Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
A trio of countries stand out for the effectiveness of their Covid-19 vaccination programmes: Israel, Chile and the UK. All have managed to inoculate an impressively high percentage of their people but each has fared very differently in controlling the disease.
Israel has done so well it is resuming university lectures, concerts and other mass gatherings and has opened up its restaurants and bars. By contrast, Chile is experiencing soaring levels of Covid cases and faces new lockdown restrictions.
Vaccine rollout faces delays as authorities scramble to secure alternatives to AstraZeneca such as Pfizer for under-50s over blood clot fears. Follow updates live
Labor MP Josh Burns has criticised the government for failing to deliver vaccines to aged care staff and residents, noting the issue is unrelated to fresh concerns about the AstraZeneca vaccine causing blood clotting in those under 50.
We’ve not had any federal aged care providers in Macnamara receive their vaccinations or have any indication on what day they are going to be having them, not to mention the staff that are still vulnerable and haven’t been vaccinated.
The frustration that Australians rightly have is that the promises that have been made have not been made by the Labor Party, they’ve been made by Greg Hunt, they’ve been made by Scott Morrison, they’ve been telling Australians that they’ve got it under control, that all is well, they are going to be vaccinating Australians and they haven’t been.
Women need more information about contraceptive options, experts said, after concerns over rare blood clots linked to the AstraZeneca Covid jab prompted a debate over side-effects caused by certain forms of the pill.
On Wednesday the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said that evidence that the jab could be causing a rare blood clotting syndrome was growing stronger. As a result the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recommended that healthy people under the age of 30 who were at low risk of Covid should be offered a different vaccine if possible.
The P1 variant is causing devastation in Brazil, where an uncontrolled Covid pandemic is raging. P1, behind the terrible scenes of hospital overload in Manaus with patients’ relatives pleading for oxygen cylinders, is now the dominant form of coronavirus in many of Brazil’s cities and partly responsible for the high death toll. Other Latin American countries have closed their borders and restricted travel to and from Brazil but P1 is now in at least 15 countries in the Americas, according to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
Vaccines have side-effects, as do all medicines. Most often, jabs cause sore arms, a headache or a bit of nausea – none of which would be very significant when weighed against the toll of a serious virus such as Covid-19.
But sometimes the risk-benefit calculation may look less simple, as in the case of Oxford/AstraZeneca’s Covid jab and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), the blood clots in the brain that have led to fatalities in the UK and Europe.
Social worker, 56, treated at Mt Sinai hospital in New York
Some patients left with serious damage from ventilators
Surgeons in New York City have performed the first windpipe transplant in the US, giving a woman who suffered severe asthma a new trachea, the tube that transports air from the mouth to the lungs.
Doctors say such operations could help Covid-19 patients left with serious windpipe damage from breathing machines.
Researchers at the University of the Philippines Los Baños aim to catch thousands of bats to develop a Japanese-funded simulation model over the next three years that they believe could help avert potential pandemics. They hope the bats will help in predicting the dynamics of a coronavirus outbreak by analysing factors such as climate, temperature and ease of spread
New variants of concern have changed the game, spreading worldwide and threatening to derail pandemic control efforts
At the end of 2020, there was a strong hope that high levels of vaccination would see humanity finally gain the upper hand over Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. In an ideal scenario, the virus would then be contained at very low levels without further societal disruption or significant numbers of deaths.
But since then, new “variants of concern” have emerged and spread worldwide, putting current pandemic control efforts, including vaccination, at risk of being derailed.
Research into how some HIV-positive people keep the virus at bay promises to yield new treatment possibilities, from vaccines to gene therapies
The year was 1998 when Joel Blankson encountered a patient he would never forget. Blankson was working in the HIV clinic at John Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, when an HIV-positive woman in her mid-40s arrived for some routine tests.
Blankson gave her a PCR test, intending to prescribe a newly developed combination of medicines called antiretroviral therapies to suppress the infection, and prevent her developing Aids.
The team behind Once Upon a Time in Iraq has compiled a moving and sometimes hopeful three-parter that offers a global perspective on the crisis
Like the virus itself, the programmes about it have moved from localised subjects to a slightly wider field and now have expanded to take in a global view. It hasn’t been a perfectly linear progression, of course, but most of the first documentaries were composed largely of footage recorded by medical professionals themselves, at work and then – exhausted and tearful – at home.
After that came socially distanced films recording the impact on local communities and bereaved families, the experiences of survivors and the long-term consequences for those who do not make a full recovery. Alongside that have come considerations and critiques of the UK response to the crisis and comparisons – not generally favourable – with that of other countries.
Half of people in the UK now have antibodies against coronavirus, either through infection or vaccination, tests conducted by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show.
According to the most recent coronavirus infection survey, an estimated 54.7% of the population in England would have tested positive for antibodies to coronavirus from a blood sample in the week ending 14 March 2021.
Spasms, memory loss and hallucinations among symptoms of 43 patients in Acadian region of New Brunswick province
Doctors in Canada are concerned they could be dealing with a previously unknown brain disease amid a string of cases involving memory loss, hallucinations and muscle atrophy.
Politicians in the province of New Brunswick have demanded answers, but with so few cases, experts say there are far more questions than answers and have urged the public not to panic.
AstraZeneca has dismissed as “inaccurate” a report in the Italian press that 29m doses of its Covid-19 vaccine found in factory near Rome were destined for the UK.
La Stampa reported on Wednesday that the doses – almost twice the amount the EU has so far received from AstraZeneca – were found “hidden” in the factory following a search by Italian police on Saturday at the request of the European commission, and that they were probably destined for the UK.
Luxembourg has announced a partial reopening of its hospitality industry, with cafés and restaurants able to serve customers again in outdoor areas from 7 April.
The European country’s venues have been closed since the end of November.
On 23 March 2020, the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, announced the first lockdown in response to the growing number of cases of Covid-19. At the same time, countries around the world began to close their schools, restaurants, and offices and ask citizens to physically distance from one another. In the 12 months since, more than 2 million people have died, viral variants have emerged, and we have developed safe and effective vaccines.
One year into the pandemic, Science Weekly is asking: what happens next? Ian Sample talks to the professors Martin Landray, Mike Tildesley, and Deborah Dunn-Walters about Covid treatments, vaccines and what the next 12 months may hold
Dexamethasone – the inexpensive steroid that quickly emerged as a highly effective Covid therapy thanks to a large drug testing programme pioneered by UK scientists – has so far saved the lives of an estimated million people globally, including 22,000 in the UK, according to NHS England.
Called Recovery, the world’s largest randomised Covid-19 drug trial commenced in March 2020 to evaluate the suitability of a suite of different drugs to help hospitalised Covid patients. The study has since been carried out by thousands of doctors and nurses on tens of thousands of patients in hospitals across Britain.
Britain’s latest lockdown has dramatically reduced cases of coronavirus, and the number of people being admitted to hospital and dying from the disease. What the country faces now is essentially a race between vaccination and infection: can we protect people faster than the virus spreads as restrictions are eased?
This was always going to be a balancing act. The UK vaccination strategy of prioritising the most vulnerable people and moving down the age groups is intended to save lives first and slow transmission second. This means that as the country unlocks, infections are likely to rise, primarily in younger people who have more social contacts and have not yet been vaccinated. Hospitalisations and deaths are expected to rise too, though not as sharply: even though vaccine coverage has been high in vulnerable groups and older people, not everyone has the vaccine and it will not protect all those who do.
The Covid-19 vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca was 79% effective in preventing symptomatic illness in a large trial in the US, Chile and Peru, the company said on Monday, paving the way for it to apply for US approval.
The vaccine was 100% effective against severe or critical disease and hospitalisation and was safe, the drugmaker said on Monday, releasing results of the late-stage human trial study of more than 32,000 volunteers across all age groups.
The UK’s Covid-19 statistics remain encouraging despite continuing rows over vaccine deliveries in Europe. Admissions to hospital and daily deaths from the disease continue to decline with numbers in the latter category now down to double digits while the former have dropped to around a 10th of their total two months ago.
However, one other category – numbers of new diagnoses a day – has reached a plateau with cases, having plunged from 60,000, stabilising at around 5,000 to 6,000. So why has this figure apparently stalled while deaths and hospitalisations continue to decline?
More than 350 clinicians report suspicions of Covid-induced diabetes, both type 1 and type 2
A cohort of scientists from across the world believe that there is a growing body of evidence that Covid-19 can cause diabetes in some patients.
Prof Francesco Rubino, from King’s College London, is leading the call for a full investigation into a possible link between the two diseases. Having seen a rise in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes in people who have caught coronavirus, some doctors are even considering the possibility that the virus ‒ by disrupting sugar metabolism ‒ could be inducing an entirely new form of diabetes.
PM welcomes vaccine safety vow, then spots new offshore home for folk trafficked here under false pretence – of getting a welcome
After a morning spent painting flowers at a primary school in his Uxbridge constituency, Britain’s prize clot returned to Downing Street to lead a press conference on clots. Blood clots to be precise.
Following the decision of some countries to suspend their Oxford AstraZeneca vaccination programmes over concerns of blood clot side-effects, Boris Johnson was happy to report that the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency had declared the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine to be absolutely safe.