Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
England’s Covid travel rules and refusal to recognise vaccines administered across huge swaths of the world have sparked outrage and bewilderment across Latin America, Africa and south Asia, with critics denouncing what they called an illogical and discriminatory policy.
The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, described England’s rules, unveiled last Friday, as “a new simplified system for international travel”. “The purpose is to make it easier for people to travel,” Shapps said.
Six companies warned not to put profit before lives as report shows less than 1% of almost 6bn doses have gone to low-income countries
Amnesty International has accused six pharmaceutical companies that have developed Covid-19 vaccines of fuelling a global human rights crisis, citing their refusal to sufficiently waive intellectual property rights, share vaccine technology and boost global vaccine supply.
After assessing the performance of six Covid-19 vaccine developers – Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Novavax – Amnesty International claims that all are failing to uphold their own human rights commitments and warns they should not be putting profit before the lives of people in the world’s poorest countries.
Premier Dan Andrews is to release Victoria’s roadmap out of lockdown a day after protests in Melbourne, Sydney, Byron Bay and Brisbane. Follow updates live
The Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, is holding a press conference in Brisbane. The state has recorded no new cases of Covid-19 in the community or in hotel quarantine.
Palaszczuk is urging people to get vaccinated after the state controversially made the Pfizer vaccine available to over 60s. She’s urging people to attend walk-in Pfizer clinics.
This is an interesting piece on the people for whom the end of Covid restrictions sparks fear rather than joy.
Racquel Sherry, 49 and based in Sydney, is immunocompromised and afraid.
In the roadmap to freedom, I hear nothing about people like me, other than as a qualifying postscript to the Covid deaths: ‘But they had an underlying health condition’.
Household names may have unwittingly helped spread fake news, investigation reveals
Dozens of the world’s biggest brands, including Nike, Amazon, Ted Baker and Asos, have been advertising on websites that spread Covid-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories, it has emerged. The companies, as well as an NHS service, are among a string of household names whose ads appear to have helped fund websites that host false and outlandish claims, for example that powerful people secretly engineered the pandemic, or that vaccines have caused thousands of deaths.
Analysis of nearly 60 sites, performed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and shared with the Observer, found that ads were placed through the “opaque” digital advertising market, which is forecast to be worth more than $455bn (£387bn) this year.
New Doherty Institute modelling presented to national cabinet warns that maintaining “medium” public health and social measures would be “prudent” until Australia reaches 80% vaccination if caseloads are high – with “medium” measures previously defined as including stay-at-home orders except for work, study and other essential purposes.
The institute – which conducted the modelling informing Australia’s four-phase reopening plan – has updated its work after a dispute erupted within the federation about whether or not it was safe to ease restrictions once 70% of Australians over the age of 16 were vaccinated.
Children and adolescents who are infected with Covid-19 rarely have symptoms that last for longer than 12 weeks, according to a review of international research.
The review, published in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, suggests that long Covid in children and adolescents is less common than previously feared.
In the UK, the majority of those now in hospital with Covid-19 are unvaccinated. Many face their last days with enormous regret, and their relatives are telling their stories to try to convince others like them
Matt Wynter, a 42-year-old music agent from Leek, Staffordshire, was working out in his local gym in mid-August when he saw, to his great surprise, that his best friend, Marcus Birks, was on the television. He jumped off the elliptical trainer and listened carefully.
The first thing he noticed was that Birks, who was also from Leek and a performer with the dance group Cappella, looked terrible. He was gasping for breath and his face was pale. “Marcus would neverusually have gone on TV without having done his hair and had a shave,” Wynter says.
Gladys Berejiklian has revealed a roadmap out of lockdown for the state, and an easing of restrictions for some parts of regional NSW. Here’s the full list of what you can and can’t do in NSW and the ACT
The premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has revealed a roadmap out of lockdown for the state, and an easing of restrictions for some parts of regional NSW.
From Saturday 11 September, parts of regional NSW that had seen zero Covid cases for at least 14 days emerged from lockdown. One of those areas, Yass Valley Council, was plunged back into a two-week lockdown from Tuesday 14 September after a new Covid case was detected.
Expert’s clever analogies and frank messages to public have won him respect – and millions of followers
Early last year, as Covid-19 began to disrupt livelihoods in Shanghai, local media struggled to persuade the public to stay at home. Then they turned to an infectious diseases expert, Dr Zhang Wenhong, who also heads up Shanghai’s expert panel on Covid-19.
“You’re bored to death at home, so the virus will be bored to death, too,” Zhang said in rapid-fire mandarin mixed with a distinctive Shanghainese accent. “Stay at home for two weeks … then we’ll be an inch closer to success.”
£200m project to eliminate avoidable blindness and disfigurement in Africa ends after funding is prematurely axed
A chandelier sparkling in the background, the grandeur of Downing Street gleaming behind him, Boris Johnson looks into the camera and speaks with solemnity. He is marking World Neglected Tropical Diseases Day, he says, to raise awareness of these “terrible afflictions … which impose an immense burden of suffering in developing countries”.
Huge progress has been made, he says, in the fight against the diseases, not least as a result of British aid to some of the poorest parts of the world. But there is more – much more – to be done: more than a billion people are still at risk, he warns, and that is why the UK “fully supports” the World Health Organization’s big elimination push over the next decade.
The Liverpool site will work with other international centres to research the threat of emerging disruptive diseases
A new scientific institute which aims to prevent future pandemics may have been able to save thousands of lives by accelerating vaccine development had it existed before December 2019, its researchers believe.
Liverpool’s new Pandemic Institute will include a new human challenge facility, where volunteers will test new vaccines and treatments under controlled conditions.
While other states are still lacking enough supply to vaccinate those under 60 with Pfizer, South Australia is opening up Pfizer access to those over 60, AAP reports.
The premier, Steven Marshall, made the announcement less than 24 hours after the Northern Territory confirmed over-60s in the Top End could get the Pfizer jab.
Victoria’s health minister, Martin Foley, is asked to weigh in on New South Wales’ decision to stop holding daily press conferences from Monday.
Foley says holding daily press conferences is not fun, but it is important, and Victoria has no plans on abandoning them at the moment:
We have no plans, sadly, other than to continue to come and share as we need to, because every day the message changes, every day we need to hear from people like Ryan, and every day we need to hear from people like we did from the other day from our ICU nurses.
We need to hear what this means in real lives. And what that means. And it’s not fun, having to do these things. This is a public health crisis, the likes of which we have not seen in a century. The fate of our public health system is on the cusp here. And it’s important that we use this every opportunity.
Scientists would make swifter progress in solving the world’s problems if they learned to put their egos aside and collaborate better, according to the leading researcher behind the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine.
Prof Katalin Karikó, the senior vice-president for RNA protein replacement therapies at BioNTech in Germany, endured decades of scepticism over her work and was demoted and finally kicked out of her lab while developing the technology that made the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines possible.
Australia’s drug regulator has banned medical practitioners from prescribing the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin for “off-label” uses, such as for treating Covid-19.
The move comes after prescriptions for the drug increased between three and four times in Australia in recent months.
Anil Goel remembers the night in May when he received a call from his desperate nephew asking for money for his Covid treatment. The nephew had been admitted to a private hospital with his wife and four other family members with Covid complications but had used up all of his savings.
“I was shocked by the request as this was a young man who was doing well in life otherwise. But the high hospital bills and the black marketing just exhausted all of his savings within days. After all, six family members were on life support,” said Goel.
Pfizer has been accused of holding Brazil “to ransom” over demands to shield itself from possible vaccine side-effect lawsuits in its contract to supply the country with 100m Covid jabs.
In its $1bn (£700m) deal with Pfizer Export BV, signed in March, despite its prior complaints, the Brazilian government agreed that “a liability waiver be signed for any possible side-effects of the vaccine, exempting Pfizer from any civil liability for serious side-effects arising from the use of the vaccine, indefinitely”.
The US diseases expert has been spoofed by Brad Pitt and lauded as the ‘sexiest man alive’. Now the pop culture phenomenon is the focus of a documentary
Beer and bobbleheads. Candles, colouring books, cupcakes and cushions. Dolls, doughnuts, hoodies, mugs and socks. T-shirts and yard signs that declare “Dr Fauci is my hero” and “In Fauci we trust”.
Anthony Fauci, an 80-year-old scientist, doctor and public servant, has become an unlikely cult hero for millions of people during the Covid pandemic.
Low-grade ventilation system at indoor carnival in Gangelt leading factor in outbreak among partygoers
Airborne viruses recycled through a low-grade ventilation system likely created Germany’s first super-spreader event of the Covid-19 pandemic, a CSI-style analysis of a carnival celebration has found.
The event at the town hall of Gangelt, a municipality on the border with the Netherlands, was labelled “Germany’s Wuhan” after it was found to be the driver of a major outbreak in the western state of North-Rhine Westphalia last year.
It might be repetitive to say, but I’ll take the good news anywhere. With that in mind, Western Australia and the Northern Territory have recorded zero new cases today. South Australia recorded one case in hotel quarantine, and zero locally acquired cases.