Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
For Kirill Dmitriev, the man in charge of selling Russia’s coronavirus vaccine to the world, there’s a simple rationale behind Moscow’s accelerated push to be the first country to roll out a coronavirus vaccine for widespread use.
“It’s part of the Russian mentality to save the world,” said Dmitriev, head of Russia’s RDIF sovereign wealth fund, in an interview with the Guardian.
The World Bank has announced plans for a $12bn (£9.3bn) initiative that will allow poor countries to purchase Covid-19 vaccines to treat up to 2 billion people as soon as effective drugs become available.
In an attempt to ensure that low-income countries are not frozen out by wealthy nations, the organisation is asking its key rich-nation shareholders to back a scheme that will disburse cash over the next 12 to 18 months.
A coalition of 156 countries has agreed a “landmark” deal to enable the rapid and equitable global distribution of any new coronavirus vaccines to 3% of participating countries’ populations, to protect vulnerable healthcare systems, frontline health workers and those in social care settings.
The Covid-19 vaccine allocation plan – co-led by the World Health Organization and known as Covax – has been set up to ensure that the research, purchase and distribution of any new vaccine is shared equally between the world’s richest countries and those in the developing world.
The UK government’s most senior scientists, England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, and the chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, have given a televised briefing about the recent increases in coronavirus cases, and what to expect – unusually, doing so without a politician there as well. Here is what we learned.
Scientists have had eyes on Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, since the beginning of this pandemic.
They can see it is evolving, but it is happening at a glacial pace compared with two other viruses with pandemic potential: those that cause flu and Aids. That is good news for efforts to develop vaccines and treatments, but scientists remain wary that anything could still happen.
Coronavirus deaths pass 925,000; biosafety head at Chinese CDC says vaccine progress ‘very smooth’; South Korea to secure early vaccines for 30 million
As global coronavirus cases neared 30 million on Tuesday, a senior health official in China said she expected a vaccine to be publicly available as early as November this year.
According to the Johns Hopkins University Covid-19 tracker, which relies on official government data, there are 29,190,588 confirmed infections worldwide. Deaths stand at 927,245 and are expected to pass 1 million by October.
The UK has ordered a total of 340m doses of potential coronavirus vaccines from six manufacturers.
The EU has done a deal said to be worth €2.4bn (£2.2bn) with one developer, while the US has orders with six companies for 800m doses under Operation Warp Speed, with options on a further 1.6bn.
They call it the “moonshot” – and it is as ambitious as any space adventure.
This is the name given to the government project that aims to ramp up testing to such a scale that it will return the country to some kind of normality. But is it feasible? And what about the cost?
Thanks for following our live coverage of the coronavirus coverage in Australia. You can continue to follow our rolling global coverage here.
A quick recap on what happened today:
Asked if he would step down as premier if the hotel quarantine inquiry laid the blame for the outbreak on his office, Andrews said his responsibility was to keep going.
My position and the responsibility I have is to see our state through this. What is what I’m focused on.
Let me be as frank as I can be: Politics has never mattered less to me. Leadership is not able doing what’s popular, it is about doing what’s right.
The politics of this, that is of no value. The only thing that matters is we all stay the course. We all keep following the data, the science and the doctors and get this done. Then move to the biggest economic repair job that our state has ever seen.
Vaccines will not be a silver bullet to end the Covid-19 pandemic and leaders must avoid creating false hope, a key government adviser has warned.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, writes in today’s Observer that the first vaccines are likely to be only partially effective. Raising expectations and rushing new drugs into production risks damaging public trust in any vaccination programmes that eventually arrive, he said.
Widespread vaccinations against Covid-19 are not expected until the middle of next year, according to the World Health Organization, which has stressed the importance of rigorous checks on their effectiveness and safety.
'This phase 3 must take longer because we need to see how truly protective the vaccine is and we also need to see how safe it is,' said spokeswoman Margaret Harris, referring to vaccine clinical trials
Scientists worldwide are working against the clock to find a viable coronavirus vaccine – but are corners being cut for the sake of political gain and profit?
To begin with, it felt like a sleek performance from a well-honed relay team. On 11 January, only 10 days after reporting a new respiratory disease, the Chinese published the genome sequence of the virus that causes it. Researchers around the world set to work building vaccines against Covid-19, as the disease became known, and the first candidate entered human trials on 16 March; it was joined, as the months passed, by dozens of others.
Scientists were jubilant, and they had every right to be. They’d broken all vaccinology records to get to that point. But then tensions began to surface among the team members, and lately even the most distracted spectator will have noticed that they appear to be trying to nobble each other openly on the track. With accusations that the Russians and Chinese hacked research groups in other countries, biotech executives criticised for cashing in on their own, as yet unapproved vaccines, and Russia approving a vaccine that is still in clinical trials, the quest for a vaccine seems to have turned sour.
The legacy of a successful battle is now helping combat Covid, but we must stay vigilant, says WHO’s Africa regional director
Africa has declared victory over a virus that once paralysed75,000 children on the continent every year.
Four years have now passed since wild polio was last detected in Africa. After a year of rigorously evaluating polio data from all 47 countries in the WHO’s African region, an independent body of experts announced during a virtual ceremony on Tuesdaythat the continent was free of wild polio.
Achievement comes following Nigeria vaccination drive, with last cases of wild virus recorded four years ago
Africa is expected to be declared free from wild polio, after decades of work by a coalition of international health bodies, national and local governments, community volunteers and survivors.
Four years after the last recorded cases of wild polio in northern Nigeria, the Africa Regional Certification Commission (ARCC) is expected to certify that the continent is free of the virus, which can cause irreversible paralysis and in some cases death.
The company manufacturing the Oxford University coronavirus vaccine has said it is not in talks with the Trump administration about fast-tracking its vaccine for emergency use ahead of November’s presidential elections.
With both Russia and China pressing ahead with inoculations involving experimental vaccines yet to pass final efficacy and safety trials, the Trump administration has become increasingly frustrated with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which the president has tried to suggest is slowing approval of a vaccine for “political reasons”.
Coronavirus will be around “for ever” and people are likely to need regular vaccinations against it, a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government has said.
Prof Mark Walport, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), likened the virus to influenza, as he said repeat inoculations on a global scale would almost certainly be required to control it.
US companies make roughly 663m syringes a year but the Trump administration has calculated that an extra 850m may be needed
As the race for a vaccine against the coronavirus heats up, the US faces another potential crisis: a shortage of syringes.
The US federal government has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars in hopes of warding off a syringe shortage, if and when a Covid-19 vaccine is approved. It comes as shortages of personal protective equipment continue to hamper the response to the pandemic.
Health experts say prime minister discussing coercive measures this early risks driving hesitant Australians away
Experts have warned Scott Morrison’s discussion of a “mandatory” Covid-19 vaccine is pre-emptive and risks driving hesitant Australians away.
The prime minister announced on Wednesday that a letter of intent had been signed with the British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca to supply Australians with the University of Oxford Covid-19 vaccine if it clears clinical trials.