New York: On Friday, the Pulitzer Board announced a Pulitzer Prize in the international reporting category for the ground-breaking investigative report done by Indian-origin journalist Megha Rajagopalan that exposed the Uyghur Muslim Concentration camps in China. 

The US’ top journalism award, the Pulitzer Prize was announced for Megha Rajagopalan’s advanced investigative reports which was done harnessing satellite technology that revealed China’s mass detention camps for Muslim Uyghurs and other minority ethnicities.

She shares the Pulitzer with two colleagues from an internet media, BuzzFeed News, it is learned. Rajagopalan and her colleagues used satellite imagery and 3D architectural simulations to support her interviews with two dozen former Uyghur prisoners from the detention camps where as many as a million Muslims from ethnic minority were unlawfully detained.

“I’m in complete shock, I did not expect this,” she said.

According to the publication, she and her colleagues, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek, identified 260 detention camps after building a voluminous database of about 50,000 possible sites comparing censored Chinese images with uncensored mapping software, a report from the National Herald revealed.

Rajagopalan, who had previously reported from China but was barred from there for the story, travelled to neighbouring Kazhakstan to interview former detainees who had fled there, BuzzFeed said.

“Throughout her reporting, Rajagopalan had to endure harassment from the Chinese government,” the publication said.

The series of stories provided proof of Beijing’s violation of Uighurs’ human rights, which some US and other Western officials have called a “genocide”.

According to the news report from the National Herald, another journalist of Indian-origin, Neil Bedi, has also won a Pulitzer in the local reporting category for investigative stories he wrote with an editor at the Tampa Bay Times exposing the misuse of authority by a law enforcement official in Florida to track children.

The Pulitzer Prizes awarded by a board at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York recognising the outstanding work is on its 105th year as of 2021.

In appreciation of the proliferation of citizen journalism in the internet age, teenaged non-journalist, Darnella Frazier, was awarded a Pulitzer Special Citation for her courage in filming the killing of George Floyd, the African-American who died in police custody in Minneapolis last year.

The video clip made on Darnella Frazier’s smartphone went viral and set off sustained countrywide protests against police brutality and led to measures in many states and cities to reform policing.

WASHINGTON: India will be receiving a share of the 80 million (8 crores) unused COVID-19 vaccines through the UN-backed COVAX global vaccine sharing programme that President Joe Biden has announced, according to a senior State Department official.

The move is part of his administration’s framework for sharing 80 million (8 crores) vaccines globally by the end of June.

According to a White House fact sheet, nearly 19 million vaccines will be shared through COVAX.

“I don’t have the specific details on when the shipment of vaccines will be arriving in India. Of course, India will be in receipt of a share of those 80 million vaccines and through COVAX, I believe there were some six million vaccines destined for the region,” State Department Spokesperson Ned Price told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday.

COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access, abbreviated as COVAX, is a worldwide initiative aimed at equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines directed by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and the World Health Organisation.

“We know that India has suffered tremendously with this pandemic and as we have done in the case of these vaccines, but also as we did even prior to this vaccine sharing announcement. We have demonstrated our commitment to work closely with our partners in India to help see the way out of this epidemic,” he said.

In recent weeks, the US has so far supplied seven planeloads of life-saving supplies worth approximately USD 100 million.

“This is also in addition to the tremendous generosity that we have seen from the private sector and the diaspora here in this country that has donated some 400 million additional dollars.

So, that’s half a billion dollars that the United States government and the people here in the United States have committed to help our friends and to help our partners in India recover from this pandemic,” Price said.

Responding to a question, he said the Biden administration is absolutely continuing with its commitment to help the government and the people of India emerge from this pandemic.

“We remain engaged with the private sector as we have spoken of our commitment of vaccines to India, of our commitment of planeloads of life-saving supplies, doing all we can not only on our part but also to galvanize action on the part of other non-governmental actors here in the United States to help our friends in India,” Price said.

India is currently witnessing the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So far, the country has recorded over 2,90,89,069 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 3,53,528 deaths.

The Biden administration had been under pressure to send the excess COVID-19 vaccines with the US to nations like India, which are facing severe vaccine shortages.

CAPE TOWN: In the global race to vaccinate people against COVID-19, Africa is tragically at the back of the pack.

In South Africa, which has the continent’s most robust economy and its biggest coronavirus caseload, just 0.8 per cent of the population is fully vaccinated, according to a worldwide tracker kept by Johns Hopkins University.

And hundreds of thousands of the country’s health workers, many of whom come face-to-face with the virus every day, are still waiting for their shots.

In Nigeria, Africa’s biggest country with more than 200 million people, only 0.1 per cent are fully protected.

Kenya, with 50 million people, is even lower.

Uganda has recalled doses from rural areas because it doesn’t have nearly enough to fight outbreaks in big cities.

Chad didn’t administer its first vaccine shots until this past weekend.

And there are at least five other countries in Africa where not one dose has been put into an arm, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The World Health Organization says the continent of 1.3 billion people is facing a severe shortage of vaccine at the same time a new wave of infections is rising across Africa.

Vaccine shipments into Africa have ground to a “near halt,” WHO said last week.

“It is extremely concerning and at times frustrating,” said Africa CDC Director Dr John Nkengasong, a Cameroonian virologist who is trying to ensure some of the world’s poorest nations get a fair share of vaccines in a marketplace where they can’t possibly compete.

The United States and Britain, in contrast, have fully vaccinated more than 40 per cent of their populations, with higher rates for adults and high-risk people.

Countries in Europe are near or past 20 per cent coverage, and their citizens are starting to think about where their vaccine certificates might take them on their summer vacations.

The US, France and Germany are even offering shots to youngsters, who are at very low risk of serious illness from COVID-19.

Poorer countries had warned as far back as last year of this impending vaccine inequality, fearful that rich nations would hoard doses.

In an interview, Nkengasong called on the leaders of wealthy nations meeting this week at the G-7 summit to share spare vaccines — something the United States has already agreed to do — and avert a “moral catastrophe.”

“I’d like to believe that the G-7 countries, most of them having kept excess doses of vaccines, want to be on the right side of history,” Nkengasong said.

“Distribute those vaccines. We need to actually see these vaccines, not just …promises and goodwill.” Others are not so patient, nor so diplomatic.

“People are dying. Time is against us. This IS INSANE,” South African human rights lawyer Fatima Hasan, an activist for equal access to health care, wrote in a series of text messages.

The Biden administration made its first major move to ease the crisis last week, announcing it would share an initial batch of 25 million spare doses with desperate countries in South and Central America, Asia and Africa.

Nkengasong and his team were in contact with White House officials a day later, he said, with a list of countries where the 5 million doses earmarked for Africa could go to immediately.

Still, the US offer is only a “trickle” of what’s needed, Hasan wrote.

Africa alone is facing a shortfall of around 700 million doses, even after taking into account those secured through WHO’s vaccine program for poorer countries, COVAX, and a deal with Johnson & Johnson, which comes through in August, two long months away.

Uganda just released a batch of 3,000 vaccine doses in the capital, Kampala — a minuscule amount for a city of 2 million — to keep its program barely alive.

There and elsewhere, the fear is that the luck that somehow enabled parts of Africa to escape the worst of previous waves of COVID-19 infections and deaths might not hold this time.

“The first COVID was a joke, but this one is for real. It kills,” said Danstan Nsamba, a taxi driver in Uganda who has lost numerous people he knew to the virus.

In Zimbabwe, Chipo Dzimba embarked on a quest for a vaccine after witnessing COVID-19 deaths in her community.

She walked miles to a church mission hospital, where there were none, and miles again to a district hospital, where nurses also had nothing and told her to go to the region’s main government hospital.

That was too far away.

“I am giving up,” Dzimba said.

“I don’t have the bus fare.” South African health workers faced similar disappointment when they crowded into a parking garage last month, hoping for vaccinations and ignoring in their desperation the social distancing protocols.

Many came away without a shot.

Femada Shamam, who is in charge of a group of old-age homes in the South African city of Durban, has seen only around half of the 1,600 elderly and frail people she looks after vaccinated.

It is six months, almost to the day, since Britain began the global vaccination drive.

“They do feel very despondent and they do feel let down,” Shamam said of her unvaccinated residents, who are experiencing “huge anxiety” as they hunker down in their sealed-off homes 18 months into the outbreak.

Twenty-two of her residents have died of COVID-19.

“It really highlights the biggest problem …the haves and the have-nots,” Shamam said.

As for whether wealthy countries with a surplus of vaccine have gotten the message, Nkengasong said: “I am hopeful, but not necessarily confident.”