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by Ammu KANNAMPILLY Agence France Presse PUNE, India (AFP) — The tiny clinking vials supervised by silent PPE-wearing technicians belie the excitement inside the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, the Serum Institute of India, a major player in the fight against coronavirus. The firm, founded in 1966 in the western city of Pune, is producing millions of doses of the Covishield vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, for India and much of the developing world. […]
by Robin MILLARD Agence France Presse GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — Pfizer announced Friday that it will provide up to 40 million of its Covid-19 vaccine doses to poorer countries on a non-profit basis, through the globally-pooled Covax facility. While dozens of the world’s richer countries have begun their vaccination campaigns in a bid to curb the pandemic, coronavirus jabs have been few and far between in the world’s poorer nations. Covax — the globally-pooled coronavirus […]
(Eagle News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) is seeking a review of the reports on deaths in frail elderly individuals who had received the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. In a statement on Friday, Jan. 22, WHO said that the Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS) has already met early this week for the review. The GACVS is a group of experts that provides independent and authoritative guidance to WHO on the matter of […]
by Kelly MACNAMARA Agence France Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — To monitor changes to the coronavirus that could supercharge the pandemic or render vaccines less effective, scientists must sequence its genetic code to catalogue potentially dangerous mutations as they emerge. But so few countries are conducting and sharing surveillance that experts are as worried about the mutations they cannot see as those they can. Publication of the first genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 in January […]
by Agnès PEDRERO Agence France Presse GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The Covax programme, bolstered by the new US presidency on Thursday, aims to secure enough Covid-19 vaccines this year for the most vulnerable 20 percent in every country, rich or poor. Top US government scientist Anthony Fauci told the World Health Organization (WHO) that the United States intends to join Covax, the globally-pooled coronavirus vaccine procurement and equitable distribution effort. The move should give […]
by Nina LARSON with AFP Bureaus Agence France Presse GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The United States on Thursday said it would resume its funding for the UN’s health agency as President Joe Biden shifts towards greater international cooperation in the fight against Covid-19, while also launching a $1.9 trillion plan to tackle the pandemic at home. On his first day in the job, Biden confirmed he had reversed the decision of former president Donald Trump […]
GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The UK coronavirus strain has been detected in at least 60 countries, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, 10 more than a week ago. With the global death toll now well past two million, and new variants of the virus causing deep concern, countries across the world are grappling with how to slow infections until vaccines become widely available. The South African strain, which like the UK one is believed […]
GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The United Nations said Tuesday that $76 million was urgently needed to help over one million people in southern Madagascar facing potentially life-threating shortages of food, water and health assistance. The UN humanitarian agency OCHA issued its so-called flash appeal after the impoverished island country in eastern Africa saw its agricultural season ruined by the worst drought in a decade. At the same time, the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic […]
by Kelly MACNAMARA PARIS, France (AFP) — People may be able to fight off reinfection for at least six months after they recover from Covid-19 thanks to cells that can “remember” the virus, according to research published Monday. Researchers in the United States and Switzerland studied dozens of people who had recovered from Covid-19 and found that while their antibodies may fade over time, they maintained levels of specific memory B cells. These cells can […]
GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The world is on the “brink of a catastrophic moral failure” if rich countries hog Covid-19 vaccine doses while the poorest suffer, the head of the WHO said Monday. World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus denounced the “me-first” attitude of wealthy nations and also blasted vaccine manufacturers for chasing regulatory approval in rich countries rather than submitting their data to the WHO to green-light vaccine use globally. He said […]
UNITED NATIONS (AFP) — The coronavirus pandemic has slowed global migration by nearly 30 percent, with around two million fewer migrants between 2019 and 2020, according to a UN report released on Friday. Some 281 million people were living outside their country of origin in 2020. The report, entitled “International Migration 2020,” showed that two-thirds of registered migrants lived in just 20 countries, with the United States at the top of the list, with […]
by Robin MILLARD Agence France Presse GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The World Health Organization’s emergency committee called Friday for globally-ramped up coronavirus sequencing studies in order to combat troubling new variants stalking the globe. The meeting was dragged forward by two weeks for urgent talks on the emerging, seemingly more contagious strains of the virus, as the death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic topped two million, according to an AFP count. The emergency committee came […]
