The United States has doubled its investment — to nearly $1 billion — to expedite development of a potential COVID-19 vaccine by American firm Moderna, which on Monday begins the decisive final phase of clinical trials.

The government now plans to spend up to $472 million on top of the previously announced $483 million, the Moderna biotechnology company announced Sunday.

Moderna said the added investment was justified by its decision, in conjunction with the government, to “significantly” expand a Phase Three clinical trial of a candidate vaccine to include 30,000 participants.

In a small, initial trial, Moderna’s experimental vaccine produced coronavirus antibodies — which should help fend off the disease — in the bodies of all 45 participants.

In the expanded trial starting Monday, half the 30,000 participants will receive a 100-microgram dose of the vaccine, while the rest will be given a placebo.

The United States has suffered more than 146,000 coronavirus deaths, leading the world in that grim category, even as the number of new cases has continued to surge.

It has announced massive investments in a huge effort to expedite vaccine development and get millions of Americans vaccinated by early next year.

On Wednesday, the American-German BioNTech/Pfizer pharmaceutical alliance announced that the US government had committed $1.95 billion to procure 100 million doses of its eventual vaccine.

With laboratories around the world in a furious race to develop a first effective vaccine, Moderna seems to hold the lead as it enters a final round of clinical trials — a decisive step in determining whether a vaccine is both effective and safe.

Moderna, which has been working with US health authorities, said it expects to be able to produce 500 million doses a year — and potentially up to 1 billion — starting in 2021.

Chinese biotech firm Sinovac said July 6 that it, too, would begin a Phase Three clinical trial “this month,” in collaboration with Brazil’s Butantan biologic research center.

Also reporting encouraging early results have been a British project developed by Oxford University in partnership with the multinational AstraZenica laboratory, and a Chinese project, led by researchers from agencies including the Academy of Military Medical Sciences.

That effort is being financed by the CanSino biotechnology group, which is listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

In all, nearly 200 candidate vaccines are in development, including 23 now in the clinical phase, being tested on humans.

Source: AFP

Cameroon’s medical authorities say over 200,000 children have not received routine vaccinations on schedule since March, when the country had its first case of COVID-19.  Parents are refusing to take their kids to hospitals because they fear they may be infected with the virus, which has spread to nearly 17,000 people and caused nearly 400 deaths.  Doctors are warning that without the vaccinations, children in Cameroon risk preventable diseases such as diphtheria, the measles, and tetanus.

A 4-month-old baby cries as she receives her second polio vaccine at the Chantal Biya Foundation Hospital in Cameroon’s capital Yaounde.

Elizabeth Mbungong, 27, says she is getting her baby’s booster shot nearly three months late because she was scared of going to the hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I gave birth in the month of March and the first vaccine was given to the baby against Tetanus. They gave me another rendezvous [appointment] in the month of April. I did not respect [the appointment] because I was afraid of the coronavirus,” she said.

Mbungong said after she watched a TV program on the dangers of not vaccinating children, she decided that going to the hospital was worth the risk.

Pediatrician Clemence Vougmo says many parents are letting fear of the virus prevent them from getting their children vaccinated.

She says Chantal Biya Foundation Hospital should have had 2,300 children for routine vaccinations since March. But they have seen only about half the children.

Cameroon’s medical officials say the problem has been widespread during the pandemic.

Cameroon’s National Expanded Program for Immunization reports across the country at least 200,000 children have not received their vaccinations as scheduled.

Deputy permanent secretary of the program Shalom Tchokfe says they have deployed staff to look for the children.

Speaking via telephone from Douala, a coastal city and the largest in Cameroon, he said the situation is especially troubling in the capital Yaounde, the economic hub Douala, and the western town of Bafoussam. He said 110,000 children in those cities have not received their routine vaccines since the month of March, when Cameroon reported its first case of COVID-19. Teams can meet the children in their houses, said Tchokfe. Parents and health workers are safe during routine vaccinations at hospitals, he said, as long as they wear their masks and wash their hands regularly.

Tchokfe notes that vaccinations dramatically reduce child mortality and urges all parents to get their infants vaccinated on schedule.

The United Nations warned this month of an alarming decline in the number of children getting vaccinated for preventable diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, and the measles.

According to a study published by the Lancet Global Health Journal this month, continuing with routine immunizations may lead to 8,300 additional deaths in Africa from COVID-19.

But the study said suspending vaccinations could lead to a further 702,000 African children dying from preventable diseases.

Source: VOA

Countries from the U.S. to South Africa to India were struggling to hold down rising rates of the coronavirus, as global deaths from COVID-19 surged past 600,000 in a sign of how far off the world remains from a return to normalcy.

While the U.S. leads global infections, South Africa now ranks as the fifth worst-hit country in the pandemic with 350,879 cases — roughly half of all those confirmed on the African continent. Its struggles are a sign of trouble to come for nations with even fewer health care resources.

India on Sunday reported a 24-hour record surge of 38,902 new cases, taking the country’s total to 1,077,618. Elsewhere in Asia, China confirmed 13 new cases in the northwestern city of Urumqi while South Korea reported less than 40 additional cases for a second straight day.

The Urumqi outbreak is the latest to pop up since China largely contained the domestic spread of the virus in March. At least 30 people have been infected and authorities are conducting universal testing in communities where cases were discovered, later to be expanded to other parts of the city and major businesses.

South Korean authorities are also struggling to suppress an uptick in local infections, with 34 additional cases, 21 of them domestic and 13 from overseas, raising the country’s total to 13,745 with 295 deaths.

Both countries are mandating testing and enforcing two-week quarantines on all overseas arrivals.

After a one-day respite, COVID-19 cases in the Australian state of Victoria rose again, prompting a move to make masks mandatory in metropolitan Melbourne and the nearby shire of Mitchell. Health officials on Sunday recorded 363 new cases in the past 24 hours. Two men and a woman in their 90s died, taking the national death toll from COVID-19 to 122.

‘Sitting ducks’

The World Health Organization on Saturday again reported a single-day record of new infections with 259,848.

South Africa now trails the U.S., Brazil, India — all far more populous countries — in the number of infections, surpassing Peru, after health authorities announced 13,285 new cases.

South Africa’s new coronavirus epicenter, Gauteng province, hosts the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria and one-quarter of the country’s population of 57 million, with many poor people living in crowded conditions in the middle of a frosty Southern Hemisphere winter.

“The simple fact is that many South Africans are sitting ducks because they cannot comply with World Health Organization protocols on improved hygiene and social distancing,” the foundation of former South African archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu and his wife, Leah, warned in a statement.

Global COVID-19 deaths have hit 601,549, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The United States tops the list with 140,119 deaths, followed by 78,772 in Brazil and 45,358 in the United Kingdom and 38,888 in Mexico, where a surge in cases has frustrated plans to reopen the economy.

The number of confirmed infections worldwide has passed 14.2 million, out of which 3.7 million are in the United States. There are over 2 million in Brazil and more than 1 million in India. Experts believe the true numbers around the world are higher because of testing shortages and data collection issues in some nations.

‘Never seen anything like this’

Infections are soaring in U.S. states like Florida, Texas, Arizona, fueled by the haphazard lifting of lockdowns and the resistance of some Americans to wearing masks.

Teams of military medics have been deployed in Texas and California to help hospitals deal with a deluge of patients who are flooding emergency rooms in parts of the U.S. Some patients are being moved into hallways to make room for most seriously ill and nurses are working extra shifts to keep up with the surge.

Patients struggling to breathe are being placed on ventilators in emergency wards since intensive care units are full, officials say.

Patients are waiting “hours and hours” to get admitted, said Dr. Alison Haddock of the Baylor College of Medicine in the state of Texas, which reported a new daily record for virus deaths Friday and more than 10,000 confirmed cases for the fourth consecutive day. More than 80 infants have tested positive for the virus in the state.

“I’ve never seen anything like this COVID surge,” said Haddock, who has worked in emergency rooms since 2007. “We’re doing our best, but we’re not an ICU.”

The surge of infections means that millions of American children are unlikely to return to classrooms full time in the fall.

Local lockdowns in Spain, India

Police in Barcelona are limiting access to some of the city’s beaches because sunbathers are ignoring regulations amid a resurgence of the coronavirus. Authorities in Amsterdam are urging people not to visit the city’s famous red light district and have closed off some of the historic district’s narrow streets because they are too busy.

Local governments in India continued to reimpose focused lockdowns in several parts of the country following a surge in cases. And in Iran, the president made the startling announcement that as many as 25 million Iranians could have been infected, the state-run IRNA news agency reported. Hassan Rouhani cited a new Health Ministry study that has not been made public. Iran has the Middle East’s worst outbreak with more than 270,000 confirmed cases.

In Bangladesh, confirmed cases surpassed 200,000 but experts say the number is much higher as the country lacks adequate labs for testing. Most people in rural areas have stopped wearing masks and are thronging shopping centers ahead of the Islamic festival Eid al-Adha this month.

Scientists, meanwhile, poured cold water on British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s hope that the country may return to normal by Christmas, saying that, without a vaccine, normal life was a long way off.

Source: AP

US biotech firm Moderna said Tuesday it would enter the final stage of human trials for its Covid-19 vaccine on July 27, to test how well it protects people in the real world.

The announcement came as the results from an earlier trial intended to prove the vaccine was safe and triggered antibody production were published.

The upcoming Phase 3 trial will recruit 30,000 participants in the US, with half to receive the vaccine at 100 microgram dose levels, and the other half to receive a placebo.

Researchers will then track them over two years to determine whether they are protected against infection by the virus. Or, if they do get infected, whether the vaccine prevents symptoms from developing.

If they do get symptoms, the vaccine can still be considered a success if it stops severe cases of Covid-19.

The study should run until October 27, 2022, but preliminary results should be available long before.

The announcement came shortly after the New England Journal of Medicine published results from the first stage of Moderna’s vaccine trial, which showed the first 45 participants all developed antibodies to the virus.

Moderna is considered to be in a leading position in the global race to find a vaccine against the coronavirus, which has infected more than 13.2 million people and killed 570,000.

But scientists caution that the first vaccines to come to market may not be the most effective or safest.

Encouraging results

Moderna had previously published “interim results” from the first stages of its trial, called Phase 1 in May.

The early results were called “encouraging” by Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is co-developing the vaccine.

But some in the scientific community said they would reserve judgment until they saw the full results in peer-reviewed form.

According to the paper, 45 participants were split into three groups to test doses of 25 micrograms, 100 micrograms and 250 micrograms.

They were given a second dose of the same amount 28 days later.

After the first round, antibody levels were found to be higher with higher doses.

Following the second round, participants had higher levels of antibodies than most patients who have had Covid-19 and gone on to generate their own antibodies.

More than half the participants experienced mild or moderate side effects, which is considered normal.

The side effects included fatigue, chills, headache, body ache and pain at the injection site.

Three participants did not receive their second dose.

They included one who developed a skin rash on both legs, and two who missed their window because they had COVID-19 symptoms, but their tests later returned negative.

Amesh Adalja, an infectious diseases specialist at Johns Hopkins University, said it was encouraging that the participants developed high levels of an advanced class of antibodies.

He added, however: “You have to be very limited in how much you can extrapolate from a phase one clinical trial, because you want to see how this works when a person is exposed to the actual virus.”

The Moderna vaccine belongs to a new class of vaccine that uses genetic material – in the form of RNA – to encode the information needed to grow the virus’s spike protein inside the human body, in order to trigger an immune response.

The spike protein is a part of the virus that it uses to invade human cells, but by itself the protein is relatively harmless.

The advantage of this technology is that it bypasses the need to manufacture viral proteins in the lab, helping to ramp up mass production.

No vaccines based on this platform have previously received regulatory approval.

Early work using this technology backfired by making hosts more, not less, susceptible to infection, David Lo, a professor of biomedical sciences at University of California Riverside told AFP.

“One of the things we certainly want to look out for is whether there is a long term effect where the immune response… potentially develops an immunologic tolerance which would actually be detrimental to protection,” he said.

(AFP)

Health Minister, Manaouda Malachie over the weekend gave two major updates on COVID-19 combat – one on air travel regulations and the other on loss of key health professional.

The Minister said flights to Cameroon will have to ensure passengers present virus test results before boarding. “Negative COVID-19 PCR test not older than three (03) days mandatory for all boarding passengers.

“Passengers who do not comply with this measure shall be prevented from travelling with these airlines,” the Minister added. The move is in line with latest regulations being imposed by countries reopening their airspaces to international traffic.

On the loss to the medical fraternity, the state-run CRTV reported the death on Friday of Dr. Anastasie Akamba, head of a district hospital in the capital Yaounde who died from COVID-19.

The state broadcaster said she had been in respiratory distress for days before succumbing. She was also the doctor for the Under-17 national women’s football team. The football federation confirmed the death last Friday, July 10.

“Deeply touched by this other big loss that we are registering within the medical professional, I would like to express all my compassion to the bereaved families. We will continue to improve the protection of health personnel throughout this crisis,” Minister Manaouda tweeted.

Confirmed cases = 15,173

Active cases = 2,886

Recoveries = 11,928

Number of deaths = 359

John Hopkins Uni stats valid as of July 13, 2020

Source: Africa News

The new coronavirus pandemic raging around the globe will worsen if countries fail to adhere to strict healthcare precautions, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Monday.

“Let me be blunt, too many countries are headed in the wrong direction, the virus remains public enemy number one,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual briefing from the U.N. agency’s headquarters in Geneva.

“If basics are not followed, the only way this pandemic is going to go: it is going to get worse and worse and worse.”

Global infections stand at 13 million, according to a Reuters tally, with more than half a million deaths.

Tedros, whose leadership has been heavily criticised by U.S. President Donald Trump, said that of 230,000 new cases on Sunday, 80% were from 10 nations, and 50% from just two countries.

The United States and Brazil are the countries worst hit.

“There will be no return to the old normal for the foreseeable future … There is a lot to be concerned about,” Tedros added, in some of his strongest comments of recent weeks.

WHO team in quarantine before virus investigation

Tedros said the WHO had still not received formal notification of the U.S. pullout announced by Trump. The U.S. president says the WHO pandered to China, where the COVID-19 disease was first detected, at the start of the crisis.

Trump, who wore a protective face mask for the first time in public at the weekend, has himself been accused by political opponents of not taking the coronavirus seriously enough, something he denies.

A WHO advance team has gone to China to investigate the origins of the new coronavirus, first discovered in the city of Wuhan. The team’s members are in quarantine, as per standard procedure, before they begin work with Chinese scientists, WHO emergencies head Mike Ryan said.

Source: REUTERS

The Vice President of the Southern Cameroons Interim Government, Dabney Yerima has expressed deep concerns over the handling of the coronavirus pandemic in the homeland and also the spike in infections in neighboring La Republique du Cameroun calling on every Ambazonian in Ground Zero to fully adhere to health guidelines.

Speaking to some prominent Southern Cameroons medical practitioners in Europe in a zoom forum on Sunday, Dabney Yerima described the resurgence of coronavirus cases in French Cameroun and daily deaths as very disturbing and advised that movements between the two Cameroons be limited.

The exiled Southern Cameroons leader praised all Ambazonian medical personnel for their sacrifices and urged Southern Cameroonians in the diaspora to play their role in the best way so that the Federal Republic of Ambazonia can break the infection chain and win the war against French Cameroun in the short term.

Vice President Yerima concluded his address by re-echoing that the war in Southern Cameroons has entered a crucial phase. He revealed that 32,500 Southern Cameroonians have been killed, 550 Southern Cameroons villages burnt, 125,000 refugees, 1.4million IDPs and 3,000 still detained.

By Isong Asu in London

The family of a local official from the West Region of Cameroon was thrown into consternation, when their father was declared dead in a government hospital in Douala as a result of Covid 19.

According to a reliable family source, their father had complained of severe headache which they said was hypertension.

He was rushed to the said hospital, but few hours later, he was confirmed dead by government health officials who seen to be operating a money-making business out COVID-19.

As usual, the casket of COVID-19 victims are sealed and handed to the family for burial. In this case, something had to betray hospital officials who have been suspected of engaging in organ sales.

When the relations were handed the casket, some blood stains were discovered by the side of the casket which raised suspicion. The family insisted that the casket be opened, but was met with stiff resistance from the mortuary attendants.

They were warned not to open the casket and if they want they should do so in their village. This resulted in a fierce argument and the family of the deceased forcefully opened the sealed casket.

To their greatest surprise and dismay, the dead relative was not only naked inside the plastic bag, but his stomach had been slit open, and the intestines were gone.

That was when Hell broke loose as a free for all fight ensued between mortuary attendants and the deceased family.

It should be noted that the shabby and inhuman manner with which corpses claimed to be those of COVID-19 victims were being handled by hospital authorities was a call for concern.

Due to the constant fights in Cameroon hospitals, the powerless and irresponsible regime of President Paul Biya had no choice but to authorize relatives to bury their dead within 48 hours.

Who knows whether the others that have been buried before the new decree were not subjected to the same operations.

Organ sales have become so lucrative in Cameroon and many hospitals are making hay as the government fails to put in place rigorous measures that can spare the bereaved families the agony they have been going through because hospital officials want to make a quick buck.

 By Ndome Ntui in Douala

A cholera outbreak has sickened at least 983 people and killed at least 45 in Cameroon since January, health authorities said Thursday.

The cases and deaths were recorded in four of the 10 Cameroonian regions, authorities said, warning that cases could increase in the rainy season from March through September.

According to the state-run newspaper Cameroon Tribune, the Littoral Region, where the country’s commercial capital Douala is located, has reported 563 cases so far, the highest caseload among the regions, while the capital Yaounde is the least affected with just three cases.

The South Region has confirmed 344 cases over the past six months, followed by the Southwest Region with 73 cases. The statistics do not include those from the country’s northern regions, where cholera is a common occurrence as a result of floods during the rainy season.

Health officials have blamed the outbreak for difficulties to access portable water sources, non-compliance with hygiene measures and the absence of latrines especially in rural areas.

Authorities are working to launch a nationwide hygiene campaign and a mass vaccination campaign to help contain the spread of the disease.

Source: Xinhaunet

The British government has decided not to join a European Union coronavirus vaccine scheme because of concerns there could be costly delays in securing the vaccines, The Telegraph reported Thursday, citing sources.

The European Commission is expected to be notified on Friday, the report said.

UK business minister Alok Sharma is believed to have withdrawn from the plan after failing to get “sufficient assurance” that the UK would receive the number of vaccines it needs on time, the report added.

The officials believed that signing up to the scheme could delay the rollout of a successful vaccine in the UK by up to six months as talks on distribution took place, the report said, citing government sources.

The decision comes a week after officials in London and Brussels said Britain was in discussions with the EU about whether it would join a plan by the bloc to secure supplies of potential vaccines against COVID-19.

(REUTERS)