The United Kingdom, Norway and UNICEF on Wednesday appealed to world leaders to give stronger backing to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ call in March 2020 for a “global cease-fire” in order to beat the COVID-19 pandemic and get vaccines to tens of millions of undocumented migrants and refugees, as well as people living in […] Continue reading ->
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the profound dangers of having social, economic and health care systems that marginalize public health. To go forward, we must start by looking back. We must build a stronger foundation with better systems that can prevent future pandemics and also weave health into all aspects of society, from our workplaces […] Continue reading ->
Cape Town – The first South African health workers will be vaccinated against SARS-CoV2 on Wednesday with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, instead of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was recently shown to be unable to stop mild or moderate infection against the B.1351 (501Y.V2) variant dominant in South Africa. In a hastily assembled Plan B, […] Continue reading ->
IBADAN, NIGERIA – She is happy to be breaking World Health Organization (WTO) ceilings for women and Africans – but has always been a disrupter and technocrat who is used to making changes that stand the test of time and put those in need at the center — even when it is unpopular. Beginning on 1 […] Continue reading ->
The AstraZeneca/Oxford COVID-19 vaccines being produced by the Serum Institute of India and SK Bio in South Korea were listed for emergency use by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday. Emergency use listing (EUL), which involves experts assessing their safety, efficacy and quality, is a prerequisite for vaccines before they can be distributed by […] Continue reading ->
Nigeria’s former finance minister, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has become the first woman and first African to be elected as Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In a press conference just hours after her historic election, she signalled that she would reboot the WTO’s mission, making both health and climate twin cornerstones of global trade […] Continue reading ->
The contribution COVID-19 vaccines can make to beating the pandemic will depend on the extent to which they are produced at scale, priced affordably, and deployed globally, says the first peer reviewed study on equitable access to vaccines, published in The Lancet on Friday. The Lancet article comes in the wake of a joint appeal […] Continue reading ->
PUNE, INDIA – For Anjal Prakash, a climate scientist based in India, the flash floods in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand this past week did not come as a surprise. “The writing was on the wall,” said Prakash, a research director at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, of the 7 February rockslide and avalanche […] Continue reading ->
TEL AVIV- New data on over 500,000 Israelis who have been fully vaccinated with two Pfizer jabs shows the vaccine is 93% effective – with no deaths and only 4 severe cases for people who are a week or more after receiving the second dose. Out of the 523,000 fully vaccinated people studied, 544 were […] Continue reading ->
None of the hypotheses about the origins of the SARS-CoV2 virus have been discarded and the World Health Organization (WHO) origins mission might be expanded to include other experts to take forward new areas of research, WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the body’s bi-weekly media briefing on Friday. “I wish to confirm […] Continue reading ->