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Hans Merket, a researcher with the International Peace Information Service (IPIS), says he didn’t go into Tanzania expecting to learn about people getting hurt and killed. His group simply wanted to measure how mines were viewed by surrounding communities.
But when they got to Mwadui, the area around the Williamson diamond mine, he kept hearing how mine security forces had taken violent action against purported trespassers on the mine area. There were reports of people being shot, stabbed, beaten, locked up, and killed.
“We really stumbled on these abuses,” he says. “We usually don’t do advocacy. It’s not our specialization.”
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With news coming in from “the real world” to help governments contradict what Pfizer, Moderna, the World Health Organization and others are telling them, jurisdictions everywhere are starting to delay second doses of the COVID-19 vaccines in order to make more first shots available to more people, sooner.
The logic is that evidence from “the real world” shows that the first dose alone is effective in reducing the severity of COVID-19, lowering both the death rate and the need for hospitalization. So, the reasoning goes, let’s give the second shot later than recommended instead of four weeks later as in the case of Moderna, as much as four months later. On March 3, Dr. Supriya Sharma, chief medical adviser for Health Canada, said on CBC’s The Current that “it is unlikely the immune response will drop off,” during such a delay. You have to wonder whether “unlikely” is a scientific term, hard evidence from “the real world” where the vaccines h