AFP UK

Nobel Prize winners in science and literature will receive their awards in their home countries rather than Sweden for the second year running because of the pandemic, organisers said Thursday.

The Nobel Foundation said a decision on the Peace Prize, which is usually awarded in Norway, had not been made yet.

The winners are announced in early October and lavish ceremonies in the two Scandinavian capitals usually follow on December 10, the anniversary of the death founder Alfred Nobel.

Last year, the foundation gave out the science and literature prizes in the laureates’ respective home countries because of virus travel restrictions.

There was also no Oslo fanfare for the peace prize, which was awarded to the World Food Programme.

“I think everybody would like the COVID-19 pandemic to be over, but we are not there yet,” said Vidar Helgesen of the Nobel Foundation.

“Uncertainty about the course of the pandemic and international travel possibilities is the reason why the 2021 laureates will receive their medals and diplomas in their home countries.”

The foundation said the 2021 ceremonies would be “a mixture of digital and physical events”, similar to last year.

Stockholm City Hall will, however, host video presentations from the laureates and “hopefully the ceremony will have a local audience”.

Traditionally, the prize-winners join the Swedish royal family and some 1,300 guests for a banquet at the City Hall after the award ceremony.

– WHO hotly tipped –

The Nobel banquet had not previously been called off since 1956, when a row with the Soviet Union over repression in Hungary sparked a cancellation. 

Covid-19, though, has prevented the candidates en masse from coming to Stockholm and Oslo, a first in peacetime since 1924. 

That year, a combination of sick winners and unawarded prizes led to the cancellation of the ceremonies in both capitals.

While the 2020 prizes were awarded as the pandemic raged, the nominations were made before the coronavirus began spreading.

This year, however, potential winners have been nominated — and the winners chosen — during the contagion.

Last year, virologists won the medical prize for their discoveries on hepatitis C.

Though current events rarely dictate the areas the committees decide to highlight, the bookmakers have the World Health Organization (WHO) as a likely winner of this year’s Peace Prize

The Nobels, which this year celebrate their 120th anniversary since the first awards in 1901, will be announced between 4 and 11 October.

A 4×4 pulls up on a dirt road in northwest Spain and livestock farmer Ana Vega climbs out, walking over to a ditch where a few days ago a wolf killed a calf. 

“They haven’t left anything… devoured everything,” she said, pointing at the ground. There is nothing left of the carcass, not even the smallest bone.

Wolves have long roamed the valley Ungilde, a paradise for the Iberian wolf near the Portuguese border, four hours’ drive from Madrid.

Controlled hunting has helped to keep their numbers down in the area — and protect livestock — but on Wednesday a ban on killing the animals came into effect, inflaming farmers but delighting conservationists. 

The hot-button ban brings northern Spain in line with the rest of the country, where hunting wolves has long been prohibited. 

Many herders and farmers like Vega are dismayed over the new rule, fearing that a proliferation of wolves will put the animals at risk. 

But conservationists have long pushed for the ban, saying the species should be protected. 

“In this tragic wolf tale, there are three main actors: the herders, the conservationists and the hunters. And each one has his own solution,” said forest ranger Carlos Zamora.  

– ‘Wolves’ paradise’ – 

There are eight packs of wolves in the Sierra de la Culebra, which spans 70,000 hectares in the northwestern tip of the Castilla y Leon region. 

Each pack is made up of 10 wolves, and there are several more lone individuals, Zamora explained. The number has remained steady for the past two decades, he added. 

The area is famed for the Iberian wolf — or canis lupus signatus, a sub-species of grey wolf which lives mainly in northwestern Spain. 

Its image is everywhere — on billboards and t-shirts and plastered all over souvenir shops.  

“It’s always been a wolves’ paradise here,” said Zamora from behind his binoculars, scanning the horizon under the morning sun. 

Until now, controlled hunting has been allowed north of the Duero river, which flows across northern Spain, to keep numbers down. 

In the Cantabria region, they planned to cull 34 wolves this year — 20 percent of the local population. 

But Spain’s Socialist government decided to unify the rules, banning wolf hunting throughout the peninsula, following similar moves in France and Italy. 

“When you’re talking about a unique species like the Iberian wolf, responsibility for its conservation lies with all regions, it can’t be just in one area,” junior environment minister Hugo Moran told AFP. 

“It’s a shared responsibility.” 

But the news has angered the regions of Cantabria, Castilla y Leon, Asturias and Galicia, where the vast majority of wolves roam, with officials vowing to appeal. 

While ecologists have hailed the ban as “an important step” towards species conservation, farmers are up in arms. 

“It is unbelievable that communities that don’t have wolves can impose their radical environmental agenda on us,” raged Castilla y Leon’s UCCL farmer’s union.

– Unfair competition –

Vega remembers a time when locals took matters into their own hands if a wolf killed a sheep. 

“They would go out and catch it or kill it,” she said, her phone full of gruesome images of carcasses and half-eaten animals.

“I’m not saying we should kill them all, but that we all have to exist together,” she added. 

Extensive farming where animals graze on local resources involves a big investment to protect them against predators. 

Vega has a pack of 15 mastiffs — dogs as big as ponies which are not cheap to keep, what with vets bills and the huge piles of food they gobble up. 

She has also paid for tractors to uproot vegetation where wolves like to hide on the land. 

Farmer Jose Castedo has shelled out too, installing electric fencing to safeguard his 450 sheep. 

“There are very few farms like this here,” said the 62-year-old of his fortified enclosure.

He worries about “unfair competition” from properties where flocks are kept behind one-metre-high fences and monitored for just a few hours a day. 

The ecology ministry has pledged to invest and help, with Moran from the environment ministry promising “financial help” to those who live in areas that are home to “large carnivores”. 

It’s famous for its roundabouts and statues of concrete cows. But the English town of Milton Keynes now has another claim to fame — a trundling army of shopping delivery robots.

The six-wheeled automated vehicles, launched three years ago, barely get a second glance as they ply the residential streets, some 80 kilometres (49 miles) north of London.

Numbers have grown to 200 in Milton Keynes and nearby Northampton, which introduced the service in 2020, with plans for as many as 500 to be in action in five more places across the country.

According to the robots’ operators, the squat white machines came into their own when Britain locked down last year as coronavirus hit the country.

“Everyone was so in need of contactless delivery during the pandemic,” Andrew Curtis, head of UK operations at Starship Technologies, told AFP.

The US company, which has quadrupled its deliveries in the UK, now makes 1,000 deliveries a day. 

“Demand hasn’t dropped off,” Curtis said, adding that as stay-at-home restrictions were lifted, users became more willing to try the technology.

The company has signed a new agreement with longstanding partner the Co-op Group’s chain of supermarkets, to provide 300 new robots by the end of the year and triple deliveries.

In front of one of the retailer’s shops in Milton Keynes, which was the first to use the delivery machines in 2018, a dozen robots are ready and waiting. 

With their antenna topped with an orange flag to aid visibility, they look almost like a queue of empty bumper cars.

– Starship troopers –

An employee emerges from the shop and places the newest order inside one of the robots — a small bag containing raspberries, yoghurt and a bouquet of flowers.

With its lid locked, the droid immediately dashes out onto the pavement. It turns and moves forward to cross the road before stopping, reversing suddenly to let a car pass.

Fitted with cameras, sensors and a loud alarm if needed, the robots — first created in 2014 by the two founders of Skype — are 99 percent autonomous. 

But if they become stuck, an operator can take control.

Once launched, the robot navigates the maze of footpaths that wind between Milton Keynes’ red brick houses.

When the way is clear, it can reach speeds of up to six kilometres (nearly four miles) per hour — a little more than a reasonable walking pace. 

Deliveries reach customers in less than an hour.

The Co-op said the use of the robots is environmentally friendly as well as convenient, with 70 percent of Starship’s customers going without a trip in the car to a store or receiving a delivery from a fuel-powered vehicle.

Under the delivery system, the robots remain the property of Starship and orders are placed via an application they developed. 

The company manages 1,000 robots, mainly in Britain and the United States but also in Estonia, Germany and Denmark.

The tech firm is not alone in the delivery robot race. 

In the United States, for example, where it operates mainly on university campuses, it is jockeying for position with start-ups and logistics giants such as Amazon and FedEx.

– A ‘godsend’ –

As their numbers grow, the wheeled delivery drones have drawn criticism from unions, who fear they will take jobs from people. 

The debate has made its way into US town halls, which are tasked with deciding limits on delivery journeys and rules around sharing the pavement.

“Fortunately, we’ve not had any accidents so far,” Curtis said, adding that in the UK Starship has obtained permission from local authorities for each of its operating locations.

The robot carrying raspberries, yoghurt and flowers continues its journey, hesitating as it encounters a gaping hole, the result of ongoing road maintenance. 

Roadworkers look non-plussed as they put down planks to bridge the gap.

When the delivery robot finally reaches its destination, Sheila Rose, 71, walks out of her house and unlocks it with her smartphone, to retrieve her groceries and blooms.

“If I can use it, anyone can,” she said, leaning on a walking stick.

“Because of my ill health, I have problems getting out to the shops,” she said, calling the robots a “godsend”. 

The delivery drones have become so essential to the septuagenarian that some weeks she uses them everyday. “I’ve got great-grandchildren. And they love it,” she added.

Dressed in a rainbow-coloured unicorn costume, Kathrin Henneberger once camped on a beech tree, trying to save a forest from destruction. Come Monday, she hopes to be one of Germany’s newly elected MPs.

The 34-year-old counts among one of Germany’s most prominent climate militants standing in Sunday’s general elections for a seat in parliament.

After years of occupying coal mines or blocking power stations, Henneberger and other activists now want a direct say in the halls of power.

Like Henneberger, Jakob Blasel, who co-founded the German chapter of Fridays for Future school strikes, is running on the Greens’ ticket.

“The places where decisions are made are decisive for our demands,” Blasel, 20, told AFP.

Blasel pointed to recurring droughts in 2018-2019 and July’s deadly flooding as evidence that the impact of climate change has already reached the doorstep of every German.

The floods that struck western Germany over the summer claimed 181 lives and destroyed homes, schools and other critical infrastructure.

In the south of Germany, scientists in the Bavarian Alps this year issued another alarming warning of irreversible damage wrought on nature.

Sitting on a cliff on Germany’s highest summit, the Zugspitze, the environmental research station Schneefernerhaus has an unparalleled view over one of the biggest symbols of climate change in the country: disappearing glaciers.

“Look, we can see that in some areas there is no more snow,” said Inga Beck, 37, spokeswoman for the research station, standing in front of a window that looks out at the Schneeferner Nord glacier — the country’s biggest.

The pace of the melting has been accelerating. A report published in April by Bavaria’s environment ministry estimates that 250 litres of water are oozing out of the glacier every 30 seconds.

In 10 years, the eternal ice cap on the German Alps would be consigned to history.

“Everything has to be done to prevent” further temperature rises, said Blasel.

And Henneberger has tried almost everything.

– ‘No longer needed’ –

“I occupied the mines, blocked the construction of power stations,” said the activist, who has been detained for her militant acts.

“A new young generation has become active here now. I am no longer needed,” said Henneberger, standing at the Garzweiler mine where she once faced off against an excavator.

“But this generation, especially Fridays for Future, needs parliamentarians who take them seriously,” she said.

“The fossil industry is already at the Bundestag (parliament) and there is a very strong lobby there,” said Henneberger, who joined a local Greenpeace group at age 13 and has stayed active ever since.

Their strategy now is to effect change from within.

But their demands for tougher environmental protection policies puts them at the radical edge of even their own party. 

But they also face criticism from the Fridays for Future movement, which has said the Greens’ official programme falls short of what is needed to stick to the 1.5 degree Celsius temperature rise outlined in the Paris climate accord.

Germany’s Green party wants to end coal energy usage by 2030 instead of the current 2038. It also wants the production of combustion engine cars to end from the same year.

Critics have already sought to portray the Greens as a “prohibition party” that will lead to rises in petrol, electricity and air ticket prices.

With thousands of jobs in the balance, it remains to be seen how the demands from the young activists would play with Germany’s army of older voters.

While younger voters are leaning Green, under-30s only make up around 15 percent of the electorate while the above-60s make up 38 percent.

– Don’t stop protesting –

With just days to go until the vote, Henneberger and Blasel will both join this week’s worldwide Fridays for Future protests. Greta Thunberg, who inspired the movement, is also due in Berlin for the march. 

Earlier in the week, Henneberger was joined on her bicycle campaign tour by a deputy mayor of Moenchengladbach, Hajo Siemes.

Once an active militant against nuclear proliferation, the Greens party member for four decades said Henneberger’s past will not hurt her possible future as a lawmaker.

“Many of us came from movements and were in the streets,” he said. 

Henneberger underlined the importance of that kind of activism, saying that even while sitting in the Bundestag, she needs protesters outside to help keep the pressure on.

“We need those who will occupy sites, others who organise demonstrations or launch popular initiatives,” she warned. 

“Just because there are a few more people in parliament, it doesn’t mean that we can then stop protesting.”

The United States on Wednesday authorized the use of boosters of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for people aged over 65, as well as adults at high risk of severe disease and those in high-exposure jobs.

The announcement means a significant part of the population — amounting to tens of millions of Americans — are now eligible for a third shot six months after their second.

“Today’s action demonstrates that science and the currently available data continue to guide the FDA’s decision-making for COVID-19 vaccines during this pandemic,” said Janet Woodcock, acting head of the Food and Drug Administration, in a statement.

The decision was expected and came after an independent expert panel convened by the regulatory agency last week voted in favor of recommending the move. 

The panel, however, rejected an initial plan by the White House to fully approve Pfizer boosters to everyone aged 16 and over, in what amounted to a rare rebuke of President Joe Biden’s administration.

The group of vaccinologists, infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists concluded that the benefit-risk balance differed for younger people, especially young males who are more susceptible to myocarditis.

– More boosters debated –

Pfizer Covid-19 boosters are currently being debated by a separate body of experts convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which may recommend further specifics about recipients. 

For example, if obesity is considered as putting a person “at high risk of severe Covid,” that definition would cover more than 42 percent of the US population aged over 20.

The CDC may also have to define which workplaces and other settings might lead to “frequent institutional or occupational exposure to SARS-CoV-2.”

For its part, the FDA indicated this would cover “health care workers, teachers and day care staff, grocery workers and those in homeless shelters or prisons, among others.”

The FDA’s emergency use authorization (EUA) applies to those aged 18 and up for the high risk of severe disease and high-exposure categories. It also only applies to Pfizer’s vaccine.

Recipients of Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, the other US-authorized vaccines, will now await news for when they, too, might become eligible for another shot.

A number of studies have shown two doses of Pfizer or Moderna, or a single shot of J&J, continue to confer high protection against severe outcomes — but this is slightly reduced for the elderly.

The World Health Organization has called for a moratorium on wealthy countries giving out boosters, while many countries — especially those in Africa — have barely begun their immunization campaigns. 

The United States argues, however, it is possible to both help middle- and lower-income nations while also protecting its own vulnerable people. 

On Wednesday, President Biden announced the United States would buy 500 million more Pfizer doses for the world, bringing its total contribution of the global supply to 1.1 billion.

Speaking to CNN on Sunday, top government scientist Anthony Fauci said that more research is needed to make a decision on whether a booster shot is warranted for the general public.

“As we said in the beginning, we would want to plan for the possibility of vaccinating all those who have gotten their initial vaccination with Pfizer,” Fauci said. “And it was always pending the evaluation of all of the totality of the data from the United States, from Israel, and any bit of data that we could get by the advisory committee to the FDA.”

Fauci added that the FDA panel decided against a third shoot for everybody aged 16 and over “in the proper deliberative process and they came up with a recommendation.”

One firebolt after another illuminates a stilt-house settlement where the Catatumbo river flows into Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo, the lightning capital of the world.

Holder of the Guinness World Record as the place with the highest concentration of lightning, South America’s largest lake receives an average of 233 flashes per square kilometer every year, according to NASA — thousands per night.

A scientific and tourist curiosity, for the water-logged communities of Zulia state in Venezuela’s northwest the phenomenon is known as the Catatumbo “lighthouse” which for centuries has helped them navigate their boats through the darkness.

There is no thunder, just lightning — a silent spectacle to be enjoyed about 300 nights per year, peaking in September.

On clear nights, the flashes paint striking patterns across the Milky Way in a sky so full of stars one does not need a telescope for constellation gazing.

Some are so fast they escape the human eye. Some zigzag more leisurely through the sky, or collide with other bolts.

In a boon for stargazers but a harsh reality for locals, the near nightly display is made all the more spectacular by the almost complete absence of light pollution.

There is no electrical grid here, and the few generators that still work are idle due to a critical lack of fuel occasioned by Venezuela’s economic crisis.

Only rarely is there the faint glow of a small home generator, or a beam from a fisherman’s flashlight.

The foreign visitors who used to come to Zulia have been staying away due to the global coronavirus pandemic and Venezuela’s economic problems.

Oblivious to the scientific interest in the phenomenon, Marianela Romera — a fisherwoman of 40 whose worn face makes her look much older — says that the lightning “shows us where to go.”

NASA says Lake Maracaibo has a unique geography and climate ideal for the development of thunderstorms.

Located along part of the Andes mountains, storms form at night as the cool mountain breeze clashes with the warm, moist air over the lake.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday cast UN climate talks in Glasgow in November as a last chance for humanity as he made a passionate appeal for the world to slash carbon emissions.

In a characteristically colorful speech before the United Nations as he seeks success in Glasgow, Johnson urged humanity not to treat the planet as an “indestructible toy” and warned of irreversible damage from climate change.

“We will have made this beautiful planet effectively uninhabitable — not just for us but for many other species,” he told the General Assembly.

“And that is why the Glasgow COP26 summit is the turning point for humanity,” he said, using the official name for the meeting of the UN climate body’s Conference of Parties.

Johnson backed a goal of the developed world phasing out coal, one of the dirtiest forms of energy, by 2030 and the developing world doing so a decade later.

Pointing to Britain’s own track record at reducing emissions while preserving growth, the Conservative leader rejected conspiracy theories often voiced on the political right about the intentions behind climate plans.

“I am not one of those environmentalists who takes a moral pleasure in excoriating humanity for its excess,” Johnson said.

“I don’t see the green movement as a pretext for a wholesale assault on capitalism.”

– ‘Everything to gain’ –

Johnson hailed a pledge made a day earlier by Chinese President Xi Jinping to end coal financing overseas and urged the world’s largest emitter also to end its own growing use of coal.

The 2015 Paris accord set a goal of reducing global warming by two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels with an aspiration to go further and limit the rise to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).

But each nation chose its own way to make efforts and UN scientists say the planet is well off track on the 1.5 goal, the threshold at which the planet is seen as avoiding the worst ravages of climate change including intensifying droughts, worsening storms and widening flooding.

Johnson voiced hope that all countries would emulate Britain’s goals, among the world’s most ambitious, to cut carbon emissions by 68 percent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels.

“We have nothing to fear and everything to gain from this green industrial revolution,” he said.

“When Kermit the Frog sang, ‘It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green,’ I want you to know he was wrong — and he was also unnecessarily rude to Miss Piggy.”

Easter Island’s famous megaliths have relatives on islands thousands of miles to the north and west — and so did the people who created them, a study said Wednesday. 

Research showed that over a 250-year period separate groups of people set out from tiny islands east of Tahiti to settle Easter Island, the Marquesas and Raivavae — archipelagos that are thousands of miles apart but all home to similar ancient statues.

“These statues are only on those islands that are closely connected genetically,” the study’s lead author Alexander Ioannidis of Stanford University told AFP.

Using cutting-edge analysis of modern DNA, Ioannidis and his team were able to map and date the first Polynesians’ path of settlement, which began in Samoa and fanned out across the Pacific between the years 830 and 1360.

“This had been an open problem since Captain Cook first noticed that the people on the Polynesian islands were all speaking the same language,” Ioannidis said.

The expansion happened rapidly — over about 17 generations — outpacing major changes in language or culture that could have served as markers, the findings show.

The researchers were able to piece together the puzzle of trans-Pacific migration by comparing the genetic material in 430 present-day inhabitants across 21 islands.

The outward expansion from Samoa unfolded westward to Fiji, Tonga in the south, and then to Raratonga in the east around the year 830. 

– ‘Small, ring-like islands’ –

A few hundred years later, descendents on Raratonga travelled to settle present-day Tahiti and the Tuamotu archipelago just beyond.

It is from the small, long-overlooked sand-bar islands of Tuamotu that the most ambitious forays set out, Ioannidis said.

Now sparsely-populated thanks in part to their role as nuclear test grounds, the Tuamotus span an area equal to the distance between England and Greece.

The study notes that the low-lying islands likely emerged from below sea level only a few hundred years before Polynesians spread there.

“They needed to have a maritime culture to get in between these small, ring-like islands,” Ioannidis said. 

“I think that explains in some part why it’s from there that we see the longest-distance voyages going out.”

This became ground zero for the megalith-building peoples who came to inhabit the Marquesas, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Raivavae.

The timing of those expansions fits with earlier DNA-based findings by Ioannidis and his team showing that Native Americans — probably from the northwestern coast of South America — and Polynesians mingled around the year 1200. 

– Ancient clues in modern DNA – 

“The date we found for that contact is very close to the dates we find for these voyages out from the Tuamotus to settle these remote islands,” Ioannidis said.

Today’s Polynesian populations have mixed heritage, with traces of Europe, Africa and other places in their ancestry.

While genetic studies of ancient peoples have tended to focus on ancient DNA samples unearthed from archaeological sites, Ioannidis said his team had been able to home in on telltale sequences buried in modern DNA.

They used a software to analyse samples from 430 inhabitants across 21 different islands to identify recurring gene patterns specific to Polynesians, blocking out DNA sequences associated with European or other ancestry.

Otherwise, “you would just find that the islands with the ‘most Polynesian’ DNA were more related,” Ioannidis explained. 

“That’s not interesting from a historical perspective.”

His team used the genetic clues to draw a kind of family tree across the Pacific, east-to-west.

Since DNA strands shorten as they are re-combined over generations, the length of shared segments revealed how many generations passed between each settlement. 

The United States and Britain on Wednesday welcomed China’s promise to end funding for coal projects overseas, but voiced hope the world’s largest emitter would also do more at home on climate change.

President Xi Jinping told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday that China will stop backing coal overseas, all but drying up the world’s foreign assistance to the dirty form of energy in developing countries after similar announcements by South Korea and Japan.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, seeking to rally international support for strong climate action ahead of UN climate talks in Glasgow in November, voiced hope for a complete global end to coal by 2040.

“I thank President Xi for what he has done to end China’s international financing of coal and I hope China will now go further and phase out the domestic use of coal as well,” Johnson told the General Assembly.

“Because the experience of the UK shows it can be done.

Despite China’s pledge on overseas assistance, it has kept investing at home in coal — an issue raised on a visit earlier this month by US climate envoy John Kerry.

A US official said of Xi’s move: “We welcome this announcement but we also recognize that more needs to be done.”

“We look forward to hearing more about the additional steps that they can take in this decisive decade to further reduce their national emissions,” the official told reporters on customary condition of anonymity.

The official said that further Chinese action would “help put the world more closely on a trajectory that will hold temperatures from rising to well above 1.5 degrees,” as appears increasingly likely despite an aspiration set by the 2015 Paris accord.

UN scientists say that warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels is a threshold at which the planet can avoid the worst ravages of climate change including increasingly severe weather, droughts and flooding.

President Joe Biden has put a high priority on the environment after defeating the climate skeptic Donald Trump and in his own UN speech Tuesday vowed to double US aid for countries hardest hit by climate change, a key gap ahead of the Glasgow talks.

The United States on Wednesday authorized the use of boosters of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for people aged over 65, as well as adults at high risk of severe disease and those in high-exposure jobs.

The announcement means a significant part of the population — amounting to tens of millions of Americans — are now eligible for a third shot six months after their second.

“Today’s action demonstrates that science and the currently available data continue to guide the FDA’s decision-making for COVID-19 vaccines during this pandemic,” said Janet Woodcock, acting head of the Food and Drug Administration, in a statement.

The decision was expected and came after an independent expert panel convened by the regulatory agency last week voted in favor of recommending the move. 

The panel, however, rejected an initial plan by the White House to fully approve Pfizer boosters to everyone aged 16 and over, in what amounted to a rare rebuke of President Joe Biden’s administration.

The group of vaccinologists, infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists concluded that the benefit-risk balance differed for younger people, especially young males who are more susceptible to myocarditis.

Pfizer Covid-19 boosters are currently being debated by a separate body of experts convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which may recommend further specifics about recipients. 

For example, if obesity is considered as putting a person “at high risk of severe Covid,” that definition would cover more than 42 percent of the US population aged over 20.

The CDC may also have to define which workplaces and other settings might lead to “frequent institutional or occupational exposure to SARS-CoV-2.”

For its part, the FDA indicated this would cover “health care workers, teachers and day care staff, grocery workers and those in homeless shelters or prisons, among others.”

The FDA’s emergency use authorization (EUA) applies to those aged 18 and up for the high risk of severe disease and high-exposure categories. It also only applies to Pfizer’s vaccine.

Recipients of Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, the other US-authorized vaccines, will now await news for when they, too, might become eligible for another shot.

A number of studies have shown two doses of Pfizer or Moderna, or a single shot of J&J, continue to confer high protection against severe outcomes — but this is slightly reduced for the elderly.

The World Health Organization has called for a moratorium on wealthy countries giving out boosters, while many countries — especially those in Africa — have barely begun their immunization campaigns. 

The United States argues, however, it is possible to both help middle- and lower-income nations while also protecting its own vulnerable people. 

On Wednesday, President Biden announced the United States would buy 500 million more Pfizer doses for the world, bringing its total contribution of the global supply to 1.1 billion.