South Africa ‘held to ransom’ over Covid vaccine deals – NGO

The country was the victim of “gross profiteering” by Big Pharma during the pandemic, a report has claimed

An investigation into South Africa’s procurement of Covid-19 vaccines has found that the country’s health officials purchased supplies from global pharmaceutical companies at inflated prices compared to many Western nations.

The Health Justice Initiative (HJI), an independent body formed during the pandemic to monitor the South African healthcare system’s handling of the crisis, said during a news conference this week that the government was “bullied” into accepting unfavorable vaccine deals via one-sided “ransom negotiations.”

“The [vaccine] contracts contain unusually hefty demands and conditions, including secrecy, a lack of transparency, and very little leverage against late or no delivery of supplies or inflated prices,” the HJI said in a statement on Tuesday. It added that this system led to “gross profiteering” and an “inability to plan properly in a pandemic.”

The terms agreed by South Africa’s government with companies such as Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson for the purchase of Covid-19 vaccines were the subject of a legal challenge by the HJI last month under the country’s Promotion of Access to Information Act.

A Pretoria court subsequently ruled in favor of the HJI, compelling the South African government to release the vaccine contracts in the interest of transparency and accountability.

The documents detailed that South Africa was liable for vaccine payments of $734 million. The terms of the agreements included no guarantees of a timely delivery or penalties for late arrival. It was also found that Johnson & Johnson charged South Africa $10 per dose of its vaccine – some $1.50 more than EU countries paid.

“The country was forced to overpay for vaccines, paying 33% more than the African Union price from the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and paying the Serum Institute of India 2.5 times more for a generic version of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine compared to the United Kingdom,” the HJI said.

The group claimed that the government’s practices throughout the pandemic “signals a dangerous precedent for future pandemic readiness,” and that “we were bullied into unfair and undemocratic terms in contracts that were totally one-sided. Put simply, pharmaceutical companies held us to ransom.”

According to publicly available data, South Africa has recorded 102,595 deaths from Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. As of May 2023, approximately 65% of South Africans have received a vaccine against the virus.

https://www.rt.com/news/582519-south-africa-covid-vaccine-prices/

Survey reveals ‘worst’ US university for free speech

Harvard ranked last in the newly released FIRE rankings

Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher learning in the US, is also the worst when it comes to freedom of speech, according to a Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) survey released this week.

The rankings showed the institution at zero, with the cumulative score actually standing at negative 10.69, FIRE’s director of polling and analytics Sean Stevens told the New York Post.

“I thought it would be pretty much impossible for a school to fall below zero, but they’ve had so many scholar sanctions,” Stevens said. Harvard has disciplined seven out of nine professors and researchers over something they had said or written.

Harvard’s censorious climate has led more than 100 faculty to organize a Council on Academic Freedom earlier this year.

Stevens said he was not “totally surprised,” as Harvard has ranked “consistently near the bottom” since FIRE started doing the survey four years ago. It is the only school that FIRE currently ranks as “Abysmal.”

“An environment in which you can actually get in trouble for the ‘wrong’ academic opinion is not one that can be depended upon to produce reliable knowledge,” FIRE president and CEO Greg Lukianoff said, announcing the survey results. ”It’s especially disturbing that some of the worst performing institutions are among America’s most influential schools, including Harvard, Georgetown, Northwestern and Dartmouth.”

The university in Cambridge, Massachusetts – just north of Boston – was chartered in 1650 and is considered one of the most prestigious in North America.

Rounding out the bottom five were the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the University of South Carolina in Columbia, Georgetown University in Washington, DC and Fordham University in New York City.

New York’s Columbia University, last year’s worst school for free speech, came in 214th this time around. A total of 248 colleges and universities were considered.

The best-ranked school for free speech this year was the Michigan Technological University in Houghton, with a score of 78.01. Alabama’s Auburn University, the University of New Hampshire, Oregon State University and Florida State University made up the rest of the top five.

According to FIRE, the rankings rely heavily on the schools’ speech codes and responses to deplatforming demands. A survey of 55,000 students also revealed that 56% were worried about getting “canceled” for something they had said, while 27% believed it was acceptable to use violence to stop speech on campus in some circumstances.

The survey showed that the most difficult topics to discuss on campus are “abortion, gun control, racial inequality, and transgender rights.”

FIRE was founded in 1999, with the mission to “defend and sustain the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought – the most essential qualities of liberty.”

https://www.rt.com/news/582552-free-speech-universities-harvard/

Japan launches ‘Moon sniper’ lander

The mission aims to touch down on the lunar surface in early 2024

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has successfully launched a lunar exploration craft aboard a domestically produced rocket, and aims to make a precision landing on the Moon by next February.

An H-IIA rocket took off from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center on Thursday, releasing the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) for its several-month voyage to the lunar surface, according to JAXA.

Though the $100 million mission got off to a rocky start, with three postponements last month due to poor weather, JAXA noted that the rocket “flew as planned” during Thursday’s launch.

The space agency says it plans to make a “pinpoint landing” with the SLIM, aiming to be within 100 meters of its target site – earning it the nickname “Moon sniper.” JAXA noted the mission would provide valuable data and experience for future space exploration, including landings on “resource-scarce planets.”

“By creating the SLIM lander, humans will make a qualitative shift towards being able to land where we want and not just where it is easy to land, as had been the case before,” JAXA said in a mission description.

Should all go according to plan, the robotic SLIM lander will follow a long, fuel-efficient path before touching down inside the Shioli impact crater, a nearly 1,000-foot wide basin located on the near side of the Moon. The craft carries a number of sensors and other gear, including several small probes that will help to monitor the condition of the landing site.

In addition to the lander, the same H-IIA rocket also carried the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM, a space telescope jointly developed by JAXA, NASA and the European Space Agency. Researchers hope the instrument will lead to breakthroughs in the field of X-ray astronomy, potentially shedding new light on the structure of the early universe, the formation of galaxies and the nature of dark matter, among other things.

The successful launch follows two other failed lunar landing attempts by Japan over the last year, with JAXA losing contact with one craft last November, while another crashed down on the Moon in April.

The feat also comes after India’s maiden voyage to the lunar surface in late August – making it the fourth country to ever perform a landing – as well as an unsuccessful attempt by Moscow’s Luna-25 mission. Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, said the landing failed due to a technical glitch with the engine of the craft, but went on to voice hopes for future Moon missions.

https://www.rt.com/news/582501-japan-lunar-lander-launch/

‘Rigged’ US election to blame for Ukraine conflict – Trump

The former president claims if he hadn’t been cheated out of office Moscow would never have launched its operation against Kiev

Former President Donald Trump has claimed that the Ukraine conflict would never have begun if the 2020 US elections hadn’t been “rigged” and Joe Biden hadn’t replaced him and taken office.

In an interview with American radio host Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday, Trump insisted that Russia would have never launched its military operation in Ukraine if he were still in the White House.

“Ukraine is so sad,” Trump said. “[Putin] would have never done it if the election weren’t rigged, our election. It was rigged and stolen. If that election wasn’t rigged, if I were president, you would right now have millions of people living that are dead,” a transcript of the former president’s interview reads.

Trump went on to claim that, if he were still president, “Taiwan would never be talked about right now,” and that he’d maintained close contact with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, even though they “were not close to him.”

He also criticized the policies of Biden, who he described as “the most corrupt and incompetent president” and warned that his leadership could lead the world to a nuclear conflict that would result in World War III. “This man doesn’t have a clue,” Trump said.

Last month, the former president also claimed in an op-ed published by Newsweek that the Ukraine conflict was influenced in part by the infamous Russiagate investigation – an FBI probe into Trump’s ties with Russia that was launched over allegations that he’d colluded with Moscow during his 2016 presidential campaign. A report by special counsel John Durham earlier this year found that the FBI should never have launched the probe, as it was based on biased sources.

Trump said the investigation came “at a critical moment when we should have been reducing tensions with Russia” and instead undermined relations with Moscow and ultimately stoked a “mass hysteria” that pushed Washington to launch a “proxy war” against Moscow.

In July, the former president suggested that that the US is in a “very stupid, dangerous position right now” because it does not have as many nuclear weapons as Russia. He insisted Washington should improve its relations with Moscow, claiming that “it’s good to get along.”

https://www.rt.com/news/582541-trump-rigged-election-ukraine/

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