✈ How is this possible? Young passenger unexpectedly gives birth to baby boy on KLM flight from Ecuador
Last Wednesday, a young woman, called TAMARA, that was travelling on board KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight KL755 from Quito and Guayaquil, Ecuador, towards Amsterdam Schiphol, The Netherlands unexpectedly gave birth.
A few hours before landing, the woman experienced pain in her abdomen and went to the toilet. There, after a few short contractions, she gave birth to her son, the Spaarnse Gasthuis hospital said, adding that she had no idea she was pregnant.
Two doctors and a nurse from Austria were also on board the aircraft (a Boeing 777-200) and provided assistance.
The mother named her son after one of the caretakers: Maximilian.
Both mother and son are doing well, reported Spaarnse Gasthuis, which also arranged for the necessary papers so she can continue her journey to Madrid, Spain as originally planned – now with a child in her arms.
💭 The virus has a higher fatality rate than COVID-19
Bill Gates, Johns Hopkins, and the WHO completed a desktop simulation for a new Enterovirus originating near Brazil. The virus has a higher fatality rate than COVID-19 and disproportionately affects children.
💭 In your lifetime, have you ever seen a prime minister and cabinet, provincial and municipal politicians, the medical community, international leaders, the influencers in Hollywood, everyone with an opinion on social media, unions, newspaper editors, radio and TV hosts, neighbors and even family members, all piling on one group of people all at the same time, regardless of their religion, colour, ethnicity, sexual orientation or Indigenous heritage, describing those people as the filth of society and then forbidding them from traveling, denying them work and even firing them, all because they refused to be coerced into accepting something they didn’t believe in? Never in my lifetime have I ever seen such open hostility towards one group of people, day after day after day for months on end, and I hope I never will again.
💭 Zambia police Sunday found the bodies of 27 men, believed to be migrants from Ethiopia, dumped in a farming area on the outskirts of the capital after they died from suspected hunger and exhaustion, authorities said.
A sole survivor was found alive in the early hours of Sunday morning and rushed to a Lusaka hospital for treatment, while the dead were transported to the mortuary for identification and postmortems to determine the exact cause of death, police said.
Preliminary police investigations showed the victims were all males aged between 20 and 38 and had been dumped along a road by unknown people.
“Police and other security wings have since instituted investigations into the matter,” Danny Mwale, police spokesman, said in a statement after police were alerted to the gruesome scene by members of the public.
Ethiopian migrants often use Zambia when traveling to countries such as South Africa, though reports of deaths in transit there are rare.
👉 Courtesy: South African Broadcasting Corporation
💭 Researchers call on authorities all across the world to heal the divisions in society left by the COVID-19 pandemic as the vaccinated are motivated to exclude the unvaccinated from family relationships and even protected political rights.
People show prejudice and discriminatory attitudes towards individuals not vaccinated against COVID-19 across all inhabited continents of the world. This is the finding of a global study from Aarhus University in Denmark, which has just been published today (December 8) in the journal Nature.
Many vaccinated people do not want close relatives to marry an unvaccinated person. They are also inclined to think that the unvaccinated are incompetent as well as untrustworthy, and they generally feel antipathy against them.
The study reveals that prejudice towards the unvaccinated is as high or higher than prejudice directed toward other common and diverse targets of prejudice, including immigrants, drug addicts, and ex-convicts.
In sharp contrast, researchers found that the unvaccinated display almost no discriminatory attitudes towards the vaccinated.
“The conflict between those who are vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who are not, threatens societal cohesion as a new socio-political cleavage, and the vaccinated clearly seem to be the ones deepening this rift,” says postdoc Alexander Bor, who is the lead author of the study “Discriminatory Attitudes Against the Unvaccinated During a Global Pandemic.”
Human explanation for prejudice
According to the researchers, the reason for these discriminatory attitudes appears to be that the vaccinated perceive the unvaccinated as free riders. High vaccination uptake is crucial in order to combat the pandemic and secure the public good of normal everyday life without great human or financial losses. And when some people help increase vaccine uptake while others do not, it evokes negative sentiments.
“The vaccinated react in quite a natural way against what they perceive as free-riding on a public good. This is a well-known psychological mechanism and thus a completely normal human reaction. Nonetheless, it could have severe consequences for society,” says co-author Michael Bang Petersen, who is a professor of political science at Aarhus University and head of the research project of which this study is part.
”In the short run, prejudice towards the unvaccinated may complicate pandemic management because it leads to mistrust, and we know that mistrust hinders vaccination uptake. In the long run, it may mean that societies leave the pandemic more divided and polarised than they entered it,” says Michael Bang Petersen.
Fundamental rights could be in danger
A survey fielded solely in the United States as part of the overall study shows that not only do vaccinated people harbor prejudice against the unvaccinated, they also think they should be denied fundamental rights. For instance, the unvaccinated should not be allowed to move into the neighborhood or express their political views on social media freely, without fear of censorship.
“It is likely that we will encounter similar support for the restriction of rights in other countries, seeing as the prejudice and antipathy can be found across continents and cultures,” says Michael Bang Petersen.
Researchers warn against condemnatory rhetoric
In many places, low vaccine uptake still poses a challenge to pandemic management, but the researchers warn authorities against employing a rhetoric of moral condemnation in their attempt to make more people get vaccinated. A strategy otherwise deployed in a number of countries, including France, where president Emmanuel Macron has stated that he wants to ‘piss off’ the unvaccinated to a degree that will make them get vaccinated.
”Moral condemnation may strengthen the cleavages and further feelings of exclusion that have led many unvaccinated to refuse the vaccine in the first place. Our prior research has shown that transparent communication about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines is a more viable public-health strategy for increasing vaccine uptake in the long term,” says Michael Bang Petersen.