Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Uneven vaccine coverage and a relaxation of preventive measures have brought Europe to a “critical point” in the pandemic, the World Health Organization has said, with cases again at near-record levels and 500,000 more deaths forecast by February.
Hans Kluge, the WHO’s Europe director, said all 53 countries in the region were facing “a real threat of Covid-19 resurgence or already fighting it” and urged governments to reimpose or continue with social and public health measures.
With millions of followers, the stance of some Apostolic church leaders threatens to undermine fight against Covid
Hymnal melodies reverberate around the hillside in Kuwadzana, a Harare suburb. On a blisteringly hot Saturday, members of the Apostolic church, dressed in white, hum and sing together.
Songs, long prayers and a little Bible reading punctuate the outdoor service. It’s a spectacle for passersby.
Speaking to the G20 summit by video, China’s president stresses vaccine cooperation and economic stability
China’s president, Xi Jinping, has called for mutual recognition of Covid-19 vaccines based on the World Health Organization’s emergency use list, according to a transcript of his remarks delivered to leaders of the Group of 20 leaders’ summit, published by the official Xinhua news agency.
Speaking to the participants in Rome via video link, Xi said China had provided more than 1.6bn Covid shots to the world, and was working with 16 nations to cooperate on manufacturing doses.
Prince Harry and Meghan join WHO in urging leaders to honour promises to help low-income countries
Prince Harry and Meghan have joined the World Health Organization (WHO) and Save the Children in appealing to G20 leaders meeting this weekend to honour promises to send Covid-19 vaccines to low-income countries where just 3% of people have had a jab.
It is one of the most directly political initiatives at a high-profile political summit by the former royal couple since they left the British royal household.
Gordon Brown has called on the British government and other G20 countries to urgently arrange a military airlift of surplus Covid vaccines to poorer countries before they expire, saying it is their “moral responsibility” to do so.
The former prime minister has organised a letter from more than 160 former world leaders and global figures calling for richer countries to send 240m vaccines stored in the US, Europe and Canada to countries struggling to vaccinate their populations.
Tuberculosis campaigners tell G20 leaders $1bn is needed annually for vaccine research to reverse decades of underfunding
A group of tuberculosis survivors are calling for more funding and action to find new vaccines, after the numbers dying of the infection rose for the first time in 10 years.
In 2020, 1.5 million were killed by TB and 10 million infected, according to the World Health Organization. Campaigners want world leaders to invest $1bn (£730m) every year into vaccine research, spurred on by the momentum from the Covid jab development.
Following up on those comments, Dame Meg Hillier has been on the BBC this morning, saying that the Conservative government’s test and trace programme treated taxpayers as if they were an ATM. PA Media quote her saying:
There was a lot of gung-ho confidence from No 10 that we would have a ‘moonshot’ towards mass testing. Those messages kept getting more optimistic. Baroness Harding was also very optimistic about what they achieved.
But in the end it massively over-promised for what it delivered and it was eye-watering sums of money.
The national Test & Trace programme was allocated eye watering sums of taxpayers’ money in the midst of a global health and economic crisis. It set out bold ambitions but has failed to achieve them despite the vast sums thrown at it. Only 14% of 691m lateral flow tests sent out had results reported, and who knows how many took the necessary action based on the results they got, or how many were never used. The continued reliance on the over-priced consultants who “delivered” this state of affairs will by itself cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds. For this huge amount of money we need to see a legacy system ready to deliver when needed but it’s just not clear what there will be to show in the long term. This legacy has to be a focus for government if we are to see any value for the money spent.
Two years ago, three months before coronavirus erupted, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) issued a warning to the international community that a pandemic was only a matter of time, and that the world was not prepared. Tragically, we were proved right.
After 20 months of Covid-19, with nearly five million directly attributed deaths and economic devastation, we say again that the world is not prepared. It has neither the capacity to end the current pandemic in the near future, nor to prevent the next one.
One thing regular readers will have noted is that I occasionally pop in this map that seems to indicate the extent to which the UK’s caseload is an outlier in the western end of Europe, while also showing the surge that is building up towards the east of the continent.
It can sometimes be quite the cognitive dissonance for a journalist to be reporting that Russia – with a much larger population and a much lower caseload than the UK – is going into a week of work-free lockdown to try and break transmission, while members of the UK government are failing to follow their own public health advice over face mask wearing, even as daily Covid cases top 50,000.
“The UK is an outlier, because it does have quite high coverage of vaccination — and is still having 45,000 cases per day,” said Quique Bassat, a pediatrician at the Barcelona Institute for Global health.
Yet after Britain marked “freedom day” in July, it was to be expected that there would be a “persistence of transmission as opposed to other countries which have maintained much more stringent preventive measures,” said Bassat.
More than 100,000 lives can be saved in Africa by undertaking the emergency airlift of 240m unused vaccines in the next fortnight, Gordon Brown has urged.
The former prime minister called on a group of rich nations to back “the biggest peacetime public policy decision” by supporting an October airlift that would see unused vaccines handed to parts of the global south struggling the most.
The UK health minister Sajid Javid has become the latest government figure to say “sorry” about the coronavirus pandemic. Appearing on the BBC this morning, Javid, who became health secretary just short of four months ago following the resignation of Matt Hancock, said:
Yes, of course I’m sorry. Obviously I am new in the role but on behalf of the government I am sorry for, during the pandemic, anyone that suffered, especially anyone that lost a loved one, a mother, a dad, a brother, a sister, a friend. Of course I am sorry for that.
Also all those people that may not have lost someone but they are still suffering - there are many people sadly suffering from long Covid, we still don’t know the impact of that. Of course I am.
The World Health Organization has unveiled a team of scientists it wants to revive the stalled inquiry into Covid-19’s origins, with one senior official saying it may be the last chance.
The group of 26 experts will be charged with producing a new global framework for studies into the origins of emerging pathogens of epidemic and pandemic potential – and their remit includes Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
World Health Organization’s director general hails ‘historic day’ in fight against parasitic disease
The World Health Organization has recommended the widespread rollout of the first malaria vaccine, in a move experts hope could save tens of thousands of children’s lives each year across Africa.
Hailing “an historic day”, the WHO’s director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that after a successful pilot programme in three African countries the RTS,S vaccine should be made available more widely.
Exclusive: UN agency must respond to the ‘real needs’ of the women and girls, says Julienne Lusenge, co-chair of the independent inquiry into the scandal
Survivors of sexual abuse by World Health Organization aid workers during the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ebola outbreak in 2018 should receive “substantive” reparations, the co-chair of an independent inquiry into the scandal has said.
Julienne Lusenge, a prominent Congolese human rights activist, said it was “essential” that the UN’s global health body drew up a workable plan for reparations to respond to the “real needs” of women and girls who became victims of abuse.
Inquiry commissioned by WHO details sexual abuse, including rape allegations, during DRC outbreak
The World Health Organization has described itself as “heartbroken” after an independent inquiry it commissioned said scores of women and girls were sexually abused by aid workers during the devastating 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The findings were described as “harrowing reading” by the WHO’s director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, while its regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, said she was “humbled, horrified and heartbroken”.
The most vulnerable people will bear the cost of sanctions, as services and the economy collapse
Watching Afghanistan’s unfolding trauma, I’ve thought a lot about Mumtaz Ahmed, a young teacher I met a few years ago. Her family fled Kabul during Taliban rule in the late 1990s.
Raised as a refugee in Pakistan, Ahmed had defied the odds and made it to university. Now, she was back in Afghanistan teaching maths in a rural girls’ school. “I came back because I believe in education and I love my country,” she told me. “These girls have a right to learn – without education, Afghanistan has no future.”
The World Health Organization has added another version of coronavirus to its list of “variants of interest” amid concerns that it may partially evade the immunity people have developed from past infection or vaccination.
The Mu variant, also known as B.1.621, was added to the WHO’s watchlist on 30 August after it was detected in 39 countries and found to possess a cluster of mutations that may make it less susceptible to the immune protection many have acquired.
Senior officials at the World Health Organization have cited stagnating vaccination rates and low uptake in poorer countries as reasons so many Covid deaths are predicted.
'Last week, there was an 11% increase in the number of deaths in the region – one reliable projection is expecting 236,000 deaths in Europe, by 1 December,' WHO Europe director Hans Kluge said.
Kluge attributed the higher transmission to the spread of the more transmissible Delta variant, an 'exaggerated easing' of restrictions and measures, and a surge in summer travel.
While about half of people in Europe are fully vaccinated, vaccination uptake in the region has slowed, Kluge said.
Europe has registered about 1.3 million Covid deaths
A booster jab of Covid-19 vaccine for vulnerable people is not a luxury but a good way to protect them, the World Health Organization has said, as surging infection rates and a pan-European vaccination slowdown produced a “deeply worrying” situation.
“A third dose of vaccine is not a luxury booster taken away from someone who is still waiting for a first jab,” Dr Hans Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, said on Monday. “It’s basically a way to keep the most vulnerable safe.”
WHO to ship 100m doses of Sinovac and Sinopharm by the end of next month, while the number of coronavirus patients in US hospitals has breached the 100,000 mark again
Two government advisers have told i news that prime minister Boris Johnson has privately accepted that there could be at least 30,000 further Covid-related deaths in the UK over the next year.
Johnson would reportedly “only consider imposing further restrictions if that figure looked like it could rise above 50,000”, with the government adopting a cost-benefit analysis on whether to impose restrictions which takes into account the economic impact and controversially put the level of acceptable cost to save a life at up to £30,000.
The prime minister is minded to implement another lockdown or new restrictions only if the figure of annual deaths looks like it’s going to go above 50,000. That means deaths from Covid of 137 a day, or just under 1,000 a week.
However, it won’t be an immediate reaction. A sustained rate of death of around a 1,000 a week for two or three weeks will, though, lead to discussion on restrictions being reimposed. Unfortunately, prime ministers have to weigh up the cost of saving lives to the impact on the economy. No one wants to talk about that’s how it works.
Decisions about how much to intervene to improve public health are always difficult for governments. Measures such as vaccinating children against meningitis or imposing speed limits on roads reduce death and disease, but also cost money and limit freedoms.
Finding the balance is one of the hardest decisions for governments, but is essentially what we vote politicians to do. In normal times, it is possible to use calculations of, say, cost per life saved, to provide some framework to guide decisions. In the UK, if an intervention costs less than £30,000 per year of life saved, then it is usually accepted in terms of healthcare.
That’s it from me today. Time to hand over to my colleague, Mattha Busby.
Here’s a brief roundup of what’s been happening over the past 24 hours: