Right after the pomp and ceremony of the heavily guarded inauguration of new US President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris is over, a deadly serious new war on COVID-19 is due to get underway –  including rejoining the World Health Organization (WHO) as part of the new Administration’s seven point COVID pandemic plan.  That […] Continue reading ->
Some 42 countries around the world are now rolling out brand new COVID-19 vaccines to their populations. But 36 of those are high-income countries, 6 are middle-income countries, and none at all are low-income countries, said WHO’s Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a WHO press briefing on Friday.  He and other WHO officials […] Continue reading ->
The redacted WHO report on Italy’s pandemic response, “An Unprecedented Challenge” contained a brief timeline of events in the early days of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in China, which a number of WHO officials sought to amend or suppress even before the entire report was recalled. In fact, the so-called “China box” on the outbreak’s early […] Continue reading ->
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced on Monday that it would recommend conditional marketing authorization for the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine – positioning Europe to finally begin rolling out vaccines across the continent – albeit after the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Israel have already moved into high gear vaccine campaigns.   Mass vaccinations were […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization’s suppression of an independent report that critically examined both the strengths and weaknesses of Italy’s COVID-19 pandemic response – sets a dangerous precedent that compromises the international organization’s credibility  at a time when WHO’s independence has been questioned – and the Italian national pandemic response is under intense scrutiny as well, […] Continue reading ->
The combined health and economic shocks triggered by COVID-19 have revealed profound weaknesses in health systems, with direct consequences on the future of healthcare, says a new World Health Organisation report on global health financing systems.  “COVID-19 has revealed [the] underlying weakness of country and global health financing systems. There needs to be a proactive […] Continue reading ->
The UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs voted on Wednesday to remove cannabis and cannabis-derived substances from its “Schedule IV” list of the world’s most dangerous narcotics. The move comes nearly two years after the WHO recommended to the UN Secretary General that cannabis and cannabis resin be removed from Schedule IV of the 1961 Single Convention […] Continue reading ->
Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, a cutting edge mRNA technology produced jointly with the German firm BioNTech, was authorized for use on Wednesday by the United Kingdom – making it the vaccine the first to be rolled out for commercial public use as early as next week.  The vaccine was authorised Wednesday morning for emergency use by […] Continue reading ->