Africa wants to buy Covid-19 vaccines, rather than keep waiting for donor-funded doses to arrive, the African Union said Tuesday, imploring producers to give the continent a fair shot at market access.

The AU also urged manufacturing nations to lift export bans so the continent can begin to address for itself the glaring inequity in access to coronavirus jabs, as wealthy nations hog available doses.

“Vaccine sharing is good. But we shouldn’t have to be relying on vaccine sharing,” Strive Masiyiwa, the AU’s Covid-19 special envoy, told a press conference at the World Health Organization in Geneva.

“We want to buy from those same manufacturers.”

The major Covid-19 vaccine producers have a moral responsibility to ensure equitable access to end the pandemic, he said, but “those manufacturers know very well that they never gave us proper access”.

Just nine vaccine doses have been administered per 100 people in Africa, according to an AFP calculation.

That figure stands at 118 doses per 100 people in the United States and Canada; 104 in Europe; 85 in Asia; 84 in Latin America and the Caribbean; 69 in Oceania and 54 in the Middle East.

African nations “have been left behind by the rest of the world”, said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The UN health agency chief spelled out the danger of leaving Africa so poorly covered by vaccines.

“This doesn’t only hurt the people of Africa, it hurts all of us,” he said.

“The longer vaccine inequity persists, the more the virus will keep circulating and changing, the longer the social and economic disruption will continue, and the higher the chances that more variants will emerge that render vaccines less effective.”

– ‘Miracle’ –

John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told the press conference that just under 3.5 percent of the eligible African population has been fully vaccinated.

The WHO wants 40 percent fully immunised in every country by the end of the year and 70 percent of the world’s population by mid-2022.

It has called for countries to hold off administering extra booster shots until the end of December to allow more people to get a first dose instead.

The AU has set up the African COVID-19 Vaccine Acquisition Task Team, or AVAT, to purchase jabs for member states in a scheme to run alongside the donor-funded global Covax facility.

Masiyiwa said Africa was also setting up its own manufacturing capabilities and called for a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights on the vaccines, as a common good.

He said: “It was a great miracle to have these vaccines. Now let this miracle be available to all mankind.”

Source: AFP

More than 200,000 people have died from Covid-19 in Africa since the start of the pandemic, according to an AFP tally compiled from official records as of 1700 GMT.

A total of 200,254 fatalities have been registered in Africa, home to more than 1.3 billion people, since the virus emerged in China in December 2019.

After several deadly months, including some 27,000 deaths in July and 26,000 in August, the pandemic appears to be easing on the continent, with current daily figures of 617 compared to up to 990 in late July, a record for the region.

The figures are based on tolls communicated daily day by health authorities in each country or by the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) and include the countries of North Africa.

The WHO has said that if excess deaths directly or indirectly linked to Covid are taken into account, the real toll could be double or triple.

The total number of infections is also likely to be an under-estimate, given insufficient testing capacity in Africa.

“It’s probably a lot higher than that,” said researcher Glenda Davidson of South Africa’s Cape Peninsula University of Technology. “Testing resources are very low on the continent.”

Death registration processes were often delayed and inaccurate, she added.

The current fall in the continent’s tally is a result of sharp drops in the hardest-hit countries.

South Africa has recorded 83,899 deaths so far. But last week’s daily average of 7,400 new cases and 234 deaths is significantly lower than in late July, when the daily average was up to 20,000 new cases and 420 deaths.

– Vaccination key –

The decrease has been even more striking in Tunisia, which has recorded a daily average of 1,680 cases and 64 deaths: 41 and 39 percent down on the previous week.

The figures are well below those of July, which were described by the government as “catastrophic”, with up to 7,900 cases and 207 deaths daily.

Tunisia’s summer was also marked by a sharp acceleration in its vaccination drive, with nearly 37 percent of the population having received at least one dose, compared to just 11 percent on July 1.

Africa has seen the lowest vaccination rate to date of all the continents, with only eight jabs administered per 100 inhabitants administered, according to an AFP count, compared with 102 in Europe and 116 in the United States and Canada.

According to the WHO, around three percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population are fully vaccinated. By comparison, 52 percent of people are fully vaccinated in the United States of America and 57 percent in the European Union.

“The inequity is deeply disturbing. Just two percent of the over five billion doses given globally have been administered in Africa,” WHO Africa chief Dr Matshidiso Moeti said last week.

However, inoculation in South Africa has been picking up after a rocky start.

“The vaccine has been our weapon,” said South African public health practitioner Shakira Choonara.

“It is contributing to certain changes in trends we are beginning to see.”

Source: AFP

The World Health Organization has said it is monitoring a new coronavirus variant known as “Mu”, which was first identified in Colombia in January 2021.

Mu, known scientifically as B.1.621, has been classified as a “variant of interest”, the global health body said Tuesday in its weekly pandemic bulletin.

The WHO said the variant has mutations that indicate a risk of resistance to vaccines and stressed that further studies were needed to better understand it.

“The Mu variant has a constellation of mutations that indicate potential properties of immune escape,” the bulletin said.

There is widespread concern over the emergence of new virus mutations as infection rates are ticking up globally again, with the highly transmissible Delta variant taking hold – especially among the unvaccinated – and in regions where anti-virus measures have been relaxed.

All viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 that causes Covid-19, mutate over time and most mutations have little or no effect on the properties of the virus.

But certain mutations can impact the properties of a virus and influence how easily it spreads, the severity of the disease it causes, and its resistance to vaccines, drugs and other countermeasures.

The WHO currently identifies four Covid-19 variants of concern, including Alpha, which is present in 193 countries, and Delta, present in 170 countries.

Five variants, including Mu, are to be monitored.

After being detected in Colombia, Mu has since been reported in other South American countries and in Europe.

The WHO said its global prevalence has declined to below 0.1 percent among sequenced cases. In Colombia, however, it is at 39 percent.

(AFP)

As the Delta variant continues its global surge, experts are questioning whether the long-held goal of achieving herd immunity from Covid-19 through vaccination is still viable.

Herd immunity is achieved when a certain threshold of the global population has either been inoculated against a pathogen or has recovered from infection.

But whether or not it is achievable with Covid-19, with the regular emergence of more infectious strains, is up for debate.

“If the question is ‘will vaccination alone allow us to dampen and control the pandemic?’ the answer is: no,” epidemiologist Mircea Sofonea told AFP.

He said herd immunity hinged on two basic factors.

“That’s the intrinsic infectiousness of the virus and the efficacy of vaccines to protect against infection. And at the moment, that efficacy isn’t there.”

Delta has shown to be roughly 60 percent more transmissible than the Alpha variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and up to twice as infectious as the original strain that emerged in late 2019.

The more effective the virus becomes at infecting people, the higher the herd immunity threshold becomes.

“Theoretically, it’s a very simple calculation to make,” said epidemiologist Antoine Flahault.

For the original virus, which had a reproduction rate between zero and three — meaning each infected person infects up to three others — herd immunity could have been achieved with around 66 percent of people immunised, Flahault told AFP.

“But if the reproduction rate is eight, as with Delta, that puts us closer to 90 percent,” he said.

Were vaccines 100 percent effective at stopping Delta infections, that 90 percent could conceivably be possible. Unfortunately, they aren’t.

– Waning immunity? –

According to data published this week by US authorities, the efficacy of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines at preventing infection has fallen from 91 percent to 66 percent since Delta became the dominant variant.

And studies have shown that the vaccine efficacy against infection with Delta falls over time — one of the reasons why several countries are now readying for an autumn third shot, or “booster”, vaccination campaign.

With all this taken into account, absent other health measures such as mask-wearing or social distancing, Sofonea said it would take more than 100 percent of people to be vaccinated in order to guarantee transmissions end — an obvious impossibility.

“The Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated and that does mean that anyone who’s still unvaccinated, at some point, will meet the virus,” Andrew Pollard, director of Britain’s Oxford Vaccine Group, told lawmakers this month.

– ‘Mythical’ –

But even if, as Pollard termed it, the “mythical” aim of herd immunity is no longer in play, experts stressed that getting vaccinated remained paramount.

As with vaccines against other, now-endemic diseases such as measles and influenza, the Covid vaccines offer excellent protection against severe illness.

“What scientists are recommending is to get the maximum number of people protected” through vaccination, said Flahault.

Eventually, of course, all pandemics end.

Sofonea said it would still be possible that Covid would become another endemic disease over time, “just not with vaccines alone”.

He envisioned a near future where “masks and social distancing continue in certain regions” in order to limit transmission and, ultimately, severe illness.

“During the AIDS pandemic, when scientists said we needed to wear condoms, lots of people said: ‘OK, we’ll do it for a while’,” said Flahault.

“And in the end they kept on using them. It could well be that we will continue using masks in enclosed spaces and on transport for quite some time.”

Source: AFP

Pope Francis said getting the coronavirus vaccine was “an act of love” Wednesday, as the head of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics joined a campaign to boost confidence in Covid-19 jabs.

“Thanks to God and to the work of many, we now have vaccines to protect us from COVID-19,” Francis said in a message for the US-based “It’s Up to You” initiative.

“They grant us the hope of ending the pandemic, but only if they are available to all and if we work together,” he said in the video, aimed at communities disproportionately affected by the virus in North, Central and South America.

“Being vaccinated… is an act of love,” the 84-year old said.

“And contributing to ensure the majority of people are vaccinated is an act of love. Love for oneself, love for one’s family and friends, love for all people“.

Coronavirus has killed at least 4,370,427 people since the outbreak emerged in China in December 2019, according to an AFP compilation of official data.

Despite mass vaccine campaigns, conspiracy theories and distrust of governments or pharmaceuticals are fuelling transmission of the virus.

In the US, the worst-affected country in terms of Covid-19 deaths, the vast majority of new fatalities and serious cases are among the unvaccinated.

Francis was joined by cardinals and archbishops from Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico and Peru for the campaign by the Ad Council and COVID Collaborative and the Vatican’s Dicastery for Integral Human Development.

(AFP)

Mushrooming outbreaks of the highly contagious Delta variant prompted China and Australia to impose stricter Covid-19 restrictions on Saturday as the WHO urged the world to quickly contain the mutation before it turns into something deadlier and draws out the pandemic.

China’s most serious surge of coronavirus infections in months spread to two more areas Saturday — Fujian province and the sprawling megacity of Chongqing.

More than 200 cases have been linked to a Delta cluster in Nanjing city where nine cleaners at an international airport tested positive, with the outbreak spanning Beijing, Chongqing and five provinces as of Saturday.

The nation where the disease first emerged has rushed to prevent the highly transmissible strain from taking root by putting more than one million people under lockdown and reinstituting mass testing campaigns.

Worldwide, coronavirus infections are once again on the upswing, with the World Health Organization announcing an 80 percent average increase over the past four weeks in five of the health agency’s six regions, a jump largely fuelled by the Delta variant.

“Delta is a warning: it’s a warning that the virus is evolving but it is also a call to action that we need to move now before more dangerous variants emerge,” the WHO’s emergencies director Michael Ryan told a press conference.

He stressed that the “game plan” still works, namely physical distancing, wearing masks, hand hygiene and vaccination.

But both high- and low-income countries are struggling to gain the upper hand against Delta, with the vastly unequal sprint for shots leaving plenty of room for variants to wreak havoc and further evolve.

In Australia, where only about 14 percent of the population is jabbed, the third-largest city of Brisbane and other parts of Queensland state were to enter a snap Covid-19 lockdown Saturday as a cluster of the Delta variant bubbled into six new cases.

“The only way to beat the Delta strain is to move quickly, to be fast and to be strong,” Queensland’s Deputy Premier Steven Miles said while informing millions they will be under three days of strict stay-at-home orders.

‘The war has changed’

The race for vaccines to triumph over variants appeared to suffer a blow as the US Centers for Disease Control released an analysis that found fully immunised people with so-called breakthrough infections of the Delta variant can spread the disease as easily as unvaccinated people.

While the jabs remain effective against severe disease and death, the US government agency said in a leaked internal CDC document “the war has changed” as a result of Delta.

An analysis of a superspreading event in the northeastern state of Massachusetts found three-quarters of the people sickened were vaccinated, according to a report the CDC published Friday.

The outbreak related to July 4 festivities, with the latest number of people infected swelling to 900, according to local reports. The findings were used to justify a return to masks for vaccinated people in high-risk areas.

“As a vaccinated person, if you have one of these breakthrough infections, you may have mild symptoms, you may have no symptoms, but based on what we’re seeing here you could be contagious to other people,” Celine Gounder, an infectious diseases physician and professor at New York University, told AFP.

According to the leaked CDC document, a review of findings from other countries showed that while the original SARS-CoV-2 was as contagious as the common cold, each person with Delta infects on average eight others, making it as transmissible as chickenpox but still less than measles.

Reports from Canada, Scotland and Singapore suggest Delta infections may also be more severe, resulting in more hospitalisations.

Asked if Americans should expect new recommendations from health authorities or new restrictive measures, US President Joe Biden responded, “in all probability,” before leaving the White House by helicopter for the weekend.

He did not specify what steps could be taken.

Source: AFP

Hundreds of junior doctors at state-run Malaysian hospitals staged walkouts Monday demanding better conditions as the country faces its worst coronavirus outbreak yet.

Dressed in black and holding signs with slogans including “equal pay, equal rights, equal opportunity” and “we are your future specialists”, they protested at medical facilities nationwide.

The doctors are on contracts for a set period and say their treatment is worse than that of permanent government staff, even as they have found themselves on the frontline of the fight against Covid-19.

They complain of a lack of job security, poor benefits and that very few are eventually offered permanent positions.

We want “equal rights, to be a permanent doctor,” said a medic at a government hospital that treats virus patients outside Kuala Lumpur.

“We would definitely not be here if we were treated fairly… we should be appreciated for what we do,” the doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told reporters.

The medic was among dozens who took part in the action at the hospital, which lasted around half an hour.

Local media reported that several hundred participated across the country, but some doctors complained they were threatened by police and senior hospital staff in a bid to halt the protests.

Those involved said senior doctors took over their duties before they walked out, to ensure that patient care was not jeopardised.

Malaysia is currently battling its most serious outbreak, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant. Officials have reported over one million cases and about 8,000 deaths.

There are over 23,000 doctors on these contracts in Malaysia — about 45 percent of the total medical doctors in the public healthcare system, according to official estimates.

Last week, the government said it would extend junior doctors’ contracts for up to four years in a bid to forestall the protests.

But they stopped short of offering permanent jobs, and the organisers of Monday’s walkout criticised the move as “short-sighted”.

AFP

At least 800 people in Uganda were given fake coronavirus vaccines — some injected with water — in a scam that involved “unscrupulous” doctors and health workers, government officials said Wednesday.

The counterfeit jabs were administered over May and June during a deadly surge of the coronavirus in the East African nation, when new infections soared to record highs of about 1,700 cases per day.

The fraudsters targeted people looking to pay for immunisation, including corporate employees, at a time when vaccines were in short supply, said Dr Warren Naamara, the director of a health services monitoring unit under the presidency.

“Some unscrupulous individuals with intentions of making money, duped members of the public into a fake Covid-19 vaccine exercise,” Dr Naamara told AFP.

“We have arrested two medical workers in the scam, and one medical doctor is on the run.”

He said those conned into getting a fake vaccine — around 800 people — should not be alarmed as tests indicated the vials contained nothing dangerous.

“Some had water in them,” he added.

The scammers charged recipients between 80,000 and 500,000 Ugandan shillings (around $25-$120 / 20-100 euros) for a fake shot, officials said.

The health ministry said Wednesday that the government was providing free and approved Covid-19 jabs at designated vaccination sites.

On June 18, as coronavirus cases and deaths in Uganda surged to record highs, President Yoweri Museveni announced a freeze on all public and private transport for 42 days, and imposed a strict dusk-to-dawn curfew to try and drive numbers down.

The veteran president warned that hospitals were full and not coping with the outbreak.

Since then, infection numbers have dipped, with 252 cases reported on Wednesday.

Uganda has overall recorded 91,162 infections, of which 2,425 have been fatal, since the pandemic began, according to the health ministry’s latest tally Wednesday.

Source: AFP

The World Health Organization (WHO) warned Thursday that “more dangerous” variants of Covid-19 could tear across the world as global infections soared to half a million daily, largely driven by the virulent Delta strain.

An AFP tally of official sources found that after an initial dip, cases have been rising again worldwide since the end of June, topping 540,000 on Tuesday and again on Wednesday.

“The pandemic is nowhere near finished,” the WHO’s emergency committee said in a statement.

It highlighted “the strong likelihood for the emergence and global spread of new and possibly more dangerous variants of concern that may be even more challenging to control”.

The virus has reappeared in places long believed to have dodged the worst of the pandemic, with Australia — lauded for its successful “Covid zero” strategy — facing a resurgence that has grown to almost 1,000 cases nationwide in a month.

About 12 million Australians went under stay-at-home orders in the country’s second biggest city Melbourne, joining residents in Sydney.

State premier Dan Andrews said he took the decision to return the city — and surrounding Victoria — to its fifth lockdown “with a heavy heart”.

“Nothing about this virus is fair,” he said.

– Sports events headache –

The coronavirus continues to wreak havoc from Asia to Africa, killing more than four million people since it first emerged in China in December 2019.

In Tokyo — now just over a week away from the opening ceremony of the virus-postponed Olympics — local authorities recorded 1,308 new cases, the highest number since January.

Organisers confirmed that an athlete in Japan and five Olympic workers, mostly contractors, had tested positive for Covid-19.

This came after eight staff at a hotel hosting Brazil’s Olympic judo team tested positive, and a staff member from Russia’s rugby sevens team was hospitalised after a positive test.

Covid-19 is posing a unique challenge for organisers of sports events.

Three members of the McLaren Formula One team tested positive, including chief executive officer Zak Brown, the British outfit announced Thursday, ahead of the British GP in Silverstone.

And India wicketkeeper-batsman Rishabh Pant tested positive as the squad prepared for a Test series in England.

– Africa deaths surge –

Countries where healthcare infrastructure — and vaccine rollout capabilities — remain limited are under particular pressure, with Rwanda set to put the capital Kigali and eight other districts under lockdown from Saturday.

The East African nation had previously avoided the worst of the pandemic by enforcing some of the strictest containment measures on the continent.

But hospitals have been overwhelmed in recent weeks, with a critical shortage of beds and medicines.

Overall, coronavirus-linked deaths in Africa surged by 43 percent in the space of week, driven by a lack of intensive-care beds and oxygen, the WHO said Thursday.

– Covid-origin probe –

In Asia, Indonesia Thursday posted a record 56,757 daily infections as the world’s fourth-most populous nation overtook India as the region’s Covid-19 epicentre.

The China-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank said it was loaning the Southeast Asian nation $500 million to boost its response.

Vaccine doses are flowing into the hard-hit country by the millions, including from Japan and the United States, while Jakarta on Thursday approved the Pfizer/BioNTech jab for emergency use.

Also facing chronic shortages of medical supplies is Myanmar, where residents across the coup-hit country’s biggest city of Yangon defied a military curfew in a desperate search for oxygen to keep their loved ones with Covid breathing.

Residents told AFP they had slipped out in the dead of night to secure spots in lines to refill oxygen cylinders — dismissing claims from the country’s military rulers that there is more than enough to go around.

As the virus shows no sign of easing, the WHO is working towards the second phase of an investigation into where Covid-19 originated, and urged China on Thursday to better cooperate.

Source:  AFP

Cameroonian president Paul Biya has signed the treaty for the establishment of the African Medicines Agency (AMA), a specialized organ of the African Union (AU), state broadcaster CRTV reported on Sunday.

The treaty for the establishment of the AMA was adopted by the AU in February 2019. Last week, Cameroon Senate approved a bill that authorized the country’s president to ratify the treaty.

The AMA should serve as the continental body that will govern the regulation of medicines and medical products on the African continent. It will regulate the access to safe, effective, good quality and affordable essential medicines and health technologies.

Source: Xinhuanet