Civil society organizations, pharmaceutical industries, and other stakeholders support the ratification of the AMA Treaty. On the two-year anniversary of the establishment of the African Medicines Agency (AMA) Treaty, over 40 patient and civil society organizations, health and pharmaceutical industries, and product development partnerships called upon African Union member states to ratify the Treaty. Rapidly […] Continue reading ->
CAPE TOWN – The failure of the Oxford/ AstraZeneca SARS-COV2 vaccine to protect against the COVID-19 variant identified in South Africa has serious implications for massive African vaccine rollouts planned by both the WHO co-sponsored COVAX vaccine facility as well as the African Union’s dedicated African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT). The bulk of Africa’s […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization (WHO) expects to make a decision next week on whether to issue emergency use licenses for the AstraZeneca/Oxford COVID-19 vaccine being produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII) and South Korea’s SK Bioscience on 15 February, according to Dr Mariangela Simão, the organisation’s assistant director general of Drug Access, Vaccines […] Continue reading ->
The COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University offers similar levels of protection against the new, more contagious variant first discovered in the UK when compared to previous variants, Oxford researchers said in a paper released on Friday. The new variant of SARS-CoV-2, B.1.1.7, emerged as the dominant cause of COVID-19 infection in the […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization’s (WHO) investigative team in Wuhan, China, visited the biosafety laboratory that has been at the centre of numerous conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday, making it the most controversial site for the team’s fieldwork so far. The team of 13 experts spent three-and-a-half hours at the Wuhan Institute of […] Continue reading ->
The US decision to join COVAX “is likely to mean resources” to be able to get vaccines for people, Dr Tony Fauci, US President Joe Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor, told the International AIDS Society’s COVID-19 conference this week. Fauci also told the conference that scientists were taking the SARS-COV2 variant identified in South Africa so […] Continue reading ->
CAPE TOWN – The South African police have arrested six people in the past two weeks for trying to smuggle large quantities of the anti-parasitic medicine, ivermectin, into the country from India as demand for the drug as a treatment for COVID-19 surges internationally. Ivermectin is only registered to treat parasitic infections in animals in […] Continue reading ->
COVAX aims to start shipping nearly 90 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to the continent this month – in what will be Africa’s largest ever mass vaccination campaign, said WHO Regional Director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti at a press briefing Thursday. COVAX has notified countries in Africa of the estimated dose allocation for the first phase of […] Continue reading ->
IBADAN, NIGERIA — A new fixed-dose combination (FDC) tuberculosis (TB) treatment could improve the ease of treatment regimes, increase the availability of treatments, and get the world back on track to achieve the goal of ending TB. The short-course preventative treatment, consisting of two drugs – rifapentine and isoniazid – will reduce the pill burden […] Continue reading ->
News of the successful trial results of the Russian Sputnik vaccine, published on Wednesday by The Lancet has shored up the prospects of quick vaccine access for dozens of countries that have pinned their hopes on Russian or Chinese vaccine alternatives – as rich countries buy up the bulk of supplies of high-tech vaccines and […] Continue reading ->