AstraZeneca has agreed to increase its COVID-19 vaccine deliveries to the European Union by 30% after a week of feuding over a shortfall in vaccine deliveries, announced by the pharma company after its manufacturing plants hit a number of snags. By April or June, a series of manufacturing foul-ups reported by Pfizer as well as […] Continue reading ->
The 2020 FIFA Club World Cup, which kicks off in Qatar on Thursday, will also launch a major COVID-19 media campaign focusing on fair global access to vaccines as well as preventive measures such as mask-wearing – thanks to a new partnership between the World Health Organization and football’s global body, FIFA, which was announced […] Continue reading ->
“A strange virus is circulating in Wuhan, China,” said my grad school intern, Grace Ren, just back from a visit to her mother in Shanghai in early January, 2020. Somewhere in between the brief respite of New Year’s and a hurried fondue alongside frigid Lake Leman in early February during WHO’s first and last in-person […] Continue reading ->
Novavax has become the first COVID-19 vaccine to show clinical efficacy against two major new SARS-CoV-2 virus variants now circulating worldwide – although the vaccine’s highest efficacy of 95.6% was against the COVID strain that had been predominant up until the end of 2020. The results of a UK-based Phase 3 clinical trial, which enrolled […] Continue reading ->
Member countries will have an idea of how many COVID vaccine doses they will receive via the World Health Organization’s COVAX Facility and when they will arrive within the next day, WHO special advisor Dr Bruce Alyward has said. These “indicative allocations” would depend on when the WHO’s regulatory review of the specific vaccines that […] Continue reading ->
Failure to align the global recovery from COVID-19 with an equally powerful climate response could threaten the worldwide effort to limit the average global temperature increase, public health experts have said. In a convention in 2015 now known as the Paris Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) established its aim to […] Continue reading ->
With ten of the world’s most infectious diseases not catered by drug firms, pharmaceutical giants remain unprepared to tackle future pandemics, a new report has said. The report, published on Tuesday, found that though current medicine and vaccine research and development is primarily geared towards the COVID-19 pandemic, there are next to no efforts to […] Continue reading ->
For the second time in as many years, WHO member states have voted down a proposal by Israel to remove a standalone item from the agenda of the 74th World Health Assembly – devoted exclusively to a report on health conditions in the Occupied Palestinian territories – and consider it as part of WHO’s overall […] Continue reading ->
AstraZeneca has joined Pfizer in announcing delays in deliveries of COVID-19 vaccines to countries in Europe, leading furious EU officials to plan for a system of tighter monitoring of vaccine exports. The British-Swedish pharma company that developed its COVID-19 vaccine with researchers at Oxford University, informed the European Commission on Friday that there would be […] Continue reading ->
While global attention has fixated on the coronavirus, the forty-year long fight against HIV, which has claimed 33 million lives, is seeing new breakthroughs in preventive tools. New discoveries of “broadly neutralizing antibodies” as well as novel regimens of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), could strengthen the world’s toolbox to prevent the disease, announced the International AIDS […] Continue reading ->