Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Until relatively recently, lethal infectious diseases stalked the lives of Australian children – including my father, Tom Keneally. Vaccines have saved millions
It’s 1940, and a five-year-old boy lies in an oxygen tent. He struggles for breath and hallucinates that his leaden toy soldiers are alive and marching around the room, monstering him with their bayonets.
He has diphtheria, a disease also known as The Strangling Angel. There is a vaccine, but not every child has been inoculated. The bacterial infection creates a membrane across the back of the throat, cutting off air supply.
A noisy minority in NSW’s northern rivers are pushing back against Covid-19 restrictions
Benny Zable has lived in Nimbin on and off since 1973, when he arrived in town for the Aquarius festival – the event that seeded counterculture and escapist lifestyles into the northern rivers of New South Wales.
The 75-year-old artist and activist is a storied figure in this part of Australia, now a heartland for alternative health and wellness advocates, and notorious for low immunisation rates. He was also the first person from Nimbin to show up for a Covid-19 vaccine.
Many more people around the world will die of Covid if western political leaders “reject their responsibility to the rest of humanity” by prioritising booster shots for their own populations instead of sharing doses, the head of the Oxford vaccine group has warned.
Writing for the Guardian, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, and Seth Berkley, the chief executive of Gavi, the vaccine alliance, say that the scientific and public health case for large-scale boosting has not been made and could have far-reaching consequences in other countries.
Anita Anand’s determination to get doses for Canadians means the country now has world’s highest global vaccination rate
For many Canadians, spring was a dark period marked by surging coronavirus infections, lockdowns – and the envy of watching their American neighbours get vaccinated en masse.
But for Anita Anand, the country’s public services and procurement minister, the mounting frustration that Canada was being left behind in the global vaccine race didn’t make her lose focus.
Barr has acknowledged the long waiting times at testing sites throughout the state, and has asked people who have been contacted by ACT Health as close or casual contacts to come forward as priority for testing:
We will be expanding testing capacity, hours of operations and the number of people at each existing testing centre can manage in a day but yesterday was our all-time record number of tests. We expect today will be even busier and we have stood additional testing capacity.
So please, if you do not have symptoms and you are not an identified close contact, you do not need to be tested today. Please, stay-at-home. There will be an opportunity to be tested in the days ahead but the priority right now is to test those people who ACT health have contacted.
The ACT has recorded two new Covid-19 cases, bringing the total to six. It has identified 1,862 close contacts and that number will grow.
There are more casual contacts. There were more than 2,000 tests yesterday and results have been received on about 1,330 of them.
Only 35.6% of residents are fully vaccinated in the state, which is opening a field hospital as officials brace for climbing death toll
Health officials in Mississippi have warned the state’s hospital system is on the brink of failure due to a surge in Covid-19 hospitalizations in the US south as the Delta variant rips through the country.
The deep south state, where only 35.6% of residents are fully vaccinated, is opening a 50-bed field hospital at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) car park with the assistance of the federal government as officials brace for a climbing death toll and ICU units reach capacity.
Chief Executive of Western NSW Local Health District, Scott McLachlan, tells @PatsKarvelas that the majority of COVID cases in regional NSW outbreaks at the moment - including Dubbo and Walgett - are Aboriginal people.
Staying with the Walgett outbreak, my colleague Nino Bucci has been digging into this story.
Lesotho’s prime minister, Moeketsi Majoro, has said he is isolating after testing positive for Covid-19, as doctors warned that the true tally of cases in the country was going unrecorded.
Majoro tweeted that he had taken a travel-related test that came back positive.
Updated guidance comes after a CDC analysis of new safety data, as vaccination rates remain low among pregnant women in the US
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention urged all pregnant women Wednesday to get the Covid-19 vaccine as hospitals in hot spots around the US see disturbing numbers of unvaccinated mothers-to-be seriously ill with the virus.
Expectant women run a higher higher risk of severe illness and pregnancy complications from the coronavirus, including perhaps miscarriages and stillbirths. But their vaccination rates are low, with only about 23% having received at least one dose, according to CDC data.
Two US companies, Pfizer and Moderna, have raised the prices of their Covid-19 vaccines after data from clinical trials showed their mRNA formula was more effective than cheaper vaccines from Britain’s AstraZeneca and the American drugs maker Johnson & Johnson.
AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson have pledged to provide their doses on a not-for-profit basis until the pandemic ends.
Ministers have started ordering vaccines for a booster campaign in autumn 2022, with Pfizer reportedly being asked to supply the UK with a further 35m doses.
The government has still not give the final go-ahead for the vaccine booster programme expected this autumn, but it is understood to have placed the order with Pfizer despite the company raising its prices.
Melbourne faces the possibility of a lockdown extension as shopping centre workers ordered into quarantine; new cases emerge across regional NSW. Follow all the day’s news
Queensland LNP MP George Christensen has spoken to Sydney radio 2GB about being censured through a parliamentary motion yesterday.
The whole House, including the government, voted to support Labor’s motion disassociating the parliament with Christensen’s anti-lockdown and anti-public health measure comments yesterday (although Scott Morrison couldn’t bring himself to name or reference Christensen in his speech and just a hour or so later, cabinet minister Paul Fletcher declined five times on national TV to say he disagreed with Christensen’s views)
Happy Wednesday!
It’s not just hump day; we’re also halfway through the parliamentary sitting. At this stage, there’s a week break and then it’s back into it, but you have to wonder whether any of the east coast MPs will risk going home, given how quickly Covid is changing the landscape. Although, it doesn’t seem like anyone is missing the deputy prime minister, who has been in lockdown in Armidale, and apparently, unable to zoom in for the sitting (he has answered no questions in QT and offered no contributions to debate).
Children accounted for 15% of new Covid cases reported last week, American Academy of Pediatrics data analysis shows
As Covid cases among children continue to rise in the US due to spread of the Delta variant, experts are urging the federal government to fast-track vaccine approval for those under the age of 12.
New data analysis from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) indicated that children accounted for 15% of new cases reported last week, with a total of almost 94,000 cases. There was a 4% increase in child cases over the past two weeks, the AAP found.
They are questions lurking in many people’s minds: just how upbeat or pessimistic should we be about the pandemic now? How does the UK compare with other countries? And is the worst of the crisis really over?
Two weeks after “freedom day” in England and with case numbers across the UK remaining lower than some modellers had feared, the worst seems to have eased. Future lockdowns, according to experts, seem unlikely unless new variants emerge.
Intensive care units near capacity in multiple locations
Covid-19 hospitalizations continued to surge among America’s deep south states on Monday as health officials urge unvaccinated residents to receive the shot and intensive care units near capacity in multiple locations, prompting fears of a surge close to the numbers of last winter.
The state of Louisiana now leads the nation in new Covid cases as the Delta variant rips through a region with some of the lowest vaccination rates in the US. Last Friday, the Louisiana department of health announced a daily increase of 6,116 positive Covid cases, with 2,421 people now hospitalized with the virus including 277 on ventilators. With just 37% of residents fully vaccinated, state data indicated that unvaccinated people accounted for 90% of hospitalizations in the state. 181 people died from the virus in Louisiana last week.
An extension to France’s “health pass” covering activities including going to restaurants and cafes, taking long-distance train journeys and visiting hospitals has come into effect after a fourth weekend of protests.
The pass sanitaire, which the government hopes will boost vaccination rates, is shown in the form of a QR code either digitally or on paper and given to those who are fully vaccinated, have a negative Covid-19 test or have had coronavirus and recovered.
All things going as normal, we should hear from the NSW authorities around 11am
A women’s and children’s hospital in St Albans has been listed as a tier one exposure site in Melbourne.
The maternity assessment centre at Joan Kirner women’s and children’s hospital on Furlong Road was listed on the Victorian exposure site list late last night. Anyone who attended the centre between 8.15am and 2.45pm on Friday 6 August has been ordered to isolate immediately for 14 days, get tested, and notify the Department of Health. The pathology lab – Dorevitch Pathology – on the ground floor of the same hospital has also been listed as a tier one site.
National Institutes of Health director says 1,450 kids in hospital
Teachers union shifts, calls for vaccine mandates for teachers
Amid increased fears that children are now both victims and vectors of the latest Covid-19 variant surge, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins signaled on Sunday that increasing numbers of children are falling ill in the US.
His comments also came as one of America’s largest teachers unions appeared to shift its position on mandatory vaccinations for teachers.
The new drive-through vaccination clinic will have capacity to administer 10,000 vaccines per week. That’s a conservative number, Bromley says, and may be limited by Pfizer supply.
She urges people to book ahead before turning up at the drive-through clinic.
To start it will be 10 cars at a time. Obviously this week all the processes will be reviewed and they’ll make it as big and as fast as efficient as possible. But we’ll start with 10 cars coming through.
Bromley says the rest of the state-run clinics will soon be allowed to deliver the AstraZeneca vaccine to under 40s. Only nine will be used initially, to test demand and the informed consent process.
So we’ll just do that initially, open up the nine hubs and the reason for that is, A, we want to see what the demand is. We want to know that we’re going to be able to manage that and we want to make sure that the process, because there is an additional process, as Brett sort of talked through, for these individuals coming through, they will go through a slightly more rigorous consent process. We want to make sure we got the systems and the workforce all set up perfectly so it’s running smoothly and so it doesn’t impact on the overall efficiency of the system.
Six EU states have now fully inoculated a larger share of their total populations with a coronavirus vaccine than the UK, after the bloc’s dire initial rollout took off while Britain’s impressive early jab rate has slumped.
According to government and health service figures collated by the online science publication Our World In Data, Malta, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Ireland have all overtaken the UK in terms of the percentages of their populations who are fully vaccinated.