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 ->
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 ->
The United States government has now secured enough COVID-19 vaccines to vaccinate every American adult after purchasing an additional 100 million doses each from Pfizer and Moderna, President Joe Biden said Thursday However, currently vaccines are in short supply across the country and logistic challenges abound.  Biden used the option in the contracts negotiated last year […] Continue reading ->
Weak medicine regulators in Africa mean the continent is vulnerable to falsified COVID vaccines being circulated. Sources at international anti-crime agencies argue that Africa’s strong trade routes with China and India are going to allow criminals to introduce shipments of falsified vaccines into supply chains. The World Health Organisation says the global market for substandard […] Continue reading ->
New York City – Echoing a message issued by WHO’s Geneva office today, WHO officials in the Agency’s Americas Regional Office stressed that stronger public health measures are desperately needed, alongside vaccines, to reduce transmission and the risk of even more variants emerging.  “The vaccine is not a silver bullet. The vaccine will not stop […] Continue reading ->
The most likely way that the SARS-CoV2 virus spread in Wuhan was from an animal intermediary that transmitted the virus from bats to humans, while the least likely was that it resulted from a laboratory “incident”, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) team on the origin of the virus, which completed a month-long investigation […] Continue reading ->