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 ->
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 ->
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 ->
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) recorded its first case of Ebola on Sunday in Butembo – a city that was one of the epicenters of the last Ebola outbreak – since its last outbreak ended in June 2020. A woman with Ebola-like symptoms was detected in Butembo, a city in North Kivu Province, […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization (WHO)’s expert group on immunisations remains confident in the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine’s efficacy against severe SARS-CoV2 disease – despite the enormous worldwide concerns triggered by a small South African study that showed it had little effect in stemming mild disease from the B.1.351 variant first identified in that country. “It is very […] Continue reading ->