UK regulator approves Moderna vaccine
LONDON: Britain’s medical regulator on Friday approved Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine for use, the health ministry said. Three Covid-19 vaccines have now been approved for use in Britain, with Pfizer-BioNTech’s shot and one developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca already being rolled out.
Moderna’s vaccine supplies will begin to be delivered to the UK from spring. “We have already vaccinated nearly 1.5 million people across the UK and Moderna’s vaccine will allow us to accelerate our vaccination programme even further once doses become available from the spring,” health minister Matt Hancock said.
Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine was 94% effective in preventing disease in late stage clinical trials, and it has already been approved for use in the US, Canada and the European Union.
Meanwhile, Iran’s supreme leader said on Friday he was banning the purchase of coronavirus vaccines made by US and UK companies. “The import of American and British vaccines to the country is banned,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a televised speech on Friday.
US sees record deaths, Oz city locked down Australia’s third-largest city headed into lockdown and borders were set to tighten nationwide on Friday, after a cleaner at a quarantine hotel contracted the UK coronavirus strain that appears to be more infectious.
More than two million residents in the Greater Brisbane area will have to stay at home for at least three days from Friday evening, authorities said.
In the US, the states of Connecticut, Texas and Pennsylvania reported their first cases of the variant that helped trigger a UK lockdown amid concern that Covid-19 deaths in the US are likely to maintain a near-record pace at least through January.
The US on Thursday reported more than 4,000 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University data – a world record for daily toll, and the first time deaths have passed 4,000.
According to the data, 4,085 Americans died and 275,000 new infections were recorded in 24 hours. The US will end January averaging about 2,600 deaths a day, according to the latest forecast updated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wednesday, a figure based on projections from 36 different models.
Cumulatively, the US is expected to surpass 400,000 deaths around the time that Joe Biden is inaugurated as president on January 20. It will hit 420,908 by January 30, the farthest date in the projection, according to the CDC model.
There have been 365,346 total Covid deaths in the US as of early Friday, according to Johns Hopkins data.
UK trial finds drugs that reduce deaths, ICU stay Two widely available drugs typically used to treat rheumatoid arthritis – tocilizumab and sarilumab – reduce the risk of death from Covid-19 by 24% and reduce stay in the intensive care unit by up to 10 days, new results from a UK government-backed trial published on Thursday show.
Most of the data came from the REMAP-CAP trial when the drugs were administered in addition to a corticosteroid.