Japan finds more contaminated Moderna doses

TOKYO/MELBOURNE/PARIS: Japan’s Okinawa region suspended the use of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine on Sunday after another contamination was spotted, the local government said.

It comes a day after the Japanese health ministry said it was investigating the death of two men who received shots from tainted Moderna batches though the cause of their death is unknown.

The Okinawa prefecture, in southern Japan, said Sunday’s vaccination programme was partially postponed. “We are suspending the use of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines as foreign substances were spotted in some of them,” it said.

The lots affected by the contamination spotted in Okinawa on Saturday are different from the 1.63mn doses suspended after the two deaths, according to local media reports.

A lockdown of Australia’s second-biggest city Melbourne will be extended, authorities announced on Sunday as they struggle to quash a stubborn coronavirus Delta variant outbreak.

Almost 7mn people in Melbourne and surrounding Victoria state were scheduled to exit a four-week lockdown on Thursday, but state premier Dan Andrews said it would no longer be possible with case numbers rising by 92 overnight.

160,000 protest against vaccine rules in France

A total of 160,000 people protested across France on Saturday, the interior ministry said, angered at the country’s Covid health pass system which they say unfairly restricts the unvaccinated.

By early evening the authorities had logged 222 separate protest actions, including 14,500 people who turned out in Paris.

In Bordeaux, several protesters said they were refusing to get their children vaccinated, just days before the start of the new school year.

“We aren’t laboratory rats,” said one 11-year-old boy who was marching with his father.