Malaysia Will Switch to Pfizer, Stop Using Sinovac Vaccine

KUALA LUMPUR, LELEMUKU.COM - Malaysia will stop using China’s Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine, the health minister said Thursday without specifying why, days after Thailand and Indonesia announced that many of their citizens would get a non-Sinovac booster jab if they had received the Chinese shot.

Thailand and Indonesia announced their policies on a booster shot amid growing concerns about the effectiveness of the Chinese-made vaccine, and after some people in those countries died of the coronavirus despite being inoculated with two shots of Sinovac.

After authorities in Kelantan said the state would stop using Sinovac, Malaysian Health Minister Adham Baba confirmed the move and said it would soon apply nationwide because the country had ordered more vaccines from another company.

“So, it started in Kelantan and soon other states will follow. As a replacement [for Sinovac] for the rest of the population that will be vaccinated, we will give Pfizer’s [vaccine],” Adham said at a press briefing.

“[W]e have secured 45.7 million [doses] of Pfizer compared to 16 million doses of Sinovac. Half of the Sinovac vaccines were already given and we will use the other half for the second dose.”

Health Director-General Noor Hisham told reporters at the same briefing that the main vaccine for the country’s COVID-19 inoculation program would now be the American-made Pfizer shot.

“Basically, it is because we have sufficient supply of the Pfizer vaccines … so now the main vaccine that will be used is the Pfizer vaccine,” Noor Hisham said.

“For those who have not yet been vaccinated, they will get the Pfizer vaccine.”

Malaysia did not offer any other reason for stopping Sinovac inoculations.

On Monday, Thailand’s government said that it planned to give AstraZeneca jabs to those who had received the Sinovac vaccine as their first jab. The decision came after unconfirmed reports about the low efficacy of Sinovac and the weekend death of a nurse who was given both shots of the Chinese jab.

Last week, Indonesia said it planned to give a third vaccination to many of the 1.47 million medical workers inoculated with Sinovac, using a jab developed by Moderna – another American drug firm – to protect them from the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19.

An Indonesian volunteer group that keeps tabs on pandemic data, LaporCOVID-19, said more than 1,100 health workers had succumbed to the virus since the start of the pandemic. At least 85 had died this month although some had been fully vaccinated with Sinovac.

Another grim infections record

Malaysia is in the throes of a huge rise in coronavirus infections.

On Thursday, the country broke the daily case record for the third day in a row, reporting 13,215 new infections, bringing the total caseload to 880,782. With 110 new virus-related deaths, the pandemic’s death toll here rose to 6,613.

Noor Hisham said the Delta variant was the cause of this infection spike, and was currently the dominant strain in the country.

The Delta variant can infect after a mere 15 seconds of close contact with a positive case, compared with 15 minutes that previous variants had shown, he said.

Malaysia, too, was mulling mixing vaccines, reportedly to boost efficacy against different COVID-19 variants, but as of July 1 that idea was no longer on the table as the government felt that data on mixing vaccines was still inconclusive.

Malaysia has said that it would need to inoculate 80 percent of the population – 26.2 million people – for herd immunity.

As of Thursday, 8.65 million had received at least one jab of vaccine. Of them, 4 million were fully inoculated.

Malaysia now has one of the fastest vaccination rates in the world, administering more than 400,000 doses a day, The Sydney Morning Herald reported Thursday.

Malaysia’s vaccine supply currently consists of jabs from Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Sinovac. Single-dose vaccines, China’s Cansino and the American Johnson & Johnson, were recently approved for use by the country’s drug administration.

As of June 21, Malaysia had in hand 4.08 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, 3.69 million doses of Sinovac and 828,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s jabs, the Ministry of Health said in a tweet.

Subsequently, on July 5, Malaysia received 1 million doses of Pfizer from the United States, which is giving away its excess vaccines.

Under a renegotiated deal with Pfizer, Malaysia is set to receive 25 million doses between July and September, Khairy Jamaluddin, the minister in charge of the vaccine rollout, told the Morning Herald. (BenarNews)

Harmoko, Minister of Information of the Suharto Era Dies

JAKARTA, LELEMUKU.COM - The Minister of Information under President Soeharto, Harmoko, passed away on Sunday, July 4, 2021, at the Jakarta Military Hospital.

Harmoko's son, Dimas Azisoko, confirmed this sad news.

"I beg to be forgiven for all his mistakes," said Dimas via text message.

He said his father had been sick for several years.
 
In May 2021, Harmoko's health condition continued to decline due to his old age.

Dimas said his father could no longer communicate.

Harmoko was born in Patianrowo, Nganjuk, East Java, February 7, 1939.

He is a politician from the Golkar Party who had served as Indonesia's Minister of Information during the New Order era.

Harmoko was also the Chair of the People's Representative Council (MPR) during the administration of President B.J Habibie.

He is known as Suharto's right-hand man. However, he was also the one who suggested Suharto resign from the presidency.

This was conveyed by Harmoko, who was then Speaker of the Parliament on 18 May 1998. (Budiarti Utami Putri| Tempo)

Pope Francis Goes to Rome's Gemelli Hospital for Intestinal Surgery

VATICAN, LELEMUKU.COM - The Vatican says Pope Francis has gone to a Rome hospital for scheduled surgery for a stenosis, or restriction, of the large intestine. The brief announcement Sunday afternoon didn’t say when the surgery would be performed but it said there would be announcement when the surgery is complete.

Just three hours earlier, Francis had cheerfully greeted the public in St. Peter’s Square in keeping with a Sunday tradition and told them he will go to Hungary and Slovakia in September.

A week earlier, Francis, 84, had used the same traditional appearance to ask the public for special prayers for the pope, which, in hindsight might have been hinting at the planned surgery at Rome’s Gemelli Polyclinic. (VOA)

New Trends; Older Women Are the Fresh Faces of South Korean Influencers

 SEOUL, LELEMUKU.COM - The freshest faces among South Korean influencers are no longer the usual, 20-something celebrities. Instead, entertainment and social media are focusing on a new generation: the elder generation.  

Older women were once invisible in South Korean entertainment as the industry stuck to rigidly conservative traditional female roles and cast them only as devoted mothers.  

But older women are front and center in recent advertising and entertainment series.  
A pioneer in the trend is Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung, the 74-year-old "Minari" actor who promotes Oriental Brewery beer and the Zig Zag shopping app in two recent ad campaigns.  

The beer video highlights the novelty of its spokesperson, who says: "For someone like me to be on a beer ad, the world has gotten so much better." With a Cass beer in her hand, Youn says she makes friends by being her authentic self and alludes to the beer helping people to dissipate their social awkwardness.

South Korean producer Kim Sehee said Youn's Oscar win earlier this year inspired his entertainment series, "Wassup K-Grandma." He said South Korean young people have a new interest in their elders, birthing a new word "harmaenial" — a portmanteau of the South Korean word "harmoni," or grandmother, and the English word "millennial."

The series broadcast in May was one of the first Korean shows to feature grandmothers as main characters, according to Kim. It brought international guests to live as temporary sons-in-law with Korean grandmothers. The color of the series came from the grandmothers' attempts to communicate with their foreign in-laws and share homemade meals and decades-old ginseng alcohol.

Park Makrye, a popular South Korean YouTuber, said the country's attitude towards gender and age has been rapidly changing.

"Back in the days, people thought women were supposed to be only housewives cooking at home but that's once upon a time. People must adapt to the current era," she said.

Park, 74, is one of the leading lights in the South Korean frenzy. Her YouTube channel "Korea Grandma" has over 1.32 million subscribers. In her videos, Park throws expletives while reviewing a Korean drama and screams her lungs out while paragliding for the first time.

Park's success has paved the way for others. Jang Myung-sook gives out fashion and lifestyles tips on her channel " Milanonna," a nonagenarian known as Grandma "Gganzi" raps and shares personal stories about living through the Japanese colonization, and a 76-year-old YouTuber flaunts her "single life" on " G-gourmet. "  

"I would like to tell grandmothers to try everything they want to do and not be concerned with their age," Park told The Associated Press.

"For young people...You'll be OK as long as you are healthy," she said. "Please fight on and best of luck." (VOA)

Zimbabwe Court Orders Godwin Matanga and Kazembe Kazembe to Pay US$10,000 to Couple

 HARARE, LELEMUKU.COM - A Zimbabwean court has ordered the country’s police boss and home affairs minister to pay more than US$10,000 to a couple that was brutalized by some law enforcement agents while claiming to be suppressing an anti-government protest in 2019.

According to the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, Harare Magistrate Winfilda Tiyatara recently ordered Zimbabwe Republic Police Commissioner General Godwin Matanga and Home Affairs Minister Kazembe Kazembe to pay US$5,000 each or its equivalent of RTGS$450,000 each to Canaan Machando and his wife Sipetangani Machando as compensation for violation of their fundamental rights and their property.

In addition, Magistrate Tiyatara ordered Matanga and Kazembe to pay RTGS$56,800 to Canaan and RTGS$24,000 to Sipetangani as compensation for damages to their mobile phone handsets.

In a statement the ZLHR said during trial, Canaan and Sipetangani, who were assisted by Fiona Iliff of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights to sue Matanga and Kazembe, told the magistrate that on 14 January, 2019, some police officers, together with some soldiers who had been deployed to quell anti-government protests held over a unilateral fuel price hike, slapped Sipetangani several times and kicked her in the presence of her two minor children.

The police officers and soldiers ordered Canaan to lie flat on his stomach, stepped on him before assaulting him and also directed him to sit in a bucket full of cold water.

The court was told that the soldiers and police officers also took Canaan to Mharapara Road, the main road in Unit F high-density suburb in Chitungwiza, where the protests had been taking place and directed him to remove burning tyres from the streets and in the process he sustained some burns on his hands.

“As a result of the assault and ill-treatment, Canaan sustained injuries to his back, thighs, eardrum and had to seek medical attention and he was unable to work as a result of his medical condition and suffered loss of income.”

The two claimed that the police officers broke Sipetangani’s Samsung mobile phone handset valued at RTGS$24,000 while one of the police officers threw teargas canisters inside their house in Unit F high-density suburb in Chitungwiza and damaged a window pane and the floor valued at the cost of RTGS$56,800.

“The persecution by ZRP officers forced Sipetengani and her minor children including a visitor out of the house as it was inhabitable for three days because of the teargas and this meant Sipetengani and Canaan were unable to work for several days.”

In her ruling, Tiyatara said Sipetengani and Canaan and their children suffered emotional pain, trauma and shock from the incident and the couple was humiliated and embarrassed by the indignity of being forced out of their home owing to misconduct by police officers.

Tiyatara said the policemen’s conduct was unlawful and “there was no legal justification whatsoever for them to have conducted themselves in such a wayward manner.”

The magistrate further ruled that the actions of the policemen was so “indiscriminate, unwarranted and unnecessary and their conduct falls short of the duty of care that the police service has towards civilians.”

Matanga and Kazembe have not yet reacted to the ruling. The two did not respond to calls on their mobile phones. (VOA)