UK PM ‘anxious’ over spread of variant detected in India

LONDON/BEIJING: Britain is anxious about the spread of the coronavirus variant first detected in India and is ruling nothing out, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Thursday.

“We are anxious about it - it has been spreading,” Johnson said, adding that there would be meetings later on Thursday to discuss what to do. “We’re ruling nothing out,” Johnson said.

“At the moment I can see nothing that dissuades me from thinking we’ll be able to go ahead on Monday and June 21 everywhere,” he added, referring to further steps to ease Covid-19 restrictions.

In its latest assessment published on Thursday, Imperial

College London said overall cases have fallen to their lowest level since August following a strict lockdown and a successful rollout of vaccines.

However, it warned that the Indian variant should be closely monitored.

The so-called REACT study found that the Indian variant, designated “of concern” because it could be more transmissible, was identified in 7.7% of the 127,000 cases tested between April 15 and May 3.

Meanwhile, Russia has recorded its first infections of the Covid-19 variant, Kommersant newspaper reported on Thursday. The regional branch of consumer health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor said it had recorded 16 cases of the variant among Indian students at Ulyanovsk

State University, some 700km east of Moscow.

China backs move to waive IPR on vaccines

China supports talks on waiving intellectual property rights protections on Covid-19 vaccines, Beijing’s commerce ministry said on Thursday, amid a global push to widen access to jabs.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has for months faced calls to temporarily remove patent protections on coronavirus vaccines, in a bid to get the drugs to poorer countries struggling to inoculate their people.

“China supports the WTO’S proposal on intellectual property exemptions, for anti-epidemic materials such as Covid-19 vaccines, to enter the text consultation stage,” Chinese commerce ministry spokesman Gao Feng has said. Beijing believes the WTO can play an “active role” in improving vaccine availability globally, he said.

Delaying 2nd doses can reduce deaths: Study

Giving a first dose of Covid-19 vaccine but delaying a second dose among people younger than 65 could lead to fewer people dying of the disease, but only if certain conditions are met, a predictive modelling study said.

The Us-conducted study, published in the BMJ British medical journal, used a simulation model based on a “real-world” sample of 100,000 American adults and ran a series of scenarios to forecast potentially infectious interactions under different conditions.