Opinion

The World is Facing a Maddening Bottleneck

Even if a COVID-19 vaccine is developed, there is unlikely to be a quick return to normality. Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s leading expert in infectious diseases dared a prediction: “We will know whether a vaccine is safe by the end of November, the beginning of December. The question is, once you have a safe and effective vaccine, or more than one, how can you get it to the people who need it as quickly as possible? You’ll have to wait several months into 2021 when you talk about vaccinating a substantial proportion of the population, so that you can have a significant impact on the dynamic of the outbreak. That very likely will not be into the second or third quarter”. Nine candidate vaccines are currently being evaluated for inclusion in the international COVAX Facility, which eventually will organize the global distribution and financing of chosen vaccines. But none of the giants, such as U.S. group Moderna (Phase III), Germany’s CureVac (Phase I), Institut Pasteur/Merck/Themis, an Austrian-American-French consortium (preclinical), or China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals (Phase I) have confirmed that their vaccine is ready to be distributed around the globe. “Rapid responses by governments, academia and industry”, noted Nature, “have already resulted in the production of more than 180 vaccine candidates, 42 of which are being tested in humans at the time of writing”.

Conflict Returns to the Caucasus

War has started again in the Caucasus, a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea consisting of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia. It is a kind of mountainous border between Asia and Europe, in a region with vast oil resources that was conquered by Russia a few hundred years ago. The fighting that has erupted is over an enclave known as Nagorno-Karabakh, a remote territory without strategic value that is nevertheless, as writer Andrew Higgins concluded in the New York Times (October 4), “the center of the most enduring and venomous of the ‘frozen conflicts’ left by the collapse of the Soviet Union”. Nagorno-Karabakh has 100,000 inhabitants, predominantly Armenians, and is located within the borders of Azerbaijan and controlled by factions with close ties to Armenia’s capital Yerevan. Relations between the two former Soviet republics, which together have fewer than 13 million people, have been tense since 1991, when Armenian military forces occupied Nagorno-Karabakh, which is internationally-recognized as a territory of Azerbaijan, a mainly Muslim nation.

ADEL Portrait: Vicky Ngari, Fashion Designer and Lecturer

“Your environment, an opportunity for skills”

Born in Kenya, Vicky Ngari reluctantly followed her mother in the United Kingdom when she was 10. She didn’t want to leave Nairobi, where she nurtured as a child a fascination for clothes, garments and dancing. As the years passed, she never severed ties with Kenya, nor Africa.

In Brighton and London, she studied Film and TV, then creative writing, majoring in sociology and journalism. She realized during her first year at University that she could learn a lot out of experience, besides theorical knowledge in the classroom. « On the ground, I taught myself how to network », she says. At the time, she had two part-time jobs, working as a receptionist and at a gym. There, she discussed so much about styling with a fashion designer who came to exercise, that she got invited on a shoot.

QAnon and Creeping Conspiracy Theories

The so-called QAnon conspiracy theory has inspired groups with millions of members on Facebook and is considered by some observers to be “a new American religion”. For the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, the conspiracy theorists could pose a domestic terrorist threat. Q followers believe the baseless messages of their faceless leader(s) that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global child-trafficking ring and plotting against Donald Trump, who is battling them, leading to a day of reckoning that will involve the mass arrest of journalists and politicians, the enemies of the people. QAnon supported Trump’s early opinion that COVID-19 was a hoax, that face masks are not needed, and that infected lungs could be cleared with industrial bleach. Q’s followers have also been informed that North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong-Un is a puppet ruler installed by the CIA, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel is a granddaughter of Adolf Hitler. Other outlandish ideas about extraterrestrials and the British Royal family also proliferate, while members of the Hollywood elite are suspected of so-called adrenochrome harvesting, in which adrenaline is extracted from children’s blood to be oxidized into the psychoactive drug adrenochrome.