The weekend of 12-13 March was a glorious time to be in the Swiss mountain resort of Villars-sur-Ollon post-pandemic. Special Olympics Switzerland had organized the regional games sporting competition with skiing, bowling, tennis and boccia, drawing dozens of keen athletes and supporters. My son joined the other 46 skiers and snowboarders from the region to […] Continue reading ->
Malawi is launching a mass vaccination campaign against wild poliovirus type 1, which is to extend to 23 million children across five southern African countries, WHO said on Friday. The campaign, to kick off Sunday, follows Malawi’s declaration of a polio outbreak on 17 February – three months after the first polio virus case in […] Continue reading ->
A Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) announcement Thursday that it has signed agreements with 35 companies to manufacture generic versions of Pfizer’s life-saving COVID-19 Paxlovid treatment for distribution in 95 low- and middle-income countries came fire almost immediately from medicines access groups as too little, too late.  The MPP-brokered sublicences follow on from an agreement between […] Continue reading ->
The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Director-Genera, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has “warmly welcomed” the breakthrough reached this week over a waiver on intellectual property for the production of COVID-19 vaccines. “This is a major step forward and this compromise is the result of many long and difficult hours of negotiations. But we are not there yet. […] Continue reading ->
The United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) will offer certain government-funded coronavirus technologies to WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), top US officials said on Thursday.  The  announcement by US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra at a virtual meeting Thursday with other ministers of health, could help bolster support for the […] Continue reading ->