WHOcalls for a fair go on vaccines
THE World Health Organisation’s chief is appealing to makers of Covid-19 vaccines and the wealthier countries buying them to stop making bilateral deals, saying they are hurting a United Nations-backed effort to widen access to the jabs.
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said 42 countries, mostly high-income and a few middle-income ones, were now rolling out such vaccines.
He called on countries that had more jabs than they needed to make some available to the Covax Facility, the UN-backed project to get vaccines deployed widely.
Tedros said making bilateral deals ‘‘potentially bumps up the price for everyone, and means high-risk people in the poorest and most marginalised countries don’t get the vaccine’’.
Canada is known to have far greater access to vaccines than its population needs. Pfizer and BioNTech, which make the first vaccine that received emergency use approval from the WHO and countries like the United States and Britain, have not reached a deal to take part in the Covax Facility.
Dr Bruce Aylward, a special adviser to the WHO, said 50 per cent of high-income countries and ‘‘zero per cent’’ of poor countries were deploying vaccines.
The Covax Facility has secured access so far to nearly 2 billion doses of vaccines produced by Swedish-British pharmaceutical maker AstraZeneca and its partner Oxford; the Serum Institute of India; US giant Johnson & Johnson; and the partnership of France’s Sanofi and GSK of Britain.
New South Wales is on high alert after a family of four tested positive to a highly contagious coronavirus mutation from South Africa, and the discovery in Queensland of a British variant that has sparked a three-day lockdown of Brisbane.
However, Acting Premier John Barilaro said yesterday NSW would not close its border with Queensland.
The lockdown imposed on Sydney’s upper northern beaches was to be lifted early this morning, despite health authorities’ reservations.
Sweden’s parliament has passed an emergency law empowering the government to impose coronavirus-related lockdowns, after nearly a year of avoiding some public health
measures that have become the norm across Europe and much of the world.
Sweden had followed a largely voluntary approach to virus precautions such as social distancing. It also avoided widespread school closures and mask mandates. But with more than 9200 deaths related to Covid-19, Sweden has the highest per capita death rate of all Scandinavian countries.
The country is now struggling to handle a surge in cases at overstretched hospitals. Sweden registered 12,536 new coronavirus cases on Friday, covering the period since January 5.
Faced with a big second wave,
the country had already tightened preventive measures, including asking people to work from home if possible, to avoid public transport, shopping centres and gyms, and to limit social gatherings to eight people.
The US yesterday topped 4000 coronavirus deaths in a single day for the first time, breaking a record set just one day earlier, with several Sun Belt states driving the surge.
The tally from Johns Hopkins University also showed nearly 275,000 new cases of the virus – evidence that the crisis is growing worse after family gatherings and travel over the holidays and the onset of winter,
which is forcing people indoors.
Deaths have reached epic proportions. Since Tuesday, the US has recorded 13,500 – more than Pearl Harbour, D-Day, 9/11 and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake combined. Overall, the pandemic has left more than 365,000 dead in the US and caused nearly 22 million confirmed infections, and more than 132,000 people nationwide are hospitalised.
Britain likewise yesterday reported its highest one-day count of deaths yet: 1325. That brings the country’s toll to nearly 80,000, the highest in Europe.