan, Fawad Chaudhry and Firdous Ashiq Awan as its spokespersons. These individuals regularly indulge in crude rhetoric against PTI’s political opponents. Additionally, on social media, PTI has a large footprint and its social media cell often indulges in coordinated attacks against its critics. Since the encouragement is coming from the party leadership as well as its social media cell, ordinary supporters of PTI have no hesitation whatsoever in indulging in abusive behaviour. Secondly, the primary factor behind this is the cult of personality model which PTI has adopted. This model glorifies Imran Khan extravagantly by projecting him as the only ‘true’ leader and Pakistan’s ‘last hope’ while demonising his opponents by labelling them as corrupt and disloyal to Pakistan. This lopsided glorification coupled with the scathing vilification of PTI’s political opponents encourages PTI supporters to abuse Imran Khan’s opponents and critics. In fact, it does something worse. It gives them an instinctive comfort in their vitriolic behaviour as they feel that Imran Khan’s opponents ‘deserve’ all the abuse because they are corrupt traitors. Lastly, a major reason behind this is the general polarised political atmosphere in Pakistan. As the PDM surges and battle lines are being drawn and re-drawn, the political polarisation has also increased; which in turn has made many PTI supporters even more intense in their support of the party and therefore even more abusive. For many of them, PDM is merely a union of the old corrupt elite to save their looted wealth. This perception only further encourages them to abuse all the opponents and critics of PTI.

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