Eleven African countries will this weekend start receiving their portion of the first batch of 400 million COVID-19 vaccines from Johnson and Johnson (J&J), the Africa CDC announced on Thursday. Recipients include Togo, Lesotho, Ghana, Tunisia, Angola, Cameroon, Egypt, Botswana, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Mauritius, and they are part of pool purchasing facilitated by the African […] Continue reading ->
More than 700 healthcare workers and patients have died, and more than 2000 have been injured in attacks on health facilities across 17 emergency-affected countries and fragile settings since December 2017, according to a new WHO report released on Tuesday.  Countries at risk included Ethiopia, Yemen, Syria, Mozambique, Nigeria, occupied Palestinian territory, Myanmar and the […] Continue reading ->
  Sixteen countries have pledged more than 610 million COVID-19 vaccine doses for 2021-2022 through COVAX, the global vaccine sharing facility, and low and middle income countries have already received 37.7 million donated doses. The United States under President Joe Biden is leading the pack with a total pledge of 260 million doses, followed by […] Continue reading ->
Unvaccinated pregnant women infected with the Delta variant run a greater risk of contracting severe COVID-19, according to a UK study of 3371 pregnant women admitted to the hospital with symptomatic COVID-19.  The study, conducted by the UK Obstetric Surveillance System (UKOSS), found that 24% of pregnant women admitted in the first wave had moderate […] Continue reading ->
A “preponderance of evidence” proves that the SARS-CoV2 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the Chinese research institute studying bat coronaviruses, concluded a report by US Congressional Republicans, released on Monday.  “As we continue to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, I believe it’s time to completely dismiss the wet market […] Continue reading ->
This article is the second in a three-part series on COVID-19 booster vaccines, which is an evolving discussion as more evidence emerges about the performance of vaccines against variants. Despite heated debates about doling out booster jabs in healthy people who are already fully vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, there seems to be consensus that at least […] Continue reading ->