Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Pope Francis has given his backing to the campaign calling for the suspension of coronavirus vaccine patents to boost supplies to poorer countries.
In a video message to the Vax Live event, Francis backed “universal access to the vaccine and the temporary suspension of intellectual property rights”. And he added his condemnation of the “virus of individualism” that “makes us indifferent to the suffering of others”.
A perceived lack of cultural awareness has raised concerns about how the rollout will be received, but islanders are working to overcome the barriers
Disruptions are not uncommon on Badu Island, one of the largest islands in the Torres Strait. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the Torres Strait went into lockdown in line with the rest of the country, and locals were encouraged not to travel between islands.
Charlotte Nona, the director of Queensland Regional Health in the Torres Strait and Northern Peninsula, says there is only one frontline health worker for the entire population on Badu.
Reduced demand comes as Joe Biden has announced a plan to vaccinate 70% of US adults by the Fourth of July
Declining demand for Covid-19 vaccines in the US is causing states across the country to refuse their full allocations of doses from the federal government, despite concerted efforts to raise national take-up rates.
Reduced demand, which is contributing to a growing stockpile of doses, comes as nearly 46% of the US population has received at least one dose of a two-shot vaccine and about 34% are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.
Italy plans to lift quarantine restrictions for travellers arriving from European countries, including Britain and Israel, as early as mid-May to revive the tourism industry, Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said on Saturday.
After meeting Health Minister Roberto Speranza to discuss the easing of restrictions for countries where vaccination levels are high, Di Maio said, quarantine requirements may also be scrapped for those arriving from the United States from June.
Tourism is an important key to Italy’s restart, and we need to plan the summer well so that health, economy and work are not put in danger.
With Minister Roberto Speranza we had a first confrontation on reopening measures to foreign tourists who want to visit our country this summer.
The German chancellor Angela Merkel said Europeans could forward to travelling this summer if coronavirus cases continue declining on the continent.
While the European Union is developing a vaccine certificate, valid throughout the 27-nation bloc, summer holidays should be possible again for people who haven’t had their shots against the virus, the chancellor said.
Merkel said that Germany also appears to have broken its most recent outbreak.
“Step by step, more will be possible in Germany, too, wherever the incidence drops, and that will hopefully be the case for all of Europe,” she said.
The Covid-19 inquiry is hearing from Australians stranded in India, including Sunny, who traveled to India in May 2020 because his father was in a critical condition with no support during India’s coronavirus lockdown.
Sunny’s father passed away on 1 June 2020 while Sunny was in hotel quarantine in Dehli. He wants to bring his mother home to Australia with him, but his flights in July 2020 were cancelled due to the Melbourne lockdown.
Sunny said it was “next to impossible” to come back with 10,000 stranded Australians seeking seats on Air India flights and no Qantas repatriation flights until November. He paid $10,000 to fly to Australia from Japan, but was bumped from the flight.
Sunny said the Australian government had been “totally insensitive to stranded Australians” after he suffered “11 months of misery”.
Sunny and his mother live in an area experiencing a “tsunami of infections”, with 60-70% of people on the street infected with Covid-19. He said they lived holed up in the house “in fear for our lives” but worried it was only a matter of time before they were infected.
Sunny quoted the advice of the chief medical officer, Paul Kelly, that the India travel ban could, in the worst-case scenario, result in the death of Australians in India.
He called for a comprehensive schedule of repatriation flights to get all Australians in India and elsewhere home.
Meg, another Australian in India, has told the committee she was stranded in India after she travelled there on holiday in January 2020.
Meg was unable to fly back in October when her Cathay Pacific flight via Hong Kong was cancelled, and she hasn’t been able to get a seat in the “raffle” of respite or charter flights.
She said:
The daily fear of going out and contracting Covid was with us every day and it it still is now, the situation is so bad. The Australian government hasn’t provided any kind of emotional support to those stranded in India. We are part of Facebook and Whatsapp groups – people are depressed about the situation. Emotionally people are so down and depressed.
We haven’t really received anything from the high commission. Every time I’ve called for help, guidance, the phone would just ring out no matter how many times you call.
The website for the new Labor campaign we mentioned earlier is now live. It is seen as a bit of an opening salvo for an election which could be more than a year away.
Germany says waiver would inhibit private sector research
Opposition to Biden plan threatens to deadlock WTO talks
The US and Germany are at odds on the issue of waivers for patents on Covid-19 vaccines, as Berlin argued that a waiver would not increase production and would inhibit future private sector research.
The disagreement is the first major rift between the two economic powers since Joe Biden took office, and threatens to deadlock discussions at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and sour relations within the G7 group of major industrialised democracies.
It was a “seismic decision” by Joe Biden, the US president, say campaigners who have fought for the demolition of patent protection on vaccines and drugs for decades. The US administration has amazed supporters and critics alike by throwing its considerable weight behind the pleas of South Africa, India and about 100 developing countries at the World Trade Organization to overturn patents on Covid vaccines in the interests of getting more of them, more cheaply and faster, to huge populations in need.
Patents preserve the profits of the multinational companies that make drugs and vaccines. They make it illegal for up to 20 years for manufacturers of generic medicines to turn out cheap copycat versions. In this pandemic where, as the World Health Organization says, no one is safe until everyone is safe, there is a powerful moral case for ditching them.
Nepal is struggling to contain an explosion in Covid-19 cases, as fears grow that the situation in the Himalayan country may be as bad, if not worse, than in neighbouring India, with which it shares a long and porous border.
Following warnings by health officials earlier this week that the country was on the brink of losing control of its outbreak, Nepal has appealed for urgent international help.
For those advocating for greater access to vaccines, it is a case of two cheers for Joe Biden. His administration’s decision to support a push at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to waive patents on Covid-19 vaccines may be a huge step towards ending vaccine inequity, campaigners say, but on its own it will not have a decisive effect on the health crisis.
Two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine have proved more than 95% effective against infection, hospitalisation and death from Covid-19 in Israel, the country with the highest proportion of its population vaccinated in the world, research has found.
One shot of the vaccine was partially effective, offering 58% protection against infection, 76% against hospitalisation, and 77% against death. The authors of the observational study in the Lancet medical journal say this shows the importance of having the second shot.
Daily life will vary depending on where you live, and how local officials decide to implement – or ignore – public health measures
For many months, members of the public have equated a return to “normal life” with the phrase “herd immunity”: that threshold reached when the Covid-19 pandemic would be boxed in by immunization campaigns, find no new hosts and society would return to a 2019-style normal.
The handling of the coronavirus crisis in the UK has provided few moments to celebrate, but the day we reach zero deaths from the disease will clearly be one to toast. That day may not be far off. On Tuesday, the UK reported four Covid deaths within 28 days of a positive test. On Monday it was only one. Months of painful lockdown, in the face of more transmissible variants, and the rapid rollout of effective vaccines, have proven their worth. We have good reason to feel optimistic for the months ahead.
No one will have forgotten the brutal winter. In January alone, the UK reported nearly 32,000 Covid deaths, an appalling tally directly linked to locking down too late. In April, the death toll fell to 753. This month, scientists advising the government expect deaths to fall further. It is worth remembering that it’s been more than nine months since the UK last reported zero Covid deaths. We may see more in May, though people will continue to die of Covid, and the numbers might well rise again when restrictions are lifted on indoor mixing.
Britons’ summer holiday plans were given a major boost on Monday, as the EU confirmed vaccinated travellers will be able to fly to Europe from June, though it’s understood the UK could give the green light to travel to fewer than 10 countries.
The changing quarantine requirements for popular holiday destinations looks set to make 2021 the year of the last-minute booking.
The restaurant and cafe terraces spilling out into the streets of the pretty Dutch medieval town of Sluis were teeming over the weekend with smiling people clinking glasses under the spring sun.
The Netherlands reopened alfresco hospitality last Wednesday and Belgians, ignoring official advice, had driven a short distance across the border in huge numbers to enjoy their neighbour’s freedom over the long Labour day weekend. “We could have filled 400 tables,” said an apologetic waiter at the Resto de Eetboetiek, as he turned away the latest family arriving without a reservation.
Severe Covid-19 vaccine shortages have hampered India’s plan to administer jabs to all adults, with fewer then half of India’s states able to begin vaccinating over-18s amid warnings the shortfall could last months.
Over the weekend, more than 600 million Indians became eligible for the coronavirus vaccine in a policy that was introduced in the wake of a deadly second wave hitting the country last month.
Liberal senator Jane Hume is asked about her government’s controversial move to make it a criminal offence to enter Australia for citizens who have been in India in the last 14 days.
Hume told the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas the punishments are “a function of the Biosecurity Act” that was introduced with Labor’s support.
“The most important thing here is we’re keeping Australians safe”
No-one is saying this is an easy decision stop in fact, it is a very, very difficult decision to make but I think Australians realise how fortunate we are to be able to live in a country that is largely Covid free and our economy is back on track.
When we see the heartbreaking images of people in India, 300,000 cases a day, 90 million people infected and 200,000 deaths, I think we all fear that third wave.”
It is not a decision made lightly and we are trying to help India in any way we can.”
We don’t want to see anybody charged, we want to see the borders open and for Australians to be able to come home again and we will do that as soon as we possibly can safely.”
Jane Hume, the minister for superannuation and financial services, has been speaking about the government’s proposed $1.7bn increase to the childcare subsidy, which will see the subsidy for families with two children lifted to a maximum of 95% and remove the cap on subsidies for higher-income earners.
Hume said it’s better than more generous proposals from Labor because the Coalition’s plan “is aimed at lower-middle-income workers and people going back to work, study or doing charity work”.
Our South Asia correspondent reflects on a catastrophe that is now affecting the lives of almost everyone in the country
You recently lost a close colleague, Kakoli Bhattacharya, to Covid-19. Can you tell us about her and the important work that she did?
Kakoli was the Guardian’s news assistant over here and had worked for us since 2009. She could find any number or contact I needed and smoothed over any and all of the bureaucratic challenges that working in India can present. She made reporting here a huge joy, when it could be a huge challenge, and she was hugely well thought of by journalists for other organisations too. More than that, though, she was the person who welcomed me to Delhi. She knew the region inside out. She was incredibly warm and was someone I could always call on. The Guardian’s India coverage won’t be the same without her.
With less than one-third of Americans fully vaccinated, health authorities switch from mass vaccination clinics to outreach campaigns
A decline in daily Covid-19 vaccination rates has left US public health authorities with a new problem – how to effectively shrink operations.
In the campaign to immunize all American adults against the coronavirus, most of the difficulties to date have involved overwhelming demand and restricted supply. Now, with less than one-third of Americans fully vaccinated, local public health authorities described a sense of whiplash as they pivot from mass vaccination clinics to outreach campaigns, all within a couple of weeks.
Mexican production of AstraZeneca jab suffers setbacks
López Obrador: “it’s probable that they’ll help us with a loan’
Mexica’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said on Friday the US will probably send his country 5m more doses of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, as the company admitted production in Central and South America had suffered multiple setbacks.