After three years of its “Zero COVID” policy, the Chinese government allowed a return to relative normalcy for its citizens in early December 2022. Due to the ongoing transmission of Omicron and its numerous COVID subvariants in China, the sudden policy shift was accompanied by rapid community transmission across the country and high numbers of […] Continue reading ->
A new 10-point proposal by the World Health Organization’s Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus for improving preparedness and response to health emergencies received mixed reviews from WHO member states in Monday’s opening session of this week’s Executive Board (EB) meeting, the agency’s 34-member governing body.  It was the first substantive issue to be tackled […] Continue reading ->
The World Trade Organization (WTO) TRIPS Council agreed to recommend to the General Council, WTO’s highest-level decision-making body, that it extend Saturday’s deadline for deciding on whether to extend an intellectual property rights waiver for COVID-19 vaccines to diagnostics and therapeutics. The panel’s recommendation on Friday at a formal meeting chaired by Ambassador Lansana Gberie […] Continue reading ->
This month, world leaders gathered in Montreal for a major UN conference on biodiversity, aiming to reach an agreement on how to stop species loss. The Fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) – COP15 for short–  has drawn tens of thousands of people. Delayed several times, it is the first […] Continue reading ->
Little agreement emerged from an informal World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting on Tuesday about whether an intellectual property (IP) waiver should be extended to COVID-19 therapeutics and diagnostics. But low and middle-income countries (LMIC) that qualify for free COVID-19 anti-virals Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir) and Molnupiravir have shown so little interest in accepting donations that some question […] Continue reading ->
Regional production of vaccines and other pandemic-related products – and sharing the technical know-how to enable this – features strongly in the much-anticipated first draft of the global pandemic treaty proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to guide future pandemics. WHO member states will be briefed on the conceptual “zero-sum” draft on Friday in […] Continue reading ->