As the world celebrates the 40th anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, the World Health Organization reports the methods used to rid the world of the devastating disease can be used today to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.In the 20th century alone, more than 300 million people died from smallpox until it was eradicated in 1975 in an effort led by the World Health Organization. Observers agree the monumental achievement was made possible by global unity and cooperation, in which even the U.S. and Russia collaborated during the height of the Cold War.Rosamund Lewis, the head of WHO’s Smallpox Secretariat, told VOA the parallels today with COVID-19 have to do with the methods used decades ago to eradicate smallpox.”That was achieved through basic public health, basic epidemiology, shoe-leather epidemiology, of basically case finding, contact tracing, quarantine, isolation of cases, treatment,” Lewis said. “These are the basic methods and approaches, which supported the eradication effort. Of course, for smallpox there was a vaccine and for COVID-19 we do not have one yet. Hence, again the importance of research and development.”Samples of the smallpox virus are kept under strict containment in two WHO collaborating centers, in the United States and Russia. Lewis says controversy still swirls over whether the live virus should be retained for research purposes or destroyed, considering the risks posed if the virus accidentally escaped from one of the facilities.However, the debate might be moot, Lewis says, as WHO and many countries have a stockpile of vaccine in the event of a resurgence of smallpox, and treatments for the disease have been approved. 
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As some states moved to open their economies from the pandemic lockdown this week, Salon owner Shelley Luther reacts as supporters chant for her after she was released from jail in Dallas, May 7, 202 for refusing to keep her business closed amid concerns of the spread of COVID-19.Best guessIn the absence of experience, models provide policymakers with the best guesses available for what the implications of their decisions will be. But with a virus that scientists discovered less than six months ago, there is a tremendous amount that modelers don’t know. And it changes all the time.”All of these models are dependent entirely upon the assumptions that you put into them,” said Mark Roberts, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Public Health Dynamics Lab. “Unfortunately, there’s just a tremendous amount of uncertainty about this virus right now and about how it behaves.”For example, scientists have only in the last month or so concluded that people can spread the virus without showing symptoms. “That was not originally in our model,” Roberts said.Modelers don’t agree on how important certain factors are — temperature, for instance. IHME factors in a 2% decrease in spread for every 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature.”As heat increases and weather gets warmer, we will see a reduction in circulation,” said health metrics sciences professor Ali Mokdad at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “So, that’s a positive.”Roberts is not so sure. It’s an option in their model, but “we’ve turned it off because we don’t know how big a difference it makes.”Each model makes assumptions about the effectiveness of policies like social distancing. Much of the data comes from early outbreaks in China. But those results may not hold up elsewhere. “If the government in China says lock down, people tend to obey,” said biologist Katriona Shea at the Penn State University Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. In the United States, however, “it’s a different political system, and you’ll get very different responses to the same management interventions,” she said.People wear mask as they ride bicycle in downtown Chicago, May 7, 2020.New mobilitySome factors are changing constantly, and models have to adjust accordingly.  People are starting to move around more, even in states that have not relaxed restrictions.  But the impact of mobility on the spread of the virus has changed since earlier in the pandemic because people’s behavior has changed in other ways. “Americans, as they are moving about right now, are being very careful and wearing masks and keeping a safe distance,” Mokdad said. “The new mobility is different than the old mobility.”For all of these elements, different modelers devise different formulas to calculate the impact and plug different numbers into their equations. They can come to different conclusions. For policymakers, basing decisions on the wrong model can mean lives lost or resources wasted, Shea said. So, she is spearheading an effort to “crowdsource” multiple models into tools that not only forecast where the epidemic is headed, but can help officials answer key questions about how to contain it.While forecasts are important to help prepare for the future, Shea said, “I think even more important is what to do to make the forecast as positive as it possibly can be.”
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has repeatedly found its suggestions for fighting the coronavirus outbreak taking a backseat to other concerns within the Trump administration.
That leaves public health experts outside government fearing the agency’s decades of experience in beating back disease threats are going to waste.  
“You have the greatest fighting force against infectious diseases in world history. Why would you not use them?” said Dr. Howard Markel, a public health historian at the University of Michigan.
The complaints have sounded for months. But they have become louder following repeated revelations that transmission-prevention guidance crafted by CDC scientists was never adopted by the White House.
The latest instance surfaced Thursday, when The Associated Press reported that President Donald Trump’s administration shelved a CDC document containing step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places during the current pandemic.  
The administration has disputed the notion that the CDC had been sidelined, saying the agency is integral to the administration’s plans to expand contact tracing nationwide.  
But it’s clear that the CDC is playing a much quieter role than it has during previous outbreaks.
The nation’s COVID-19 response has seen a strange turn for the CDC, which opened in 1946 in Atlanta as The Communicable Disease Center to prevent the spread of malaria with a $10 million budget and a few hundred employees. Today, the agency has a core budget of more than $7 billion — a sum that has been shrinking in recent years — and employs nearly 11,000 people.  
The CDC develops vaccines and diagnostic tests. Its experts advise doctors how best to treat people, and teach state, local and international officials how to fight and prevent disease. Among the CDC’s elite workforce are hundreds of the world’s foremost disease investigators — microbiologists, pathologists and other scientists dispatched to investigate new and mysterious illnesses.
In 2009, when a new type of flu virus known at the time as swine flu spread around the world, the CDC held almost daily briefings. Its experts released information on a regular basis to describe the unfolding scientific understanding of the virus, and the race for a vaccine.
The federal response to the coronavirus pandemic initially followed a similar pattern.  
The CDC first learned in late December of the emergence of a new disease in China, and the U.S. identified its first case in January. In those early days, the CDC held frequent calls with reporters. It also quickly developed a test it could run at its labs, and a test kit to be sent to state health department labs to detect the virus.
But February proved to be a disaster. The test kit was flawed, delaying the ability of states to do testing. A CDC-run surveillance system, meant to look for signs of the virus in people who had thought they had the flu, was slow to get off the ground. Officials at the CDC and at other federal agencies were slow to recognize infections from Europe were outpacing ones from travelers to China.  
But politically speaking, one the most striking moments that month was something that the CDC — in the eyes of public health experts — got perfectly right.
In late February, Dr. Nancy Messonnier — a well-respected CDC official who was leading the agency’s coronavirus response — contradicted statements by other federal officials that the virus was contained. “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen – and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” she said.  
Stocks plunged. President Donald Trump was enraged.
The White House Coronavirus Task Force moved to center stage. Vice President Mike Pence took control of clearing CDC communications about the virus. CDC news conferences stopped completely after March 9. Messonnier exited the public stage.White House Coronavirus Task Force membersCDC Director Robert Redfield continued to keep the low profile he’s had since getting the job. Two other task force members — Dr. Deborah Birx, the task force coordinator, and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health — became the task force’s chief scientific communicators.
Health experts have praised Fauci, but they say CDC’s voice is sorely missed.
“At the White House briefings, they (CDC) should be talking about antibody tests and if they work. How long do people have the virus if they’re infected? What are the data for that? The issue ought to be front and center. These are the questions CDC can answer,” said Dr. James Curran, a former CDC star scientist who is now dean of Emory University’s public health school.
The government has continued to look to CDC officials for information and guidance, but there have been repeated instances when what the agency’s experts send to Washington is rejected.
In early March, administration officials overruled CDC doctors who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, the AP reported.
Last month, USA Today reported that the White House task force had forced the CDC had to change orders it had posted keeping cruise ships docked until August. The post was altered to say the ships could sail again in July, the newspaper reported.  
And last week, officials nixed CDC draft guidance that was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.   The 17 pages of guidelines were never approved by Redfield to present to the White House task force, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. They were only discussed at the task force level once the drafts leaked publicly, and no decisions about them were ever made.
Still, the CDC guidelines were the subject of intense debate at the upper echelons of the White House. Some officials saw them as essential to helping businesses and other organizations safely reopen.  
Others, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, did not believe it appropriate for the federal government to set guidelines for specific sectors whose circumstances could vary widely depending on the level of outbreak in their areas, according to a person familiar with the discussion. What was necessary for a coffee shop in New York and one in Oklahoma was wildly different, in their view.  
They worried about potential negative economic impact from the guidelines, and some aides expressed doubts about whether the government should be prescribing practices to religious communities.
The decision not to issue detailed sector guidance is also in keeping with the White House’s strategic decision to leave the specific details of reopening to states. While Trump had at one point claimed absolute authority to detail how and when states open, he’s adopted a largely hands-off approach as more and more states begin to lift lockdowns.  
Trump suggests his decision is in keeping with the principles of federalism, but White House aides acknowledge that it also lessens the political peril for the president — who has come under pressure from conservative allies, particularly in states that haven’t experienced wide outbreaks, to swiftly reopen the country.  
On a conference call Thursday afternoon with the House members on the White House’s “Opening Up America” panel, lawmakers in both parties pressed the White House to release sector-specific guidance of the sort currently held up by the administration.
“There was clear bipartisan support for the need to have CDC guidance and the need to have best practices,” said Democratic Congressman Ted Deutsch.
The CDC did not respond to a Thursday request for an interview with Redfield.  
In a recent interview with the AP, the agency’s No. 2 administrator, Dr. Anne Schuchat, was asked to address reports that CDC recommendations were being ignored in Washington.
She paused, and then replied slowly.
“The CDC is providing our best evidence-based information to policy makers and providing that on a daily basis to protect the American people,” she said, without further comment.
 
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Marine life in the politically disputed South China Sea took another hit over the past year, researchers said, due to overfishing and lack of international efforts to protect species.Vessels from multiple Asian countries are going farther out into the 3.5 million-square-kilometer sea and casting deeper because coastal waters yield increasingly little, scholars and published research indicate. Giant clam harvesting, added to use of  cyanide and dynamite bombing for fish, damaged coral reefs last year, the analysts said.Marine life in the sea that stretches from Taiwan southwest to Singapore comes into focus every May, when China declares a moratorium on fishing above the 12th parallel, which encompasses waters most frequented by China but bisecting both Vietnam and the Philippines. The bans that began in 1995 will last this year from May 1 to August 16.“We’re all in this pretty rapid decline when it comes to biodiversity in the South China Sea and we certainly don’t see any evidence that anybody is doing anything about it,” said Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative under the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.Fishing in the sea expanded rapidly in the 1980s and early 1990s, to about 10 million tons per year but then started stagnating, researchers Cui Liang of China’s Xiamen University and Daniel Pauly from the University of British Columbia said in a 2017 paper.Since then, the study said, boats have fished deeper and caught smaller fish. Still, the South China Sea accounted for 12 percent of the global fish catch just five years ago, according to CSIS. Analysts could not estimate the total 2019 catch volume because of lack of national-level data.“The coastal areas are already overfished, so that means that fishing fleets from China, Taiwan, Korea, even Japan would actually be swarming now into the center of the South China Sea area, which means there is that concern about overfishing, and then, not to speak of that island-building processes that China conducted,” said Herman Kraft, a political science professor at University of the Philippines Diliman.Among the problems is continued use by Asian fishing crews of dynamite and cyanide bombing, the conservation group Global Underwater Explorers said on its website. The practice, which wrecks coral reefs and fish spawning zones, is “widespread throughout Asia and the South China Sea, from Indonesia to southern China,” the website said.CSIS pointed to “large-scale” clam harvesting and dredging for island construction. China has wrecked 40,000 acres of coral reef to build islets for human use, Poling said. Giant clam harvesting last year by Chinese boats hurt coral around Scarborough Shoal west of Luzon Island in the Philippines, media outlets in Manila said.Military groups in the sea’s Spratly Islands have shot turtles and seabirds, raided nests and fished with explosives, the World Wildlife Fund said on its website. One turtle species, the hawksbill, is endangered.Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam claim all or part of the sea that is also valuable because of its energy reserves and marine shipping lanes. An estimated 37 million people depend on fishing there for a living, while state-to-state conservation talks are rare.The declining fishery stocks push each country’s fleet to look harder for what’s left, Poling said. About 4 million Chinese fishing crew members are expected to obey China’s moratorium, but crews from other countries, which contest sovereignty over that tract of sea, are unlikely to change course because they do not recognize the Chinese claim.Most conservation efforts to date come from individual countries.About five years ago, academics in the Philippines suggested creating a protected area in the Spratlys, and the idea gained a following in government agencies, although not at the presidential level, Kraft said. Vietnam had proposed nearly 20 years ago that a separate160-square-kilometer tract of the archipelago become a protected area. Both countries control some of the Spratly islets.Coral in 3,500 square kilometers of open sea around the Taiwan-controlled Pratas islets showed improvement last year because the Taiwanese coast guard has stepped up patrols to keep foreign-registered fishing vessels away, said Chuang Cheng-hsien, a conservation section chief under the Marine National Park Headquarters. China also claims the three Pratas atolls.Eight or nine years ago, he said, foreign vessels would fish near the protected atolls.“They get pushed out now, so there’s a big difference in numbers between now and the past,” he said. “In that area there’s virtually no destruction by mechanized fishing boats.”  
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On May 9th, 1960, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the world’s first commercially produced oral contraceptive. The birth control drug — popularly known as ‘The Pill’ — was hailed by supporters as “revolutionary” but 60 years later, insufficient access to the drug and other methods of birth control around the world have hampered what many hoped would be the magic pill for female reproductive rights. VOA’s Jesusemen Oni has more.
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The World Health Organization says it is “deeply troubled by reports that domestic violence has spiked dramatically in many areas of Europe during COVID-related lockdowns.”Speaking from Copenhagen Thursday, the WHO Europe chief, Dr. Hans Kluge, said he had seen reports of increases in reports of domestic and other interpersonal violence against men, women and children from countries including Belgium, Britain, France, Russia, Spain and others amid the coronavirus pandemic.FILE – Padlocks and ribbons signed “Free for Khachaturyan sisters” are attached on the Patriarshy Bridge during an action against domestic violence, with the Kremlin in the background, in Moscow, Russia, Dec. 14, 2019.While statistics are difficult to come by, Kluge estimates that 60% of women are suffering domestic violence, and that calls to help hotlines have jumped about five times. What perhaps is more troubling is the fact that most domestic violence cases go unreported.Kluge said if lockdowns were to continue for six months, the organization would expect an extra 31 million cases of gender-based violence globally.Saying there is no single solution to the problem, Kluge called on government officials to consider it a moral obligation to ensure help services are available to communities.He said that some countries have already responded to the emerging crisis, noting that Italy has developed an app where people can request help without making a phone call. Spain and France have programs where pharmacists can be alerted to problems by people using code words. Scotland has also allocated additional funds to social services related to domestic violence. 
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The focus of future U.S. missions to the moon may soon shift from research to commerce. Meanwhile, European scientists have discovered the closest black hole to our solar system. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi explores This Week in Space.
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Microbes carried on the bodies of visiting astronauts are being sampled on board the International Space Station in hopes of learning how to better protect their health and the health of people on Earth.“Microbial tracking” is a series of experiments in which samples are taken by ISS crew members and studied by researchers on the ground. The experiments have shown microorganisms living on surfaces inside the space station so closely resembled those on an astronaut’s skin that scientists could tell when a new crew member arrived and departed, just by looking at the microbes left behind.The findings show how monitoring microbes will be important for protecting the health of astronauts on the ISS and in future long-term space projects. But they could also tell us something about relatively closed environments on Earth, like hospitals, where understanding the presence of microbes and other potentially dangerous organisms have never been more important.Livermore National Laboratory Biologist Crystal Jaing is the principal investigator for the microbial tracking study. She says understanding how the space station crew interacts with the “microbial community” is important to prevent complications for human health on a spacecraft during long flights, or, perhaps, in a home, on public transportation or a hospital.Results of the study were published last week in the science journal PLOS One. 
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As she was treated for COVID-19 in a hospital isolation ward in Kuwait City, Amnah Ibraheem wanted to credit those caring for her. The nurses were all South Asian, the radiologist was African, another of her doctors was Egyptian. The only fellow Kuwaiti she saw, briefly, was a lone volunteer.
Ibraheem pointed this out on Twitter, in a rejoinder to some voices in Kuwait and other parts of the Gulf who have stoked fear and resentment of foreigners, blaming them for the spread of the coronavirus.
“We can’t decide right now to be racist and to say that expats are free-riders, because they’re not,” the 32-year-old political scientist and mother of two told The Associated Press. “They’re the ones working on our health right now, completely holding our health system together.”
The global pandemic has drawn attention to just how vital foreigners are to the Arab Gulf countries where they work, particularly as countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman expel foreigners from certain sectors to create jobs for their own citizens. The crisis has also shed a brief light on the systemic inequality in their home countries that drives so many to the region in the first place.
 
Across the Gulf countries, the workers on the front lines are uniquely almost entirely foreigners, whether it’s in a hospital in Saudi Arabia, an isolation ward in Kuwait or a grocery store in the United Arab Emirates. They carry out the essential work, risking exposure to the novel coronavirus, often with the added strain of being far from family.
Foreigners also make up the vast majority of the roughly 78,000 confirmed coronavirus cases overall in the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain Oman and Saudi Arabia.
In the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, foreigners also make up the vast majority of the population. Most hail from India, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines and Egypt. They reside on temporary work visas with no path to citizenship, no matter how long they’ve lived or worked in the Gulf. Many work low-paying construction jobs and live in labor camps where up to 10 people share a room. These living conditions have made them vulnerable  to the fast-spreading disease known as COVID-19.  
That has made them a target for some. Popular Kuwaiti actress Hayat al-Fahad told a Kuwaiti broadcaster the root of the country’s coronavirus problem lies in South Asian and Egyptian migrant workers. She lamented that if their own countries won’t take them back, why should Kuwait fill its hospitals to treat them at the expense of its own citizens.
“Aren’t people supposed to leave during crises?” she said, before adding: “I swear by God, put them in the desert. I am not against humane treatment, but we have gotten to a point where we’re fed up already.”
Ibraheem said her tweet was in response to such rhetoric. Kuwait, she said, has always been a moderate, welcoming country built with help from expatriates.
“This is the not the time to become tribalistic,” Ibraheem said. “This is the time to work together with everybody because the virus doesn’t check your passport.”
From the same hospital, Najeeba Hayat used Instagram to take aim at Kuwaiti lawmaker Saffa al-Hashem after she called for the deportation of foreigners who’d overstayed their visas in order to “purify the country” of the virus they might transmit.  
“I take umbrage to that,” Hayat told the AP. “There’s no way we can survive if we continue to look down on the very people taking care of us, who have raised our children, who are part of the fabric of our community.”
Hayat spent more than 30 days in the hospital until she was cleared of COVID-19. On the day she left, she shared photos with her more than 25,000 followers of her Indian nurses, thanking them for being on the front line with her.  
While foreign doctors and nurses have received some praise in local media, farther from the spotlight are the delivery men, street cleaners, construction workers, butchers and cashiers who also risk exposure to the virus in their jobs.  
At the Carrefour supermarket in Dubai, plexiglass shields at the registers protect the cashiers, and everyone entering is required to wear gloves and a mask.  
One cashier, Valaney Fernandes, a 27-year-old from Goa, India, who’s been working in the UAE the past five years, said she felt she was contributing. “It’s like in hospitals and everywhere, they are serving there as much as they can.”
Fernandes said she was grateful to still be working. Her retired parents back home rely on her salary. “We have to earn for our daily needs,” she said. “I’m lucky enough to work now. I’m really lucky.”
Tens of thousands of migrant workers who’ve lost their jobs have demanded from their embassies in the Gulf to be flown back home amid the pandemic. In the UAE alone, local media reported that more than 197,000 Indians registered their details with the Indian government to return home.
When the UAE shuttered movie theaters in March, Ugandan Lukia Namitala came close to losing her job at Vox Cinema, but parent company  Majid Al Futtaim quickly redeployed  her and some 1,000 other employees to their Carrefour supermarket division to help with a surge in demand.  
“The majority of my friends, they are no longer working,” she said. Now she’s an essential worker, stocking shelves.  
To be so far from family has been hard, she said. Namitala had to postpone her annual leave last month due to the pandemic, and missed her daughter’s fifth birthday. As she thought about another missed milestone, her eyes welled up with tears.
“The best thing in this world is staying next to your family,” she said. “If I get my savings nicely, I’m ready to go back and stay with my family because my family is my everything.”
In a nod to how important foreigners are to the economy, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed said in a video he was moved to tears watching foreign residents on social media sing the UAE’s national anthem.  
“May God protect you, protect the country you’re in, which you are loyal to like its own citizens,” he said in late March. 
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A team of European astronomers has discovered a black hole 1,000 light years from Earth, the closest yet found to our solar system.According to the authors of a study, published Wednesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the black hole is close enough that two stars affected by it can be seen with the naked eye. Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other institutes found evidence for the invisible object by tracking the two companion stars using a 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. They were able to confirm that something about four or five times the mass of our sun was pulling on the inner star and concluded it could only be a black hole.They say finding a black hole this close could be just the tip of the iceberg, as many more similar black holes could be found in the future.The authors say that is valuable because “by finding and studying them, we can learn a lot about the formation and evolution of those rare stars that begin their lives with more than about 8 times the mass of the sun and end them in a supernova explosion that leaves behind a black hole.” 
 
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Britain’s health secretary said Wednesday that national lockdown rules were “for everyone,” after one of the government’s key scientific advisers quit for receiving secret visits from his girlfriend amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Imperial College epidemiologist Neil Ferguson developed models that predicted hundreds of thousands would die unless the U.K. imposed drastic restrictions to slow the spread of the coronavirus. His advice was key in triggering Britain’s lockdown in March. Under the rules, people are barred from visiting friends and family that they don’t live with.
Ferguson quit the government’s scientific advisory panel late Tuesday after the Daily Telegraph newspaper reported that a woman he is in a relationship with had crossed London to visit him at his home.
Ferguson said in a statement that he had “made an error of judgment and took the wrong course of action.”
“I deeply regret any undermining of the clear messages around the continued need for social distancing to control this devastating epidemic,” he said.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Ferguson was “a very eminent and impressive scientist,” but “took the right decision to resign.”
He told Sky News that the social distancing rules “are there for everyone, they are incredibly important and they are deadly serious. They are the means by which we have managed to get control of this virus.”
Ferguson has become a well-known figure in Britain, making frequent media appearances during the outbreak. On March 18, he tweeted that he had a fever and cough, symptoms of COVID-19, and that there was a small risk he had infected others.  
Ferguson is the second scientific adviser in the U.K. to quit after failing to follow their own advice. Catherine Calderwood resigned as Scotland’s chief medical officer last month for twice traveling from Edinburgh to her second home.
As one of the founders of the MRC Centre for Global Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, Ferguson’s work has been instrumental in shaping public health responses to outbreaks including swine flu, Ebola and Zika. Ferguson has long advised authorities including the World Health Organization and national governments in Britain, Europe and the U.S.
On March 16, Ferguson and colleagues published a paper suggesting that even with some social distancing measures, the U.K. could see 250,000 coronavirus deaths and that the U.S. might have about 1 million deaths. In a worst-case scenario, Ferguson predicted those figures could more than double in both countries.  
The following day, Prime Minister Boris Johnson advised Britons to work from home if possible and to avoid all unnecessary social gatherings.
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British and Kenyan scientists have discovered a microbe that they say has “enormous potential” toward the possible eradication of one of the world’s most dreaded diseases — malaria.The study published in the journal Nature Communications says the microbe completely protects mosquitoes from being infected by malaria.The microbe is called Microsporidia MB, and scientists discovered it inside the guts and genitalia of mosquitoes living around Lake Victoria in Kenya. They report that they could not find a single mosquito with the microbe in its guts carrying the malaria bug. “The data we have so far suggest it is 100% blockage, it’s a very severe blockage of malaria,” insect expert Dr. Jeremy Herren told the BBC. “It will come as a quite a surprise. I think people will find that a real big breakthrough.”The experts say they don’t know exactly how the microbe works, but suspect it affects the mosquito’s immune system in a way to allow the insect to fight off the malaria parasite.The scientists estimate that about 5% of mosquitoes carry the microbe naturally. The experts’ next step is to study ways to release the microbe-infected mosquitoes into the wild.Malaria, which kills about 400,000 people every year, spreads through mosquito bites. The World Health Organization says most of the victims are children younger than five.Although measures including mosquito nets and insecticides have led to tremendous progress in combating malaria over the past 20 years, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, existing strategies are proving to be insufficient, as mosquitoes develop resistance to some insecticides.WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned last month that while the global medical community is focused on battling the coronavirus, some diseases, including malaria, “will come roaring back” if fewer people are vaccinated because of the lack of attention. The WHO forecasts the number of malaria deaths could surpass 769,000 this year. 
 
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If life on Earth has become tedious with coronavirus restrictions, celestial activity this week promises some excitement. In addition to an ongoing meteor shower, the year’s last supermoon is out and will be seen at its best Thursday.The annual Halley’s Comet meteor shower peaked Monday, but the meteor streaks will still be visible in the sky by the end of the week. The world’s best-known comet produces a meteor shower, officially known as Eta Aquariids, which can be seen once a year in the spring when the Earth crosses the comet’s path.Halley’s Comet is the best known because it can be seen with the naked eye as it passes by periodically. It was first noticed more than 2,000 years ago. Astronomers have observed and documented its appearances, which has helped them understand comets in general. The comet was named after 17th-century British astronomer Edmond Halley, who computed the rate of its movement from his 1682 observations and predicted that it would reappear in 1758, long after his death.Halley’s Comet shower is the most spectacular for viewers in the southern hemisphere. It is best seen from Australia, New Zealand, Africa and South America, where gazers may see as many as 40 “falling stars” in the sky. But northern viewers can admire the radiant show above the horizon in predawn hours, away from city lights or moonlight.SupermoonThis year the comet shower coincides with the last supermoon of the year 2020. A supermoon is a full moon that appears bigger and brighter when it gets closest to the Earth in its orbit. The May supermoon will be seen at its fullest and brightest Thursday, but it will be bright enough Tuesday to outshine the comet’s performance.FILE – The supermoon rises behind a downtown office building in Kansas City, Mo., April 7, 2020.A full moon appears approximately once a month. When it gets closest to the Earth in its orbit, it can look up to 14% bigger and 30% brighter than a regular monthly full moon and so it is called supermoon.Most years have 12 full moons, but this year has 13, three of them supermoons. The May supermoon, known in the United States as the Flower Supermoon, follows the Pink Supermoon from April and another one in March.The names Pink and Flower were given to moons by Native Americans after the abundance of field flowers that grow at the time they appear.The year 2020 will also have a rare blue moon. A blue moon is the second full moon in the same month — something that happens only every 2½ or three years. English-language speakers are familiar with the phrase “once in a blue moon,” referring to something that happens rarely. This year’s blue moon will fall on Halloween, October 31, something that happens once in two decades, so that makes it even more special.Halley’s Comet appears once in about 75 years. The last time it could be seen from the Earth was in 1986 and it won’t be seen again until at least 2061. 
 
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A government scientist was ousted after the Trump administration ignored his dire warnings about COVID-19 and a malaria drug President Donald Trump was pushing for the coronavirus  despite scant evidence it helped, according to a whistleblower complaint Tuesday.Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, filed the complaint Tuesday with the Office of Special Counsel, a government agency responsible for whistleblower complaints.He alleges he was reassigned to a lesser role because he resisted political pressure to allow widespread use of hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug favored by Trump. He said the Trump administration wanted to “flood” hot spots in New York and New Jersey with the drug.Bright’s complaint comes as the Trump administration faces criticism over its response to the pandemic, including testing and supplies of ventilators, masks and other equipment to try to stem the spread. To date, there have been nearly 1.2 million confirmed cases in the United States and more than 70,000 deaths.Bright also said the Trump administration rejected his warnings on COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. He said he “acted with urgency” to address the growing spread of COVID-19 after the World Health Organization issued a warning in January.But he said he “encountered resistance from HHS leadership, including Health and Human Services Secretary (Alex) Azar, who appeared intent on downplaying this catastrophic event.”Bright alleges in the complaint that political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services tried to promote hydroxychloroquine “as a panacea.” The officials also “demanded that New York and New Jersey be ‘flooded’ with these drugs, which were imported from factories in Pakistan and India that had not been inspected by the FDA,” the complaint says.But Bright opposed broad use of the drug, arguing the scientific evidence wasn’t there to back up its use in coronavirus patients. He felt an urgent need to tell the public there wasn’t enough scientific evidence to support using the drugs for COVID-19 patients, the complaint states.Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned doctors against prescribing the drug  except in hospitals and research studies. In an alert, regulators flagged reports of sometimes fatal heart side effects among coronavirus patients taking hydroxychloroquine or the related drug chloroquine.The decades-old drugs, also prescribed for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, can cause a number of side effects, including heart rhythm problems, severely low blood pressure and muscle or nerve damage.In late January, Bright said he made an effort to ramp up federal procurement of N95 respirator masks, after having heard warnings that a global shortage could imperil first-responders.But he said his boss, Assistant Secretary for Planning and Preparedness Robert Kadlec, gave short shrift to the warnings during a meeting Jan. 23.At another meeting that day, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Kadlec “responded with surprise at (Bright’s) dire predictions and urgency, and asserted that the United States would be able to contain the virus and keep it out,” the whistleblower complaint said.Publicly, HHS was saying it had all the masks that would be needed.Bright found an ally in White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who was also urgently concerned about the virus.The complaint described a series of contacts with Navarro’s office that led to a meeting between Bright and the trade official on at the White House on a Saturday early in February. Bright said his boss, Kadlec was not pleased.”Navarro clearly shared (Bright’s) concerns about the potential devastation the United States would face from the coronavirus and asked (Bright) to identify the supply chain and medical countermeasures most critical to address at that time in order to save lives.”Navarro’s memos to top White House officials raised alarms even as Trump was publicly assuring Americans that the outbreak was under control.Bright felt officials had “refused to listen or take appropriate action to accurately inform the public” and spoke to a reporter who was working on a story about the drug.He said he had to tell the public about the lack of science backing up its use, despite the drug being pushed by the president as press briefings, to protect people from what he believed “constituted a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety,” the complaint says.”As the death toll mounted exponentially each day, Dr. Bright concluded that he had a moral obligation to the American public, including those vulnerable as a result of illness from COVID-19, to protect it from drugs which he believed constituted a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety,” the complaint says.On Jan. 20, according to the complaint, the WHO held an emergency call to discuss the novel coronavirus. It was attended by many HHS officials, and which WHO officials advised that “the outbreak is a big problem.”Trump has accused the U.N. agency of mismanaging and covering up the spread of the virus after it emerged in China and said he would cut funding.Bright’s agency works to guard against pandemics and emergent infectious diseases, and is working to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.Top officials also pressured him to steer contracts to a client of a lobbyist, he reported.Bright said he repeatedly clashed with leadership about the role played by pharmacy industry lobbyist John Clerici in drug contracts. As he tried to push a contract extension of a contract for one of his clients Aeolus Pharmaceuticals, Clerici said the company’s CEO was a friend of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.In the complaint, Bright says he wants to returned to his position as the director and a full investigation.When Bright’s plans to file a complaint surfaced last month, HHS confirmed that Bright is no longer at the BARDA agency, but did not address his allegations of political interference in the COVID-19 response. 
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