Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Israel and the UK were viewed as world leaders in their coronavirus vaccine campaigns but whereas the former is lifting almost all pandemic limitations, the latter is now glumly extending its restrictions in England amid a sharp rise in infections.
Despite starting its mass inoculation programme after the UK in December, Israel has sped ahead and it reached a key milestone on Tuesday, scrapping a requirement to wear face masks indoors, one of the final Covid limitations.
China is on track to administer 1bn vaccine doses by the end of this week, after bolstering production and distribution networks in an ambitious drive to vaccinate 40% of the population by this month.
Chinese authorities have been encouraging people to take the free and voluntary doses with cash incentives, gifts and colour-coded signage to laud or shame businesses depending on vaccination rates, as well as the promise of protection against Covid-19.
Instead of cutting the aid budget – including 95% from the plan to stamp out the disease – Britain should take a global lead
Despite the Covid pandemic, there have been just two recorded cases of wild polio in 2021 – in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the two remaining hiding places for the disease. But eradication is not guaranteed. Polio is virulent and spreads quickly. Even one case poses a threat to unvaccinated children everywhere, which is why a new strategy launched last week by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) outlines a plan to utilise this small window of opportunity for the world to end polio for good.
A 99.9% fall in polio cases globally in recent decades is thanks in large part to the GPEI and its supporters. The British government’s recent announcement that it will slash its contributions to the GPEI by more than 95% has been a body blow. The funding cut amounts to almost a quarter of the annual World Health Organization polio eradication budget.
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Bars at full capacity. No masks for vaccinated Disneyland goers. Fans sitting side-by-side at Giants and Dodgers games.
California rolled back its major public health restrictions on Tuesday, 15 months after it became the first state in the US to shut down to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Vaccine thefts reported and hospitals unable to admit patients as cases leap 2,800% in a month
Uganda has all but run out of Covid-19 vaccines and oxygen as the country grapples with another wave of the pandemic.
Both private and public medical facilities in the capital, Kampala and in towns across the country – including regional hubs in Entebbe, Jinja, Soroti, Gulu and Masaka – have reported running out or having acute shortages of AstraZeneca vaccines and oxygen. Hospitals report they are no longer able to admit patients to intensive care.
Africa will get priority treatment for the Group of Seven’s pledged 870 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine, a senior World Health Organization adviser said on Monday.
“You will see that Africa is one of the most vulnerable, under-served (areas), so the priority would be for doses to go... to the African continent writ large. Those numbers will be sorted out the coming weeks,” Bruce Aylward, a senior WHO adviser and coordinator of the ACT (Access to Covid-19 Tools) Accelerator, told an online news briefing from Geneva.
Italy reported 36 coronavirus-related deaths on Monday against 26 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections fell to 907 from 1,390.
Italy has registered 127,038 deaths linked to Covid-19 since its outbreak emerged in February last year, the second-highest toll in Europe after Britain and the eight-highest in the world. The country has reported 4.25 million cases to date.
Patients in hospital with Covid – not including those in intensive care – stood at 3,465 on Monday, down from 3,542 a day earlier.
There were 11 new admissions to intensive care units, down from 20 on Sunday. The total number of intensive care patients fell to 536 from a previous 565.
Some 79,524 tests for Covid-19 were carried out in the past day, compared with a previous 134,136, the health ministry said.
A Covid vaccine that is a critical part of the effort to vaccinate the developing world, as well as the UK, has an efficacy of 90% overall, its manufacturers have said after trials in the US and Mexico.
The UK has ordered 60m doses of Novavax, which has manufacturing agreements in Britain. Novavax has signed an agreement to provide 1.1bn doses to Covax, the UN-led initiative to get vaccines to poorer countries. The Serum Institute of India is contracted to make 100m doses, but has been making vaccines only for India in recent months in response to the Covid crisis there.
Ministers have been told that a four-week delay to easing all Covid restrictions would probably prevent thousands of hospitalisations, as Boris Johnson prepares to tell the English public they will have to wait up to another month for “freedom day”.
The government roadmap out of lockdown earmarks 21 June for the last remaining coronavirus restrictions to be lifted in England, but the prime minister is expected to announce on Monday that the timetable will be pushed back by two to four weeks amid a rapid rise in cases of the Delta variant first detected in India.
Delivering his closing press conference in the Carbis Bay hotel on Sunday, pale golden sand and azure sea visible behind him, Boris Johnson sought to play down the unseemly diplomatic spat that had marred his moment on the world stage.
“Actually, what happened at this summit was that there was a colossal amount of work on subjects that had absolutely nothing to do with Brexit,” he insisted.
Green campaigners and anti-poverty groups say Cornwall summit failed to address challenges facing the world
Boris Johnson has sought to defend the deal struck by G7 leaders at the Cornwall summit, as green groups and anti-poverty campaigners said the rich nations’ club had failed to match the scale of the challenges facing the world.
The final communique contained no early timetable to eradicate coal-fired emissions, offered only 1bn extra coronavirus vaccines for the world’s poor over the next 12 months and made no new binding commitments to challenge China’s human rights abuses.
It was around mid-May when workers at the Cal-Comp factory in Phetchaburi, central Thailand, heard a small group of their colleagues had tested positive for Covid-19. It soon became clear the virus had ripped through the production lines. A cluster associated with the electronics factory has since been linked to thousands of infections.
Hwan Htet Paing*, a worker from the factory, said he was not told the results of his Covid test, carried out on 19 May. Despite this, he was instructed to quarantine inside a vast hall at his workplace. The floor was covered with tarpaulin sheets and lined with rows of mosquito nets for each worker. Everyone was given a bucket and a cup, and bedsheets to lay across the floor. Fans were handed out to help ease the heat – until the vast numbers of people testing positive meant there were none left.
G7 summit hears move would slash the cost of jabs and accelerate rollout of programmes across the developing world
Britain and Germany were under intense pressure on Saturday to drop their resistance to proposals that would slash the cost of Covid-19 vaccines, following accusations that an agreement at the G7 summit to fund a billon doses will give the world’s poorest countries “crumbs from the table”.
Aid agencies said rules that protect drug patents from being illegally copied must be waived during the pandemic to accelerate the rollout of vaccines and save lives across the developing world.
G7 leaders discussed the origins of Covid-19, including the theory it originated in a Chinese lab, WHO head Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“We believe that all hypotheses should be open, and we need to proceed to the second phase to really know the origins,” he told reporters.
Above all, at the root of the #COVID19 pandemic is a deficit of solidarity and sharing – of the data, information, resources, technology and tools that every nation needs to keep its people safe. @WHO believes the best way to close that deficit is with a #PandemicTreaty. #G7UK
A poll for the Observer shows more than half the British public support delaying the lifting of restrictions on social contact because of the rising number of Covid-19 cases, report Michael Savage and Ben Tapper.
With Boris Johnson poised to announce a delay to his plan to remove the remaining restrictions on 21 June, an Opinium poll for the Observer found that 54% think the move should be postponed, up from 43% from a fortnight ago.
It suggests that the public is taking a cautious view following the emergence of the Delta variant, first detected in India and thought to be 60% more transmissible than the variant previously dominant in the UK. The proportion of people who thought Johnson should push ahead with the unlocking has fallen from 44% a fortnight ago to 37% this week.
The Duchess of Cambridge and US first lady Jill Biden have written a joint article on the importance of early childhood, following their visit to a primary school in Cornwall, where the G7 is taking place.
The two women met for the first time on Friday at Connor Downs Academy in Hayle, where they took part in a round-table discussion with experts on the importance of the early years of childhood for future outcomes.
In the article, published by CNN, they say there must be a fundamental shift in how the UK and US approach the earliest years of life. “If we care about how children perform at school, how they succeed in their careers when they are older, and about their lifelong mental and physical health, then we have to care about how we are nurturing their brains, their experiences and relationships in the early years before school,” they write.
The European Union has been urged to back down in a dispute with the UK over Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit trading arrangements.
Boris Johnson was holding talks with the EU’s key players on Saturday as the dispute threatened to overshadow his hosting of the G7 summit.
The prime minister was meeting European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, European Council head Charles Michel, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the margins of the gathering in Cornwall.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab urged the EU to take a more “pragmatic” approach to the Northern Ireland issue. The main summit agenda will see the leaders of the UK, the US, Canada, Japan, France, Germany and Italy commit to a new plan aimed at preventing a repeat of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Johnson also faces a potentially tricky series of meetings with the EU’s senior representatives. Downing Street has indicated the UK would be prepared to unilaterally delay the full implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol to prevent a ban on chilled meats crossing the Irish Sea from Great Britain.
Although a few states have seen large increases in vaccination rates among Black and Latino Americans, most are still trailing behind
When vaccines became increasingly available throughout America, US health officials moved quickly to try to convince large numbers of Americans to get vaccinated. But amid the mass vaccination rollout, Black and Latino communities, who are disproportionately affected by the pandemic, have been left behind in vaccination efforts, creating racial disparities about who was more likely to get a Covid-19 shot.
Amid federal and local efforts to address vaccine disparity, vaccination rates for Black Americans and Latinos lag behind the general population, leaving many communities of color still unprotected against the Covid-19 pandemic.
Downing Street is due to announce its decision on the next stage of Covid reopening in England by Monday, a week ahead of 21 June, which was set as the earliest date to bring in what is officially stage four of the Covid unlocking process. The original aim was to remove “all legal limits on social contact”, allowing the reopening of remaining businesses such as nightclubs. Public health is a devolved matter, meaning Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do not have the same deadline. Here are some possible options for England. They are not exclusive, meaning several could be used at the same time.
TheEUdoes not expect Johnson & Johnson will be able to deliver 55 million Covid-19 vaccine doses it had committed to shipping to the bloc by the end of June, an EU official has said.
Reuters reports that the bloc had previously said that it was confident the US pharmaceutical giant could meet its commitments. The position has changed after the European Medicines Agency, the European drugs regulator, said earlier today that J&J doses sent to Europe from a factory in the US would not be used out of precaution after a case of contamination.
The British Medical Association is calling for a delay to the easing of all remaining lockdown restrictions in England due to case numbers ‘rising rapidly’.
The BMA says the fourth stage of lockdown should not go ahead until there is “better understanding of the implications” of the reported rise in cases in recent days.
More than 90% of Covid cases in the UK are now down to the coronavirus Delta variant first discovered in India, data has revealed, as the total number of confirmed cases passed 42,000.
Also known as B.1.617.2, the Delta variant has been linked to a rise in Covid cases in the UK in the past weeks. It is believed to spread more easily than the Alpha variant, B.1.1.7, that was first detected in Kent, and is somewhat more resistant to Covid vaccines, particularly after just one dose. It may be also associated with a greater risk of hospitalisation.
A flood evacuation warning has been re-issued for Traralgon in Victoria’s Gippsland region, reports AAP.
Anyone near the Traralgon Creek was being told early on Friday afternoon to evacuate now.
Andrew Grech, a partner at Gordon Legal, is on the ABC now responding to the federal court judgment on the robodebt class action.
I think for many people, there’s been a lack of accountability, both of the ministers involved and senior public servants involved.
We think that it’s important that, through the proper parliamentary processes and, if necessary, through a royal commission, that those questions be answered for people, so that they can actually have far more closure on all those issues.
The UK will donate 100m surplus coronavirus vaccine doses within the next year to low-income countries as part of at least 1bn doses due from the G7.
The US has promised to buy 500m Pfizer vaccines at a cost of $3bn for distribution to 100 poorer countries, with 200m to be distributed this year, in addition to releasing 80m of its surplus by the end of June.