Word: partly
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...reduced aid payments and less disposable income in consumers' pockets. Businesses will only start reinvesting money on production and jobs when they're sure demand has returned - and that isn't likely before we see government undertake cost-cutting we know is inevitable." (Read a piece on London as part of TIME's Davos coverage...
Still, Pennington says there are lessons to be learned. He says the vaccine surplus in many cases can be ascribed in part to countries' own pre-existing pandemic-preparedness plans. Many such plans, which were put in place in the mid-2000s, were based on the worst-case-scenario assumption that the next pandemic virus would be some variation of the highly lethal H5N1 bird-flu virus, which has so far killed 263 people. The U.K.'s plan, for example, which was automatically enacted when the WHO declared the H1N1 pandemic, predicted between 50,000 and 750,000 deaths from...
...part of their plans, many governments lined up multibillion-dollar advance-purchase agreements with pharmaceutical companies to buy vaccines during a pandemic. When the WHO declared H1N1 as such, governments were locked into these contracts, if not legally then politically - amid news reports of a new and potentially lethal virus spreading around the globe, governments could not responsibly pass on the option for vaccine. In this context, governments may have felt the only prudent course was to err on the side of caution. (See pictures of thermal scanners hunting for swine...
...government, for its part, still wants to vaccinate as many people as possible against H1N1. Although it has indeed been a mild flu season so far, says Jeff Dimond, a spokesperson at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "our message right now is that people should get vaccinated. We are aware that a third wave of infections is possible, so we aren't making any decision yet on whether we will use our full capacity of 251 million doses...
...quarrel began typically enough. Belarus, like many ex-Soviet countries, has enjoyed subsidized oil and gas supplies from Russia for two decades, in part to ensure its loyalty after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has even been allowed to buy Russian crude oil on the cheap, refine it at home and sell it on to Europe at a huge profit. But in the past three years, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has started to assert his independence in subtle ways. Following the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, Lukashenko declined to recognize the breakaway Georgian republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia...