“Every aspect of the COVID-19 response, beginning with the origins of the pandemic in Wuhan to China’s current Zero-COVID strategy, has had severe restrictions on human rights,” according to Prof Lawrence Gostin, a member of the independent Panel for a Global Health Convention. Speaking Monday afternoon at the UNITE Global Summit in Lisbon, he called […] Continue reading ->
COVID-19 was a “global stress test” for parliamentarians, whose job is to propose policies, said Kelvin Yil Lee Wuen, a parliamentarian from Malaysia. Speaking Monday at the UNITE Global Summit in Lisbon, the MP proposed five global policy recommendations, which he said his own country had adopted. 1 – Create conducive policies and infrastructure to […] Continue reading ->
A special project celebrating the fifth anniversary of “Our Views, Our Voices” | Learn more Jaime Barba, from Mexico, developed Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) after smoking for 32 years. When COVID-19 struck, the country converted the hospital at which Barba received treatment into a COVID facility, leaving him no place to be treated if […] Continue reading ->
Almost three years of harsh lockdowns, enforced quarantines in state facilities and daily testing have tried the patience of many Chinese people, who since Friday have taken to the streets from Shanghai and Nanjing in the east, to central Chengdu and Wuhan and Urumqi and Korla in the north and west. While scores of people […] Continue reading ->
“There is this tsunami that is happening after the earthquake that was COVID-19 that is now coming to shore and hitting health systems across the world,” said Ricardo Baptista Leite, president and founder of UNITE, a global network of parliamentarians committed to addressing global health challenges. “The pandemic also led to a huge economic crisis […] Continue reading ->
Little agreement emerged from an informal World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting on Tuesday about whether an intellectual property (IP) waiver should be extended to COVID-19 therapeutics and diagnostics. But low and middle-income countries (LMIC) that qualify for free COVID-19 anti-virals Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir) and Molnupiravir have shown so little interest in accepting donations that some question […] Continue reading ->
The Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator is going to focus on vaccinating high-risk populations, introducing new treatments, boosting testing and securing sustained access to COVID-19 tools in the next six months. ACT-A announced its new transition plan at a meeting on Friday as the world moves to long-term COVID-19 control. “Recognizing the evolving nature […] Continue reading ->
Tuberculosis cases and deaths have increased for the first time in decades, and fewer cases were detected and fewer people treated during 2021 – all as a result of disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). An estimated 10.6 million people fell sick with TB last year, an increase […] Continue reading ->
China administered the world’s first oral aerosol COVID-19 vaccine boosters in Shanghai on Wednesday, as new lockdown measures were imposed on Wuhan, the supposed birthplace of the pandemic. Chinese vaccine manufacturer CanSino Biologics said in a media statement that the inclusion of its vaccine in Shanghai’s booster vaccination program marked “the start of the rollout […] Continue reading ->
Midway through last year, the head of the Africa Vaccine Acquisition Task Team, Strive Masiyiwa, angrily accused the global COVID-19 vaccine acquisition platform, COVAX, of misleading African countries about its ability to procure vaccines for them. Masiyiwa’s bitter remarks came after months of Africans watching Europeans and North Americans being vaccinated against COVID-19 while no […] Continue reading ->