‘Save Lebanon from sinking’

BEIRUT: Influential parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri said yesterday that Lebanon would sink like the Titanic if it could not form a government as he opened a session to approve emergency funds to literally keep the lights on for two more months.

“The whole country is in danger, the whole country is the Titanic,” Berri said. “It’s time we all woke up because in the end, if the ship sinks, there’ll be no one left.”

Lebanon is in the throes of a financial crisis that poses the biggest threat to its stability since the 1975-90 civil war. Without a new government, it cannot implement the reforms required to unlock desperately needed foreign aid.

But prime minister-designate Saad al-Hariri and President Michel Aoun have been at loggerheads for months over the make-up of a new cabinet.

Parliament approved a loan of $200 million to pay for fuel for Lebanon’s electricity company after a warning by the energy ministry that cash had run out for electricity generation beyond the end of the month.

THE US Government has hit the accelerator on its shipments of Covid-19 vaccines after a month of largely stagnant weekly deliveries, giving states the doses they say they need to finish vaccinating priority groups and open shots to all adults in the coming weeks.

The biggest supply boost has come from Johnson & Johnson. Shipments of the one-shot vaccine had been slow to ramp-up since its late February authorisation as the company waited for regulatory clearance of a key US factory. Pfizer Inc also has boosted output of its vaccine, doubling batch sizes and shortening production time.

Officials from more than half a dozen states including Vermont, Idaho and New Jersey told Reuters that increased vaccine shipments will allow them to accelerate efforts to inoculate the elderly and front-line workers, and in some cases to open shots to all adult residents earlier than expected.

“The increasing allotment of vaccine by the Biden administration is making it possible for us to speed up our vaccination timetable,” said Ben

Truman, a spokesperson for Vermont’s department of public health.

Ve rmont has now decided to offer vaccines to all adults on April 16, a month sooner than planned, he said.

The US government boosted its weekly allocations of Covid-19 doses by more than 20 percent to 27 million last week. That includes 4 million J&J vaccine doses, up from only a few hundred thousand in weeks prior.

The White House expects that to surge even further over the next week, with plans to deliver around 11 million of the J&J shots. If shipments of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Inc vaccines remain constant, that should put the total number of weekly shots at more than 34 million.

And Pfizer’s shipments to states has increased, jumping about 25 percent last week from the week prior and around 45 percent since the beginning of the month, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC).

The US has been hovering at a seven-day average of around 2.5 million shots in arms each day for most of the second half of March as the federal government worked to overcome supply bottlenecks. Vermont expects the increased shot deliveries to allow it to speed vaccinations of priority groups such as teachers and people with chronic health problems that put them at risk for severe Covid-19, Truman said.

The higher allotments of J&J shots, which can be stored in a standard refrigerator and immunise people with one shot, could be especially useful for getting vaccines to hard-to-reach and underserved groups, said officials from New Jersey and Vermont.

Indiana is using its J&J shot allotments to set up a mass vaccination centre at Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the first half of April, a spokesperson said. Ohio is planning to use mobile vaccination clinics to get J&J shots to harder-to-reach people.

Residents in Idaho are actively seeking out J&J’s single-dose vaccine over the two-dose Pfizer or Moderna alternatives, said Zachary Clark, spokesperson for Idaho’s public health agency, despite data suggesting J&J’s shot is somewhat less effective at preventing illness. He added that Idaho’s allocation of J&J shots it still much lower than the other vaccines.

About half of US states plan to begin offering shots to all residents over the age of 16 in April, ahead of the Biden administration’s target date of May 1 for widespread vaccine availability.

However, Wisconsin officials said they were waiting to make sure the federal government could sustain the increased shipments before committing to a faster rollout.

“We’d like to see more vaccine and more currently eligible people vaccinated before we move to general population,” Jennifer Miller, a spokesperson for Wisconsin’s public health agency, said in an email.

The companies making the three authorised Covid-19 vaccines have committed to providing the US government with 240 million doses by tomorrow.