American billionaire Bill Gates has claimed Covid-19 deaths and infections may drop below seasonal flu levels next year as more people get vaccinated and treatment improves, unless we encounter a new, more deadly variant.

Speaking on Thursday in a virtual interview at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, founder of Microsoft stated that vaccines, natural immunity and emerging oral treatments mean that “the death rate and the disease rate ought to be coming down pretty dramatically.”  

The tech mogul, who has been particularly vocal during the pandemic, said issues around vaccine-production capacity are likely to be replaced by distribution challenges and even waning demand.

“The vaccines are very good news, and the supply constraints will be largely solved as we get out in the middle of next year, and so we’ll be limited by the logistics and the demand,” he noted. 

He also told his audience that it remains to be seen how much demand there is for Covid-19 shots in places like Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Calling for more work to eradicate flu, Gates claimed Covid-19 rates and deaths would possibly fall below those of flu by the middle of next year, unless more deadly coronavirus variants emerge. 

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has involved itself in the development of vaccines and virus surveillance, calling for a global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The foundation has invested hundreds of millions dollars in the development and distribution of potentially lifesaving shots. 

According to the World Health Organization, influenza kills up to 650,000 people each year. At least five million people have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic began in late 2019.

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Controversial agriculture laws that saw farmers across India protesting for over a year are going to be rolled back, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has unexpectedly announced.

“I want to tell the country that we have decided to repeal the three farm laws,” Modi said in a televised address on Friday, which local media described as “stunning.”

The Indian parliament will complete the constitutional process of repealing the agricultural legislation in late November, he added.

However, the PM again defended the divisive legislation, saying that the reform of the sector, which accounts for some 15% of India’s $2.7 trillion economy, was actually aimed at supporting the country’s small farmers.

Whatever I did was for farmers. What I am doing is for the country.

“Maybe something was lacking in our efforts, which is why we couldn’t convince some farmers about the laws,” Modi acknowledged.

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The laws, which were introduced last September, allowed farmers to sell their crops outside of the government-regulated wholesale markets, in which they were guaranteed a minimum price.

The government argued that it would see them earning more, but growers feared that that move would, on the contrary, cause a drop in prices and make them hostages to large corporations.

Thousands of farmers joined the protests against what they called “black laws,” and some rallies turned violent. A year later, many demonstrators remain camped along roads outside the capital New Delhi.

And the farmers aren’t planning on going home just yet, with one of their leaders saying on Twitter: “We will wait for parliament to repeal the laws.”

Modi’s concession to the protesters may have been unexpected, but it comes several months ahead of elections in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, as well as two other northern states with large rural populations.

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The French government has kicked off a €14 million national campaign to tackle underage prostitution and pimping. It comes months after a report found as many as 10,000 youngsters, mostly teen girls, are involved in the sex trade.

The campaign, launched by the Ministry for Solidarity and Health on Monday, is expected to be fully rolled out in 2022. The ministry described the problem as a “growing phenomenon that society can no longer ignore” and about which “too little is known.”

The government programme is expected to “increase awareness” while helping to “inform and provide a better understanding of the phenomenon.” It also aims to help “identify the young people involved” and “prosecute clients and pimps more effectively.”

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According to RFI, the prevalence of underage prostitution has increased by as much as 70% over the past five years, with social media believed to be compounding the problem. The public broadcaster noted that the situation had worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic when young people spent more time online.

In July, a working group produced a damning report that found between 7,000 and 10,000 young people were involved in prostitution across the country. The majority are young girls aged between 15 and 17, but a ministry statement noted that the “entry point” into prostitution was increasingly becoming younger at around 14-15 years.

“There’s really a normalisation of prostitution of young people because girls say that selling sex is a way of making lots of money easily and that it can help them reach their dream life,” deputy public prosecutor Raphaelle Wach told the news outlet France 24.

In its statement, the ministry noted that many minors did not consider themselves victims and valued the “financial autonomy” and feelings of “belonging to a group” and “regaining control” over their lives.

“These minors are however in danger, both physically and psychologically,” the ministry warned.

“Covid played a considerable role because social networking provided new ways of being able to hook in underage girls very easily,” Geneviève Collas, who runs an NGO fighting human trafficking, told RFI. She added that recruiting minors has been made “easier” with short-term apartment rental apps like Airbnb helping mask the scale of the problem on the streets.

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