The World Health Organization’s emergencies program director said Wednesday that vaccines alone would not end the COVID-19 pandemic and would do nothing to stop the current global surge in coronavirus infections.Mike Ryan made the comments during a virtual question-and-answer session from the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.His comments came the same day that pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech announced that final results from the late-stage trial of their COVID-19 vaccine showed it was 95% effective.The companies said they had the required two months of safety data and would …

The World Health Organization has officially declared an end to the Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo’s Equateur Province, nearly six months after the first cases were reported. Health officials are hailing the end of this outbreak as a milestone and cause for celebration.  Combating Ebola in the remote, heavily forested region posed numerous logistical challenges, not least of which was reaching communities scattered across this geographically vast area and then gaining their trust.Bob Ghosn is head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Ebola Response …

Thousands of demonstrators rallied Wednesday in central Berlin to protest the parliamentary vote that would give Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government powers to enforce restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19.Germany’s lower and upper houses of parliament are due to vote and pass laws Wednesday that could allow the government to impose restrictions on social contact, rules on mask-wearing, drinking alcohol in public, shutting shops and stopping sports events.   Although most Germans accept the latest limited lockdown to tackle a second wave of the virus, a minority of right-wing …

Iota continues to pound Nicaragua with strong winds and heavy rains even after weakening from a hurricane to a tropical storm. As of late Tuesday night, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said Iota was carrying maximum sustained winds of 65 kilometers an hour on a path towards Tegucigalpa, Honduras.  Forecasters say Tropical Storm Iota will dump between 7 to 20 kilometers of rain on a stretch of Central America from southern Nicaragua to southern Belize overnight, leading to “significant, life-threatening flash flooding and river flooding,” along with mudslides in higher areas. …

An agreement announced Tuesday paves the way for the largest dam demolition in U.S. history, a project that promises to reopen hundreds of miles of waterway along the Oregon-California border to salmon that are critical to tribes but have dwindled to almost nothing in recent years. If approved, the deal would revive plans to remove four massive hydroelectric dams on the lower Klamath River, creating the foundation for the most ambitious salmon restoration effort in history. The project on California’s second-largest river would be at the vanguard of a trend toward …