$12 billion for developing world

Despite the vaccine testing setbacks, which health experts say is normal as testing scales up massively in its later stages, the World Bank approved $12 billion for developing countries to finance the purchase and distribution of vaccines, tests and treatment.

The financing “aims to support vaccination of up to a billion people,” the bank said.

The announcement came as Oxfam warned of “COVID famines” in the wake of the pandemic and said the international community’s response to global food insecurity was “dangerously inadequate.”

For its part, the International Monetary Fund said that while the recession triggered by the pandemic was less severe than initially feared, the global GDP will still contract 4.4 percent.

“The ascent out of this calamity is likely to be long, uneven, and highly uncertain,” IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath said.

In the United States, President Donald Trump has returned to the campaign trail three weeks before the November 3 election, after being hospitalized with COVID-19. He held a new rally with supporters in the battleground state of Pennsylvanian late Tuesday.

Critics have excoriated Trump for his handling of the crisis, with more known infections and deaths in the United States than anywhere else in the world.

But Trump has been touting his own swift recovery, after being treated with experimental therapeutics at Walter Reed military hospital close to Washington, DC, as a rallying cry to re-open the country.

“I went through it and now they say I’m immune... I feel so powerful,” Trump told a cheering crowd in Florida Monday, few of whom wore masks.