WHO grants Moderna’s Covid-19 jab emergency use authorisation

ZURICH: The World Health Organization has listed Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use, the agency said on Friday, the fifth to be given the status meant to expedite countries’ own approval of shots.

“The objective is to make medicines, vaccines and diagnostics available as rapidly as possible to address the emergency,” the WHO said.

WHO assistant director-general Mariangela Simao said it was important to have more vaccines available because of supply problems for other shots, including from India, a main source of vaccines for the global COVAX vaccine sharing programme. India has restricted exports because of a crisis of infections. Moderna announced this week an expansion plan for its production network to boost its capacity to up to 3 billion doses in 2022.

Pakistan detects Brazil, South African variants

Health officials in the Pakistani province of Sindh said they have detected two coronavirus variants first identified in Brazil and

South Africa. It would be the first detection of those variants in Pakistan confirmed by officials. “Yesterday 13 samples underwent genomic study at the Agha Khan University Hospital, of these 10 were of the UK variant, and 2 were of the Africa and Brazil variants”, minister for health & population welfare, Dr Azra Fazal Pechuho said on Friday.

The highly contagious variants were discovered at a hospital in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, which has also reported the most deaths in any city, accounting for 3,903 of the country’s 17,811 deaths.