COVID-19 is "still evolving" and "progressing around the world," threatening to make the second year of the global pandemic "more deadlier than the first,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned this week.
The United States will endorse a motion at the World Trade Organization seeking to waive draconian patent and related intellectual property protections that have thus far prevented the world from achieving global COVID-19 vaccines equity, the Biden-Harris administration announced this week. Pope Francis announced his support of “universal access to the vaccine” and condemned the “virus of individualism” that “makes us indifferent to the suffering of others”.
"It is not surprising, therefore, that there is now a vast global coalition of NGOs, states and UN agencies that favour the recognition of vaccines (and health in general) as a public good and not a business, and the consequent temporary suspension of patent rights."
This week, the most consequential trial in this historic era of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement culminated in a rare guilty verdict. A Minneapolis jury found Derek Chauvin, a white man and former police officer, guilty of the May 2020 brutal, daylight lynching of George Floyd, a Black American man.
The "jury did the right thing" when it found Derek Chauvin, the white former Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd, a Black man, guilty on all three charges of murder and manslaughter, according to former U.S. President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama.
