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

The world passed the “tragic milestone” of four million recorded Covid-19 fatalities on Wednesday, the World Health Organization said, adding that the pandemic’s true toll was probably higher.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced the landmark had been reached, more than 18 months since the outbreak emerged in China in December 2019.

“The world is at a perilous point in this pandemic. We have just passed the tragic milestone of four million recorded Covid-19 deaths, which likely underestimates the overall toll,” Tedros told a press conference at WHO headquarters in Geneva.

The UN health agency’s director-general said some countries with high vaccination coverage were now “relaxing as though the pandemic is already over”, dropping public health measures and planning to roll out booster shots.

“The world is at a perilous point in this pandemic

‘Shocking inequity’ in vaccine access

But he said that far too many countries all over the world were seeing sharp spikes in cases and hospitalisation, due to fast-moving virus variants and a “shocking inequity” in global access to vaccines.

“This is leading to an acute shortage of oxygen, treatments and driving a wave of death in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America,” Tedros said.

“Vaccine nationalism, where a handful of nations have taken the lion’s share, is morally indefensible

“At this stage in the pandemic, the fact that millions of health and care workers have still not been vaccinated is abhorrent.”

Tedros said variants were currently outpacing vaccines due to the inequitable distribution of available doses, which he said was also threatening the global economic recovery from the Covid-19 crisis.

“From a moral, epidemiological or economic point view, now is the time for the world to come together to tackle this pandemic collectively.”

(AFP)

A measles outbreak has killed four people in Cameroon, according to a report on Tuesday by the expanded immunization program of the country’s Ministry of Public Health.

About 200 people are infected with the disease, according to the ministry. Seven out of the 10 regions of the Central African nation have been affected by the outbreak.

“Seventy-eight percent of victims are aged between nine months and nine years,” the report said, stating that the East region, as well as the Center region where the capital Yaounde is located, have the highest number of suspected cases.

Authorities have appealed to parents to vaccinate their children against the disease.

In 2019, the government organized a national vaccination campaign to stop an outbreak of the disease after more than 3,000 suspected cases were reported and 17 people died.

Source: Xinhuanet

University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing professor Edwin Aroke, Ph.D., has been elected president of the Association of Cameroonian Nurse Anesthetists in America and will serve a two-year term from 2021-2023.

As president, Aroke, along with other members of the ACNAA, will improve training for nurse anesthetists in Cameroon, develop workshops for education and create a sustainable revenue source to support ACNAA’s efforts. He will continue to donate lightly used equipment when possible and plans to complete a robust benchmarking study of the state of anesthesia care in Cameroon.

“As individuals who still have family in Cameroon and who have lived there, we bring more than expert knowledge to the table,” Aroke said. “It makes a difference to have providers who really understand the politics of the area and the culture and challenges of the people. Being able to relate to each other matters.”

Aroke is an award-winning educator, CRNA and researcher for pain disparities among minorities in the United States. He was recently named the John F. Garde Researcher of the Year by the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists Foundation. He hopes to use his knowledge and research during his ACNAA appointment to positively impact people’s lives in the United States and internationally.

The tie to his home country is strong, Aroke says, and for members in ACNAA, there is a

passion for improving anesthesia care in Cameroon. The gap in health care provider knowledge is a major issue and can lead to increased death rates for conditions that are easily treatable in the United States.

“Most of us entered nurse anesthesia to make a difference,” he said. “You get tired of hearing that someone had a hernia or appendicitis, went to the hospital, and died. If we come together and share our ideas and experience, we can be part of the solution instead of just sitting on the sidelines and criticizing.”

Source: UAB News

South Africa will host the continent’s first Covid-19 vaccine production facility, as President Cyril Ramaphosa said Monday Africa now understood that doses would “never come” from elsewhere in time to save lives.

Ramaphosa joined the World Health Organization (WHO) and French President Emmanuel Macron in announcing the new hub for Messenger RNA coronavirus vaccine technology.

But as the project will take time to get off the ground, no vaccines are expected from it until next year.

At tech transfer hubs, the technology is established at industrial scale, while interested manufacturers can receive training and any necessary licences to the technology.

“The ability to manufacture vaccines, medicines and other health-related commodities will help to put Africa on a path to self-determination,” Ramaphosa told a WHO virtual press conference via video-link.

“It’s been shown now that we just cannot continue to rely on vaccines that are made outside of Africa because they never come. They never arrive on time and people continue to die.”

Hub seen as combating inequality

The hub is seen by the Geneva-based WHO as a way to combat the vast inequality in access to vaccines between the world’s wealthiest and poorest nations.

WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said it could take nine to 12 months before Covid-19 vaccines could be produced in South Africa using tested and approved processes.

Under the tech transfer hub system, the WHO and its partners bring in the production know-how, quality control and necessary licences to enable a rapid roll-out.

At the South African hub, the bio-pharmaceutical company Biovac will act as developer; the Afrigen biotechnology firm will be the manufacturer; and a consortium of universities will provide the scientific know-how.

Messenger RNA genetic technology — as used in the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus jabs — trains the body to reproduce spike proteins similar to those found on the coronavirus. When exposed to the real virus later, the body recognises the spike proteins and is able to fight them off.

The WHO said it would “continue its assessment of potential mRNA technology donors and will launch subsequent calls for other technologies, such as viral vectors and proteins, in coming months”.

Kate Stegeman of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said that “Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech must immediately share their mRNA technology with the hub so that many more mRNA vaccines can be produced independently by manufacturers in South Africa and more broadly on the African continent”.

‘Great day for Africa’

During a visit to South Africa last month, Macron said he was pushing for the faster transfer of technology to allow poorer countries to start manufacturing their own Covid-19 jabs.

It was a “great day for Africa,” said Macron.

“Each continent must be able to develop and produce its own vaccines, its own medicines,” he added.

“Action for global public goods is the fight that this century must uphold and the fight that cannot wait.”

South Africa accounts for more than 35 percent of Africa’s total recorded Covid-19 cases, and is currently suffering a third wave of infections.

South Africa, along with India, has been pushing for a temporary waiver of vaccines’ intellectual property rights in order to speed up production.

More than 2.6 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been injected in at least 216 territories around the world, according to an AFP count.

In the highest-income countries, accounting for 16 percent of the global population, 74 doses have been injected per 100 inhabitants.

Source: AFP