MOSCOW, June 26 (Reuters) - A central Russian region on Saturday suspended COVID-19 vaccinations for two days due to a shortage of doses, local officials said, as the country reported its highest daily increase in coronavirus cases since mid-January.
Russia is facing a surge in new cases that authorities blame on the highly infectious Delta variant and slow progress on vaccinating people, with deaths hitting a new record in the capital, Moscow, on Friday. read more
In pop culture, America’s most famous pedagogic tool for teaching everyone how the world could work, there are two opposing models for law and order in the high school cheerleading system.In TV’s “Glee,” which premiered on Fox in 2009, the cheer team’s real star is its coach, Sue Sylvester, a mercurial tyrant whose autocratic standards yield award after award, no matter the cost to her students grappling with body-image issues and teen pregnancy. Cheer is war, and in war you lose soldiers. Disloyalty, in the form of joining the glee club, is sedition. “I’m all about empowerment,” says Sylvester, played by a track-suited Jane Lynch. “I empower my Cheerios to live in a state of constant fear by creating an environment of irrational, random terror.”
But 2000’s landmark cheer movie “Bring It On” imagines a seemingly coachless alternative where school cheer squads operate without adult oversight. New cheerleaders are selected by a syndicalist tribunal of current cheerleaders, who direct their own routines, some of which are stolen from more creative, talented peers. “This is not a democracy, this is a cheerocracy” says cheer captain Torrance Shipman, played by Kirsten Dunst. “If we’re gonna be the best, we have to have the best.” Under this dictatorship of the studentariat, competitive conditions seem no less cutthroat. When students wear the uniform under any modern on-screen regime, they cheer to win.
In real-life public schools — America’s second-most famous pedagogic tool for teaching everyone how the world could work — cheerleading management tends to favor a more corporate approach, somewhere on the center-right of the Shipman-Sylvester spectrum of cheer autonomy. Cheer squads are taught that authority rests with coaches, and the coach’s authority, which flows legally downstream from school boards elected by voters, is resolute. It is a democracy, but not one that cheerleaders vote in.
Following shortages that suspended inoculation campaigns from Friday at some centres in the Bashkiria and Khabarovsk regions, health officials in the central Udmurtia region said vaccinations would stop until Monday due to a supply crunch.
The Kremlin said the issue would be resolved in the coming days, and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin announced additional health spending of 25 billion roubles ($346.80 million) for the care of COVID-19 patients.
"To drastically solve the issues, you need people to get vaccinated or head to lockdowns and shut down everything," he told state TV.
So far, 21 million of Russia's 144 million people have received at least one vaccine dose, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said on Friday.
By the end of this month, 2.5 million doses of the country's Sputnik Light single-dose vaccine will be put into circulation, he said on Saturday.
Russia reported 21,665 new COVID-19 cases on Saturday, more than a third of them in Moscow, taking the official national tally since the pandemic began to nearly 5.5 million.
The government's coronavirus task force said 619 people had died of COVID-19-linked causes in the past 24 hours, the highest number since late December and pushing the overall death toll to 132,683.
St Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city, saw a record daily death toll from the novel coronavirus of 107 in the past 24 hours.