Month: January 2022

World tennis No.1 Novak Djokovic has had his visa canceled by Australian authorities and is facing deportation. He had received a COVID-19 vaccination exemption to defend his title at the Australian Open but has reportedly failed to provide proper evidence to border officials.

The Serbian is the defending Australian Open champion, and a nine-time winner of the event, but the government said Thursday he’s no longer welcome.

He was detained at Melbourne airport Wednesday for several hours before border force officials announced that he had not met immigration regulations and would be deported.

Djokovic’s father had claimed his son was being held “captive.”

Serbian President Aleksander Vucic said he was a victim of “harassment.”

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is standing firm, though.

“On the issue of Mr. Djokovic, rules are rules and there are no special cases,” Morrison said. “That is the policy of the government, and it has been our government’s strong border protection policies and particularly in relation to the pandemic that has ensured that Australia has had one of the lowest death rates from COVID anywhere in the world. Entry with a visa requires double vaccination or a medical exemption. I am advised that such an exemption was not in place and as a result he is subject to the same rule as anyone else.”

With his visa revoked, Djokovic is now an “unlawful non-citizen” in Australia and is being held in immigration detention, where his movements are restricted after he was driven from Melbourne airport by government officials. It is also unclear whether Djokovic is allowed to communicate with his advisers, which is standard practice according to Australian law.

His lawyers are challenging the deportation order in Australia’s Federal Circuit Court.

The 34-year-old tennis star has not publicly confirmed his COVID-19 vaccination status.

He flew to Australia after being granted a controversial medical exemption. Tennis authorities said he had not received any special treatment, but many Australians, who have lived under some of the world’s toughest coronavirus restrictions, believed Djokovic had abused the system.

Australia’s states and territories Thursday reported more than 70,000 new COVID-19 cases. A total of 612,000 infections have been diagnosed in Australia since the pandemic began, according to official figures, 2,289 people have died.

More than 90% of the eligible population have been fully vaccinated.

To curb the spread of the virus, the Northern Territory imposed lockdown restrictions Thursday on unvaccinated residents, who must adhere to stay-home orders until next Monday.

Source: Voice of America

The World Health Organization says a new coronavirus variant recently detected in France is nothing to be concerned about right now.

Scientists at the IHU Mediterranee Infection Foundation in the city of Marseille say they discovered the new B.1.640.2 variant in December in 12 patients living near Marseille, with the first patient testing positive after traveling to the central African nation of Cameroon.

The researchers said they have identified 46 mutations in the new variant, which they labeled “IHU” after the institute, that could make it more resistant to vaccines and more infectious than the original coronavirus. The French team revealed the findings of a study in the online health sciences outlet medRxiv, which publishes studies that have not been peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal.

Abdi Mahmud, a COVID-19 incident manager with the World Health Organization, told reporters in Geneva earlier this week that, while the IHU variant is “on our radar,” it remains confined in Marseille and has not been labeled a “variant of concern” by the U.N. health agency.

Meanwhile, an international team of health care advocates and experts is calling for 22 billion doses of mRNA vaccine to be administered around the world this year to stop the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant. The team is urging the production of an additional 15 billion doses of mRNA vaccine, more than double the projected 7 billion doses.

The report says mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna have demonstrated the best protection against several variants by providing cross-immunity through so-called T-cells, an arm of the human immune system that kills virus-infected cells and keeps them from replicating and spreading.

The report was a collaboration among scientists at Harvard Medical School, Columbia University, New York University and the University of Saskatchewan and the advocacy groups PrEP4All and Partners in Health.

Source: Voice of America