Power Alley: Africa's CDC Starts To Chart A New Way Forward, Assuming Tangerine 2.0 Will Be Of Zero Help...

Ever since 2001, African health advocacy groups have been pushing nations on that continent to allocate about 15 percent of the national spending budgets toward health care and prevention, under the so-called Abuja Declaration -- but so far only two nations are on track to achieve the stated goal: Rwanda and Botswana. Backgrounder, here.

Self sufficiency would be wonderful -- but feeding people generally comes ahead of vaccines, in Africa. So the goal remains a fair piece off, from here. And thus Tangerine's senseless cuts. . . will likely endanger nations across the entire rest of the globe -- due to increased risk of ever-more pandemic shocks.

In any event, here is the latest -- from just a half-hour ago, at CIDRAP:

. . .In the DRC, health officials are experiencing a shortage of mpox vaccine amid high uptake. So far, more than 525,000 people have received at least one dose, with coverage in Kinshasa at 70% of the targeted population. He estimated that the region needs 6.4 million more vaccine doses over the next 6 months.

Elsewhere in Africa, Kaseya said Uganda continues to report a high proportion of deaths among its mpox cases, and cases are rising in Tanzania, one of the newly affected countries. So far, Tanzania has reported 55 suspected cases in 16 of its regions. . . .

In many ways, this is the US playing Russian Roulette, with a revolver. . . but in this case, the revolver doesn't have one bullet in the six chambers -- five of the chambers hold live rounds. Damn.

And (trivially) as has been true for about three fourths of all the tournaments, over nearly 16 years now, Mr. Obama is out to a quick lead over me. He picked Creighton, where I had Louisville -- he was right. But I may still catch him, on other upsets! Onward, ever. . . onward. Smile.

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