Background:The fight against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has continued to threaten human existence globally, has led to the development of vaccines in order to control the rate of infection and death associated with the disease. Media messages on the COVID-19 vaccine are geared towards raising audience awareness and understanding of health risks, knowledge and attitudes about the vaccine safety. Objective: The study examined the knowledge and attitude towards COVID-19 vaccine safety media messages amongst residents of South East, Nigeria. Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted among 399 respondents (18-47 years) in both urban and rural communities of South East, Nigeria from May 6th to July 4th, 2021. The survey was carried out using structured self administered questionnaire containing the respondents' demographics, knowledge and attitudes towards media messages regarding COVID-19 vaccine safety. The data were analysed using the SPSS version 26 software. Result was presented in frequencies, percentages and charts showing the interrelatedness of the variables examined. Regression ANOVA was used to test hypotheses on the extent to which level of exposure to COVID-19 media messages predict their knowledge and attitude towards COVID-19 vaccine safety at P<0.05 level of significance. Results: Data indicate respondents are apprehensive of taking the COVID-19 vaccine. Approximately, 91% of respondents are between the ages of 18 and 27 years. Meanwhile, 26.1% of the respondents agreed that media messages on COVID-19 vaccine is very assuring and convincing as regards human safety; 42.4% disagreed on the safety of COVID-19 vaccine safety messages; 26.1% rated vaccine messages as moderate as regards human safety, while 5.5% rated the vaccine messages as poor. Knowledge of respondents regarding the safety of the vaccine was low and respondents' attitude was negative in South East, Nigeria. The implication is indicative of the failure of the main stream media in educating the general public on pertinent health issues relevant to them. Conclusion: Knowledge regarding media messages on COVID-19 vaccine safety is low. Messages on COVID-19 vaccine safety were not sufficient and convincing. Consequently, there is a negative attitude towards the vaccine. Hence, improving knowledge and adoptive attitude amongst respondents amidst COVID-19 is critical.

In this study, we made use of the human capital theory (HCT) and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to develop a model that explains the effectiveness of a social media–based intervention on interest, entrepreneurial skills and behavioural intention towards painting among young graduates without paid employment in Nigeria. The study included an experiment involving 470 (235 control-group and 235 treatment-group) participants who were not on the payroll of any organization at the time of the study. The questionnaire served as the instrument for data collection, while the results were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The result of the study was effective, because respondents who were exposed to the intervention reported greater interest in painting than those who were not. Also, participants in the treatment group reported greater entrepreneurial skills and behavioural intention towards painting than their counterparts in the control group. We explored the implications of these results on theory and practice and made recommendations for further studies.

Next generation sequencing (NGS)-based studies have vastly increased our understanding of viral diversity. Viral sequence data obtained from NGS experiments are a rich source of information, these data can be used to study their epidemiology, evolution, transmission patterns, and can also inform drug and vaccine design. Viral genomes, however, represent a great challenge to bioinformatics due to their high mutation rate and forming quasispecies in the same infected host, bringing about the need to implement advanced bioinformatics tools to assemble consensus genomes well-representative of the viral population circulating in individual patients. Many tools have been developed to preprocess sequencing reads, carry-out de novo or reference-assisted assembly of viral genomes and assess the quality of the genomes obtained. Most of these tools however exist as standalone workflows and usually require huge computational resources. Here we present (Viral Genomes Easily Analyzed), a Snakemake workflow for analyzing RNA viral genomes. VGEA enables users to map sequencing reads to the human genome to remove human contaminants, split bam files into forward and reverse reads, carry out de novo assembly of forward and reverse reads to generate contigs, pre-process reads for quality and contamination, map reads to a reference tailored to the sample using corrected contigs supplemented by the user’s choice of reference sequences and evaluate/compare genome assemblies. We designed a project with the aim of creating a flexible, easy-to-use and all-in-one pipeline from existing/stand-alone bioinformatics tools for viral genome analysis that can be deployed on a personal computer. VGEA was built on the Snakemake workflow management system and utilizes existing tools for each step: fastp (Chen et al., 2018) for read trimming and read-level quality control, BWA (Li & Durbin, 2009) for mapping sequencing reads to the human reference genome, SAMtools (Li et al., 2009) for extracting unmapped reads and also for splitting bam files into fastq files, IVA (Hunt et al., 2015) for de novo assembly to generate contigs, shiver (Wymant et al., 2018) to pre-process reads for quality and contamination, then map to a reference tailored to the sample using corrected contigs supplemented with the user’s choice of existing reference sequences, SeqKit (Shen et al., 2016) for cleaning shiver assembly for QUAST, QUAST (Gurevich et al., 2013) to evaluate/assess the quality of genome assemblies and MultiQC (Ewels et al., 2016) for aggregation of the results from fastp, BWA and QUAST. Our pipeline was successfully tested and validated with SARS-CoV-2 (n = 20), HIV-1 (n = 20) and Lassa Virus (n = 20) datasets all of which have been made publicly available. VGEA is freely available on GitHub at: https://github.com/pauloluniyi/VGEA under the GNU General Public License.

Ever since Philosophers developed and devoted themselves to the study of why human beings behave the way they do, as well as the results of such behaviours, the concept of ethics has continued to grow not only in prominence, but in complexity and controversy. Being a public-spherical profession in which truth, fairness, sense of duty and consideration of possible consequences combine to determine the course of a given action; journalism will continue to remain at the centre of such complex and controvertible discourses for a long time. Basically, the objective of this paper is to research into the ethical dilemmas that hamstring the practice of journalism in Nigeria. Relying on secondary data, this paper radically explores the subject matter vis-à-vis the major reasons that orchestrate journalists' vulnerability to such dilemmas. In conclusion, the paper submits that the application of the 'SAD' formula is a panacea to resolving the various ethical dilemmas encountered by Nigerian journalists in the day-today discharge of their responsibilities.