We’ve launched a new blog at the link below – head there for the latest:
Hotel quarantine system for arrivals into Britain from 'high-risk' countries
A hotel quarantine system targeted at arrivals into the UK from high-risk countries will be announced by the home secretary, Priti Patel, on Wednesday, after ministers met to sign off the more targeted approach.
Boris Johnson rejected calls at Tuesday evening’s meeting for a blanket policy in favour of imposing hotel quarantine on British citizens from a limited number of countries such as South Africa and Brazil.
Ministers were presented with a number of options, with some – including Patel and the health secretary, Matt Hancock, in favour of a more blanket approach, a larger number of countries on the list or even a temporary closure of UK borders.
Labour said a country-by-country quarantine policy would be “half-baked” and leave the UK’s vaccination programme vulnerable to as-yet unknown strains of coronavirus.
Updated
Portugal’s government has been urged to transfer Covid patients abroad as deaths hit a record high and the oxygen supply at a hospital near Lisbon partly failed from overuse, Reuters reports.
Deaths in the last 24 hours reached 291, meaning 11,012 people in the country have died from the virus during the pandemic.
A hospital in the Amadora region had to transfer 48 of its patients to other centres in the capital late on Tuesday as oxygen pressure wasn’t high enough for the large amount of patients.
News reports showed ambulances rushing through the hospital’s main gates to get the patients, while some left escorted by police.
Twenty patients were transferred to Lisbon’s largest hospital, Santa Maria, which on Tuesday installed two fridges outside its morgue with the capacity for 30 bodies, its spokesman said.
Nicolás Maduro is promoting another “miracle” cure to save Venezuelans from Covid-19, backing a secretive solution with no scientific evidence published, Associated Press reports.
The president told TV on Sunday:
“Ten drops under the tongue every four hours and the miracle is done. It’s a powerful antiviral, very powerful, that neutralizes the coronavirus.”
His government hasn’t released any details of the substance’s contents, praising a “brilliant Venezuelan mind” behind it. The country’s National Academy of Medicine said it appeared to be derived from the herb thyme.
It’s not the first time the Venezuelan leader has promoted a cure. In October, he notified the Pan American Health Organization that Venezuelan scientists discovered a molecule that nullifies the replication capacity of the new coronavirus.
Summary
Here’s a round-up of this evening’s coronavirus news
- AstraZeneca’s chief executive has insisted the UK will come first for vaccines as he rejected calls to divert doses to the European Union following a breakdown in supply.
- US states will get a 17% increase in the amount of vaccines from next week after shortages across the country. The government will supply 10.1 million first and second doses, up from this week’s allocation of 8.6 million.
- Leaders of tribes in the Amazon rainforest have urged governments to ensure vaccine rollouts reach all its communities, according to Reuters. Head of the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon Basin (COICA), Jose Gregorio Diaz, said his people faced a “health emergency”.
- The death toll in France rose to more than 74,000 on Tuesday, as its new case figures stayed above 20,000 for the fourth day in a row. President Emmanuel Macron hopes a new 6pm curfew will be enough to contain the surge.
-
Iceland has issued its first vaccine “passports” in an attempt to ease international travel for people who have had the jab, AFP reports.
- Lebanon has hit a new daily record of Covid-19 deaths amid a second day of protests against strict lockdown measures. Another 73 people died in the last 24 hours from the virus, according to Associated Press.
- Brazil has had 61,963 new recorded cases and another 1,214 deaths. The South American country has now had 8,933,356 confirmed infections since the start of the pandemic, while the death toll has risen to 218,878.
- The Gambian health ministry has said it will “name and shame” people refusing to self-isolate, after 40 refused to do so last week or escaped treatment clinics. The west African country has recorded 128 deaths since the pandemic began.
Updated
Lebanon has hit a new daily record of Covid-19 deaths amid a second day of protests against strict lockdown measures.
Another 73 people died in the last 24 hours from the virus, Associated Press reports. The total number of deaths has reached nearly 2,500 in the Middle Eastern country.
Daily infections have soared in recent weeks and hospitals have seen nearly full ICU occupancy. Almost 286,000 infections have been recorded since the pandemic began.
The country is in the early stages of a month-long national lockdown, which started in mid-January. Many have criticised the new measures for coming too late, after a relaxation in restrictions during Christmas.
Protests were seen in the capital Beirut and Lebanon’s second largest city, Tripoli. The latter saw dozens pelt government offices with stones and block a main square. The army was deployed to contain the demonstrators, who also torched a vehicle nearby.
Brazil has had 61,963 new recorded cases of Covid-19, and another 1,214 deaths, Reuters reports.
The South American country has now had 8,933,356 confirmed infections since the start of the pandemic, while the death toll has risen to 218,878.
The number of deaths is the world’s third worst, with only India and the US recording more fatalities.
Updated
A custody sergeant in the UK has become the fifth Metropolitan police staff member to die from Covid-19 in recent weeks.
The passing of the officer, who worked in the Met’s detention department comes after the deaths of three police constables and a traffic police community officer since 11 January, according to the Press Association.
PC John Fabrizi died on Sunday, a week after the death of his 37-year-old colleague PC Michael Warren.
The Met’s commissioner Cressida Dick said:
I’m deeply saddened by the news that in recent days and weeks Covid has taken five of our colleagues from us.
“Policing is a family and the scale of our loss is truly shocking. My deepest condolences are with the families, friends and colleagues of Fabrizi, Warren, traffic police community support officer Chris Barkshire, PC Sukh Singh and our colleague from Met Detention, who will be named soon.”
Updated
US states to get boost in vaccine next week after shortages
US states will get a 17% increase in the amount of vaccines from next week after shortages across the country.
Some vaccination sites have had to cancel tens of thousands of appointments, with people still waiting for their first dose, according to Associated Press.
Figures from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that next week the government will supply 10.1 million first and second doses of the Pfizer and Moderna jabs, up from this week’s allocation of 8.6 million.
Updated
AstraZeneca has said the EU’s decision to strike a late agreement with it for a Covid-19 vaccine is the reason for delays to it being supplied.
It meant that the company didn’t have enough time to iron out glitches in setting up production lines with external partners, according to the drugmaker’s chief executive Pascal Soriot. He said it had led to a three-month delay.
He told German daily Die Welt:
“And the issue here is we’ve had also teething issues like this in the UK supply chain,” he added. “As for Europe, we are three months behind in fixing those glitches.”
The company said it would cut supplies to the EU in the first quarter of the year due to production problems. A senior EU official said at the time that it meant a 60% reduction to 31 million doses, in the period.
Updated
Iceland has issued its first vaccine “passports” in an attempt to ease international travel for people who have had the jab, according to AFP.
All 4,800 Icelanders who have received two doses of the vaccine are eligible for digital certificates, its health ministry said. However, the documents are yet to be recognised internationally. The country is not part of the EU, but is part of the Schengen free travel area. EU nations are divided on their approach to them.
Iceland’s health ministry said:
The aim is to facilitate the movement of people between countries so that the individuals can show a vaccination certificate during border checks and be exempt from border restrictions.”
Updated
The Gambian health ministry has said it will “name and shame” people refusing to self isolate, after 40 refused to do so last week or escaped treatment clinics.
It also said large numbers of recent arrivals had failed to follow health procedures or report for a mandatory test, Reuters said.
A statement said failure to report to health authorities would: “lead to serious consequences, including the publication of names and identifying information of all those at large”.
The west African country has recorded more than 4,000 cases and 128 deaths from coronavirus since the pandemic began.
Leaders of tribes in the Amazon rainforest have urged governments to ensure vaccine rollouts reach all its communities, according to Reuters.
Head of the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon Basin (COICA) Jose Gregorio Diaz said his people faced a “health emergency” and urgently need vaccines.
We’re concerned that the indigenous peoples that make up the entire Amazon basin are not included in vaccination plans.”
More than 1.7 million coronavirus cases among indigenous people in the Amazon basin have been registered, with more than 42,000 deaths since the pandemic began according to COICA.
Brazil has included Amazon communities in its vaccine rollout, but other countries have not included them in their plans. Colombia, which is home to 2 million indigenous people, the government said it would prioritise healthcare workers and people over 80.
Updated
The death toll in France rose to more than 74,000 on Tuesday, as its new case figures stayed above 20,000 for the fourth day in a row, according to Reuters.
The 612 new deaths, bringing the total to 74,106, means the country has the seventh-highest death toll in the world from Covid.
Hospitalisations in the country have now reached an eight-week high of 27,041, sparking fears of a third national lockdown.
President Emmanuel Macron still hopes a 6pm curfew put in place 11 days ago will be enough to contain the surge.
Updated
A country-by-country hotel quarantine policy would be “half-baked” and leave the UK’s vaccination programme open to as-yet unknown strains of coronavirus, Labour has said.
Strict new quarantine rules in hotels are expected to be announced by home secretary Priti Patel on Wednesday after ministers met to sign off the proposals on Tuesday evening, with Boris Johnson favouring a targeted approach that would impose hotel quarantine on British citizens from a limited number of countries such as South Africa and Brazil.
Ministers were presented with a number of options with some – including the home secretary and Matt Hancock, the health secretary – in favour of a more blanket approach, or a larger number of countries on the list.
Patel will give a statement to parliament on Wednesday setting out the measures after prime minister’s questions. The policy is expected to take a number of weeks to implement.
Updated
Good evening, this is Harry Taylor seeing you through the rest of tonight with coronavirus-related news from the UK and around the world.
If you have any comments, tips or suggestions then drop me a line either via email, or I’m on Twitter at @HarryTaylr.
Updated
Brazil has barred entry for visitors from South Africa to stop the spread of a new coronavirus variant from the country, according to the federal government’s gazette, Reuters reports.
The barring of South African visitors is in addition to a pre-existing prohibition on entry for people coming from the UK, which has also seen a new variant. Brazil, home to the world’s second deadliest coronavirus pandemic, also has its own new variant from the north of the country, which researchers believe is more transmissible.
“International flights to Brazil originating in or passing through the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Republic of South Africa are prohibited on a temporary basis,” the gazette said. The measure applies to anyone who has been in either country “in the last 14 days,” it added. Those who fail to comply may face arrest, repatriation, deportation, or have their asylum request denied, it said.
Travellers coming into Bulgaria by air, land or sea will need to produce a negative Covid test starting from 29 January, the health ministry has said, Reuters reports.
Truck and bus drivers as well as airplane crews will be exempt from the directive, which will last until the end of April. The PCR tests will have to be carried out no later than 72 hours before arrival, the ministry said. Bulgarians who are returning home and fail to produce a negative test would have to self-isolate for 10 days.
Bulgaria has seen a drop in new infections in recent weeks and will reopen shopping malls and gyms on 1 February, while secondary schools will start classroom studies under a special rotating regime from 4 February, the ministry said.
In another decision, the ministry allowed restaurants and cafes to open at 50% of their capacity from 1 March but said bars and nightclubs should remain closed. Some restaurant and bar owners, hit hard by the closure of their outlets since late November, want to start serving clients from February too and plan to protest in downtown Sofia on Wednesday.
Updated
The issues holding up vaccine supply exports from China to Brazil are due to technical, rather than political obstacles, China’s ambassador has said, as delays to Brazil’s vaccine rollout began to grow, Reuters reports.
Some have speculated that China, which for years has been the butt of attacks by Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, may have stalled approving the exports as some form of political vengeance. Brazil is waiting for ingredients from China needed to produce two vaccines locally - one from China’s Sinovac and another from AstraZeneca.
But speaking at a press conference in Sao Paulo, Yang Wanming sought to scotch those rumours. “Regarding authorisation for the export of vaccine supplies, I believe that we all know very well that this is a technical issue and not a political one,” he said, without giving more details.
“Vaccines are a weapon to contain the pandemic and guarantee the health of the people and not a political instrument. China attaches great importance to cooperation in the development of the vaccine and we would like to consolidate cooperation.”
Yang Wanming said China is committed to helping Brazil after a vaccine developed by Sinovac was late-stage tested in Sao Paulo state. The Sinovac shot is currently Brazil’s main hope of slowing the world’s second deadliest coronavirus outbreak.
The active ingredient needed to produce 100 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which will be made at the federally funded Fiocruz Institute, has yet to leave China, adding to delays to Bolsonaro’s widely criticised vaccine rollout. “The company continues to work to release the lots of (active ingredient) for the vaccine as soon as possible,” AstraZeneca said in a statement.
Brazilian biomedical center Butantan expects supplies for around 8.5 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine to arrive by 3 February, its director said today.
European Commission urged by Italy to take action against Pfizer over vaccine delays
Italy has asked the European Commission to take action against Pfizer over cuts to its Covid vaccine deliveries, the government’s special commissioner said, Reuters reports.
The request to Brussels came a day after Rome sent a formal warning letter to the US drug company calling on it to respect its contractual commitments after a temporary slowdown in its Covid-19 vaccine deliveries.
Pfizer has said it will make up for the drop in deliveries with manufacturing changes that will boost output. The move increased tensions between Europe and the US company and came as rival vaccine developer AstraZeneca also warned of cuts to initial deliveries.
“The extraordinary commissioner ... called for a discussion with the EU executive to take all appropriate action against Pfizer’s non-compliant behaviour,” the commissioner’s office said in a statement.
The statement did not say what action the Italian government was seeking from Brussels, but on Saturday the government said Pfizer’s delays amounted to a serious breach of contractual obligations and that Italy would use all available legal tools. Pfizer was not immediately available for comment.
It comes after EC president, Ursula von der Leyen, today urged pharmaceutical companies to honour their commitments to supply coronavirus vaccines, citing the massive public investment in research and development (see 3.58pm).
An increasing number of Covid-19 vaccination sites around the US are cancelling appointments because of vaccine shortages in a rollout so rife with confusion that even the new CDC director admitted she doesn’t know exactly how many shots are in the pipeline, AP reports.
States were expected to find out their latest weekly allocation of vaccines on Tuesday amid complaints from governors and top health officials about inadequate supplies and the need for earlier and more reliable estimates of how much is on the way so that they can plan accordingly.
President Joe Biden suggested yesterday that he hopes the country can soon ramp up to 1.5 million shots dispensed per day. His administration has also promised more openness and said it will hold news briefings three times a week about the outbreak that has killed over 420,000 Americans.
Amid the rising frustration, the White House planned to hold a call with governors today to discuss the vaccine supply. The setup inherited from the Trump administration has been marked by miscommunication and unexplained bottlenecks, with shortages reported in some places even as vaccine doses remain on the shelf.
Dr Rochelle Walensky, Biden’s new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was herself flummoxed over the weekend in trying to describe current supplies. “I can’t tell you how much vaccine we have,” she told Fox, describing the problem as a challenge left by the outgoing Trump administration. “And if I can’t tell it to you, then I can’t tell it to the governors, and I can’t tell it to the state health officials. If they don’t know how much vaccine they’re getting, not just this week, but next week and the week after, they can’t plan.”
Yesterday, Florida governor Ron DeSantis said the state can’t meet growing demand from residents partly because an increase in vaccine promised by the government hasn’t happened. “We are at the mercy of what the federal government sends us, and right now we are able to go through it quicker than what we are receiving,” he said. White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded by saying that Florida has administered only about half of the vaccines it has been given.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had administered 23,540,994 doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the country as of this morning and distributed 44,394,075 doses, Reuters reports.
Updated
News of France falling further behind in the race to develop Covid-19 vaccines has caused dismay, reigniting a debate about the country’s standing in the world and its scientific prowess, AFP reports.
France has a celebrated history of medical breakthroughs, including from Louis Pasteur, a pioneer in microbiology and the inventor of vaccines against rabies and anthrax. With the world-renowned research centre that bears his name in Paris, the Pasteur Institute, as well as leading pharma group Sanofi, the country looked well placed to produce its own jab to protect against coronavirus.
But the Pasteur Institute announced yesterday that it was abandoning research on its most promising prospect, while Sanofi has said its candidate for inoculation will not be ready before the end of 2021 at best. “It’s a sign of the decline of the country and this decline is unacceptable,” Francois Bayrou, a close political ally president Emmanuel Macron, said today.
Bayrou, head of the centrist MoDem party and named by Macron last year as commissioner for long-term government planning, said the problem was a brain-drain from France to the US. Speaking on France Inter radio, he said it was “not acceptable that our best researchers, the most brilliant of our researchers, are sucked up by the American system”.
He referred to Stephane Bancel, a Frenchman who heads US-based biotech firm Moderna, whose vaccine was the second to be approved for use in the United States and Europe. Experts say the US government has invested more in vaccine research in the previous decades, while innovative companies are also drawn to the country because raising funds from private investors is easier and quicker.
Long-time Socialist minister and ex-presidential candidate Segolene Royal blamed “liberal ideology” for reductions in public funding for vaccine research, while Communist Party head Fabien Roussel called the setbacks a “humiliation”.
Ireland introduces hotel quarantine for arrivals from Brazil and South Africa
Ireland is to introduce a 14-day quarantine in hotels for all people arriving from Brazil and South Africa, and for anyone arriving without evidence of a negative coronavirus test, the government has announced, Reuters reports.
Visa-free travel from both countries and from all of South America has been suspended until March 5, prime minister Micheal Martin said. Ministers signed off on the measures, which are aimed at stopping more transmissible variants entering Ireland, while extending a national lockdown until March 5. The quarantine period - 14 days - was announced later at a news conference.
Ireland reported three cases of the South African variant earlier this month, which health officials said had been contained. No cases of the Brazilian variant have been discovered. The government has said it will take a few weeks to put the system in place. Under previously announced measures, anyone flying into Ireland must show they have had a negative/not detected Covid test from the previous 72 hours.
Varadkar also said that although the government was not ruling out extending hotel quarantine to all arrivals, as demanded by most opposition politicians, it would not be fully effective because of different rules across the open border in British-run Northern Ireland. It would also create issues around supply chains, he added.
Updated
Canada will soon take more steps to restrict foreign travel in an attempt to clamp down on Covid, the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has said, but did not give details, Reuters reports.
Trudeau also said he did not expect Canada to be affected by shortages of Covid-19 vaccines that are hitting some European Union nations. The issues largely centre around AstraZeneca Plc’s vaccine, which Canada has not approved yet, he said.
A second wave of coronavirus is sweeping Canada and health officials say some hospitals run the risk of being overwhelmed. Trudeau is urging Canadians not to travel abroad and said Ottawa intended to introduce more restrictions.
“All options are on the table and we will be announcing new measures very soon,” he said. Trudeau had previously said one possibility would be to oblige arriving passengers to spend a 14-day quarantine period in a hotel at their own expense.
People arriving from abroad currently only have to promise they will go into two weeks of quarantine. Canada obliges everyone flying into the country to provide a mandatory negative test for coronavirus.
Updated
Italy has reported another 541 coronavirus-related deaths, up from 420 registered yesterday, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections rose to 10,593 from 8,561, Reuters reports.
Some 257,034 tests for Covid-19 were carried out in the past day, against a previous 143,116, the health ministry said. Italy has now registered 86,422 deaths linked to Covid-19 since last February, the second-highest toll in Europe after Britain and the sixth-highest in the world. The country has reported 2.486 million total cases among its population of 60 million during the pandemic.
Patients in hospital with Covid-19 - not including those in intensive care - stood at 21,355 on Tuesday, compared with 21,424 a day earlier. There were 162 new admissions to intensive care units, against 150 the day before. The total number of intensive care patients stood at 2,372 down from 2,421 on Monday.
When Italy’s second wave of the epidemic was accelerating quickly in the first half of November, hospital admissions were rising by about 1,000 per day, while intensive care occupancy was increasing by about 100 per day.
Updated
Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has said he has approved in principle a group of private sector companies buying 33m vaccine doses from AstraZeneca, something the British drugmaker firm said cannot happen “at this moment”, Reuters reports.
Speaking at a virtual event hosted by Swiss investment bank Credit Suisse, Bolsonaro said half of the shots would be for employees of the companies buying them, and the other half would go to the government’s national immunisation program.
Newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported that the proposal came from a group of business leaders on a conference call on Monday to discuss which firms and organisations would participate.
“I want to make it very clear that the federal government is in favour of this group ... bringing the vaccine here to immunise 33 million people, at zero cost for the federal government,” Bolsonaro said.
AstraZeneca, however, said in a statement that all of its vaccine supply “at this moment” is only available to governments and multilateral organisations around the world. “It is not possible to make vaccines available to the private sector,” it said.
Updated
Shares in Spanish pharmaceutical company PharmaMar have surged more than 20% today after it cited a paper published by peer-reviewed journal Science that confirmed “potent preclinical efficacy” of its drug Aplidin against Covid, Reuters reports.
A study carried out in vitro and in vivo by a team of scientists in New York, San Francisco and Paris showed Aplidin (plitidepsin) leads to a reduction of viral replication, resulting in a 99% reduction of viral loads in the lungs of animals, the Science paper reported, according to a PharmaMar statement.
The drug, approved in Australia for the treatment of multiple myeloma, blocks a protein associated with the Covid-19 virus. Toxicity of the drug is well known and the doses used in Covid-19 trials are well tolerated in humans, the company said.
“When we infected animals and we treated them with the adequate dose of plitidepsin, an extraordinary reduction of the viral load is produced,” Pablo Aviles, head of nonclinical toxicology and pharmacology at PharmaMar, told Reuters TV. “It’s like if the virus in the infected cell needed to use a photocopy machine to copy itself and create new particles, and plitidepsin blocks the photocopying machine” so the virus cannot multiply, he added.
PharmaMar said it was in talks with various regulatory agencies – the most advanced ones being with the Spanish and British regulators - to start Phase III trials. They are deciding how many patients should be included in the trial.
PharmaMar shares were up 21% at €106 in late trading on Tuesday, heading for their strongest close since early November and leading the Spanish Ibex-35 stock index, after retreating slightly from the day’s peak of €110.
Updated
Slovakia’s nationwide screening programme detected 30,556 people, or 1.18% of those tested, carrying Covid as of yesterday, the prime minister, Igor Matovic, has said.
Nearly 2.6 million people out of a population of 5.5 million have taken part over the past week in the programme, which is concluding today. Thereafter, stricter lockdown measures will be imposed on those who cannot show evidence of a negative test result, Reuters reports.
Updated
The world’s biggest pharmaceutical firms are little prepared for the next pandemic despite a mounting response to the Covid-19 outbreak, an independent report has warned.
Jayasree K Iyer, executive director of the Netherlands-based Access to Medicine Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation funded by the UK and Dutch governments and others, highlighted an outbreak of the Nipah virus in China, with a fatality rate of up to 75%, as potentially the next big pandemic risk.
“Nipah virus is another emerging infectious disease that causes great concern,” she said. “Nipah could blow any moment. The next pandemic could be a drug-resistant infection.”
Nipah can cause severe respiratory problems and encephalitis, swelling of the brain, and has a mortality rate of 40% to 75%, depending on where the outbreak occurs. Fruit bats are its natural host. Outbreaks in Bangladesh and India were probably linked to drinking date palm juice.
It is one of 10 infectious diseases out of 16 identified by the World Health Organization as the greatest public health risk where there are zero projects in pharmaceutical firms’ pipelines, according to the foundation’s biennial report. They also include rift valley fever, common in sub-Saharan Africa, along with Mers and Sars – respiratory diseases that are caused by coronaviruses and have far higher death rates than Covid-19 but are less infectious.
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals has said its antibody cocktail was found effective in preventing Covid-19 in people exposed to those infected with the new coronavirus in an ongoing late-stage trial, Reuters reports.
The two-antibody cocktail, Regen-Cov, caused a 100% reduction in symptomatic infection and roughly 50% lower overall rates of infection, based on an early analysis of 400 participants in the trial who had a household member with Covid-19.
In comparison, the company’s rival Eli Lilly and Co said last week its antibody drug, bamlanivimab, cut the risk of Covid-19 infection by 80% for nursing home residents in a trial.
Regeneron said it would discuss the interim results with US health regulators to potentially expand the antibody cocktail’s current emergency use authorisation (EUA). Full data from the trial is expected early in the second quarter.
During the trial, jointly run by Regeneron and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one death and a Covid-19 related hospitalisation were reported among those who received a placebo, but there was no such incident in the treatment group, the company said.
Donald Trump said that an experimental drug cocktail from Regeneron was key to recovering from his infection. He said it was his suggestion to be treated with the drug, which had then rarely been used outside clinical trials.
Updated
Portugal has reported a record daily death toll, with another 291 people dying of causes related to Covid-19, up from the previous peak of 275, Reuters reports.
The country, with a population of 10 million, has so far reported a total of 653,878 Covid-19 cases and 11,012 deaths, and currently has world’s the highest seven-day rolling average of cases and deaths per million people. It recorded 10,765 new infections over the past 24 hours.
Updated
The European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has urged pharmaceutical companies to honour their commitments to supply coronavirus vaccines, citing the massive public investment in research and development.
“Europe invested billions to help develop the world’s first Covid-19 vaccines, to create a truly global common good,” she said at a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum. “And now, the companies must deliver. They must honour their obligations.”
EU member states could take AstraZeneca to court for breach of supply contracts if it did not honour its schedule, Latvian foreign affairs minister Edgars Rinkevics said. “The possibility should be evaluated, and it should be coordinated among the EU countries.” (see 10:58am)
The EC will finalise a proposal by the end of the week to require pharmaceutical firms to register their vaccine exports from the EU, and says it has no plans to impose an export ban (see 2.29pm).
Updated
Several gorillas at the San Diego zoo are expected to make a full recovery weeks after testing positive for Covid-19, The cases are believed to be a first in the US, AP reports.
The Safari Park executive director, Lisa Peterson, said the eight western lowland gorillas were likely to have been exposed to the virus by a zookeeper who tested positive for Covid-19 in early January, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
Veterinarians have since closely monitored the gorillas to make sure they have been eating and drinking enough to recover on their own. The park, north of San Diego, has been closed to the public as part of California’s lockdown efforts to curb coronavirus cases.
“We’re not seeing any of that lethargy. No coughing, no runny noses anymore,” Peterson said. “It feels to us like we’ve turned the corner.”
Officials tested the faeces of the gorilla troop after two apes began coughing on 6 January. Positive test results in three gorillas were confirmed by the US Department of Agriculture’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories. Faecal samples from the gorillas are no longer testing positive for the virus, Peterson said.
She said some of the gorillas will get the Covid-19 vaccine, a supply not permitted for use in people. “The hope is that we would be able to vaccinate wildlife that would be susceptible to illness and then prevent them from ever catching it,” she said.
Updated
German Chancellor Angela Merkel says the COVID-19 pandemic has shown how deeply interlinked we are with each other and how much we depend on nature.
— World Economic Forum (@wef) January 26, 2021
Watch the full session here: https://t.co/aAPgpVMwqd#DavosAgenda pic.twitter.com/KEOZhetohN
Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents have given their backing to a vaccination programme to which the World Health Organization’s Covax programme has pledged $112m, Reuters reports.
Announcing the funding, an Afghan health official said the programme would cover 20% of the population. The Covax programme is a global scheme to vaccinate people in poor and middle-income countries against the coronavirus. It aims to deliver at least 2bn vaccine doses by the end of 2021 to cover 20% of the most vulnerable people in 91 poor and middle-income countries.
Afghanistan’s deputy health minister, Waheed Majrooh, told journalists it was going to take six months to get the vaccines but authorities were in discussions to get them earlier. Afghanistan has registered 54,854 infections and 2,390 deaths – but experts say the actual numbers are much higher and are underreported due to low testing and limited access to medical facilities in the war-torn country.
Any vaccination programme will take place amid continuing fighting between Taliban and government forces and rising attacks on media and rights campaigners, but officials believe the insurgent group would not oppose the campaign because it would not go door-to-door.
The Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters that the group would “support and facilitate” the vaccination drive conducted via health centres.
Aside from Covax, the country has also received a pledge of 500,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from India, Dr Ghulam Dastagir Nazari, head of the expanded programme on immunisation at Afghanistan’s health ministry, told Reuters.
Updated
Sweden’s health agency is seeking clarification from the EU on how many Covid-19 vaccine doses per vial it has to pay Pfizer for, and is hoping for an answer before payments are due in a few weeks, Reuters reports.
Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported earlier on Tuesday that Sweden was withholding payment for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine until it has clarity on the number of doses it has been billed for. Sweden now wants the EU commission and Pfizer to reach an agreement on how many doses there are in each vial, it added.
“Yes, it is true, but it’s also the case that no current bills are due to be paid yet so it’s not a problem. We hope to get clarification before then,” Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, told a news conference when asked about the report, adding that it was some weeks before payments were due.
Pfizer Sweden declined to comment on the report but told Dagens Nyheter it had charged for six doses per vial. “Since the approval of the sixth dose, we use that number. We have to go with the approved product summary,” the newspaper quoted Ulrika Goossens, head of communications for Pfizer Sweden, as saying.
Sweden had stopped vaccine payments to Pfizer amid a disagreement over the number of doses of vaccine in each vial (see 10.10am).
“This is unacceptable. If a country only has the ability to extract five doses, it has received fewer doses for the same price,” the paper quoted Sweden’s vaccine coordinator, Richard Bergström, as saying.
Sweden, whose unorthodox pandemic strategy has placed it in the global spotlight, registered 9,123 new coronavirus cases since Friday, according to statistics from its health agency statistics, down from 9,779 cases last week.
The country of 10 million inhabitants registered 242 new deaths, taking the total to 11,247. The deaths registered have occurred over several days and sometimes weeks. Sweden’s death rate per capita is several times higher than that of its Nordic neighbours, but lower than in several European countries that opted for lockdowns.
Updated
New figures show that deaths surged in Poland in 2020 to a level unseen since the second world war due to Covid-19, Associated Press reports.
Poland, a nation with a population of more than 38 million, registered 357,400 births last year, the lowest number since 2005, and some 486,200 deaths from various causes, the highest number registered since the war. The overall data showed a population loss of some 129,000 people, compared to a decline of some 36,400 the year before.
Poland’s population has slowly decreased in the past two decades mostly due to the emigration of young people seeking better opportunities.
Minister of family and social policy Marlena Malag ascribed the high death rate to the pandemic and said it would take a long time for the current government programme of family benefits intended to boost the birthrate to reverse the negative trend.
Updated
EU to stop short of vaccine export ban, reports say
The European commission will finalise a proposal by the end of the week to require pharmaceutical firms to register their vaccine exports from the European Union but stop short of introducing an export ban, Reuters reports.
EU countries learnt late last week that deliveries of the vaccine from AstraZeneca, which is expected to be approved on Friday, would be some 60% lower in the first quarter than initially indicated.
There have also been reduced deliveries of a vaccine jointly produced by Pfizer and BioNTech.
The European Union can already monitor exports via customs data, but wants clearer data as it seeks to hold pharmaceutical companies to their contracts.
Updated
The UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, said Britain would be able to work with the European Union to ensure there is no disruption to vaccine supplies, Reuters reports.
I’m sure that we can work with the EU to ensure that, whilst transparency is welcome, that no blockers are put in place,” he said at an event hosted by Chatham House, adding he had spoken to the chief executives of Pfizer and AstraZeneca.
“I’m confident of the supply of vaccine into the UK. I’m confident that won’t be disrupted. But I would urge all international partners in fact to be collaborative and working closely together, and I think protectionism is not the right approach in the middle of a pandemic.”
Updated
A third night of riots over the Covid curfew in the Netherlands has resulted in the arrest of over 180 anti-lockdown protesters arrested after shops were looted and cars set alight in several towns and cities, reports Jon Henley.
Officials said the rioters, who reportedly used social media apps to organise, were overwhelmingly teenagers. Experts questioned the extent to which many were motivated by opposition to the 9pm curfew, which came into force on Saturday.
A leading Dutch criminologist, Henk Ferwerda, said the riots involved “virus deniers, political protesters and kids who just saw the chance to go completely wild – all three groups came together”.
This is Rachel Hall taking over from Mattha Busby - do drop me an email at rachel.hall@theguardian.com if you have any tips or thoughts you’d like to share.
Mo Farah believes the Olympic Games will go ahead this summer and says athletes have been told they will receive vaccinations against Covid-19.
Farah, who has won 5,000 and 10,000 metres gold at each of the last two Games in London and Rio, has previously said he is targeting success in the longer distance only in Tokyo. However, the Games are again under threat from the coronavirus pandemic, which were originally postponed by 12 months in March last year.
The idea of vaccinating athletes has been floated by International Olympic Committee member Dick Pound, and Farah told TalkSport:
I think most people in a career want to go to an Olympics and take part in an Olympics. The key thing is to stay safe and see what the country can do. What they have said to us is basically everyone will be able to get Covid injections and after that it’s less risk of spreading the disease, and then from there just see what happens and take one day at a time.
I think [the Games] will go ahead but at the same time, for me I have had the experience of taking part in three Olympics and I have to see it as another race and see what happens.
The German government is discussing reducing to almost zero the number of flights into Germany in an effort to prevent more virulent mutant Covid variants gaining a foothold in Germany, the interior minister, Horst Seehofer, told Bild newspaper.
Other measures being considered included closures of borders to regions where mutant strains were more prevalent, he added.
“The risk posed by these virus mutations demands of us that we consider even drastic measures,” Seehofer told Bild. “They include stricter border controls, especially at frontiers with high-risk regions, but also a reduction of air traffic to Germany to almost zero, as Israel is currently doing.”
Updated
Europe’s cultural and creative sector has been hit harder by the coronavirus crisis than every other industry except aviation, according to a study that calls for major public and private investment to avert possibly irreparable long-term damage.
According to the report, revenues in the sector – which includes TV, cinema, radio, music, publishing, video games, the performing and visual arts – plunged by 31.2% last year compared with 2019. It was hit even harder than tourism, which lost 27% of its income.
Only the aviation industry, where revenue fell by 31.4%, has suffered more, say the authors of the report, commissioned by EU authors’ and creators’ rights organisations and due to be presented to the European commission on Tuesday.
“Culture has become a scarce resource in Europe today and we are the worse for it,” said the French electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre, who will hand over the study. “We are learning the hard way the truly essential value of art in our society.”
Coronavirus: Should you start taking vitamin D? pic.twitter.com/FqXsXmAS9e
— ITV News (@itvnews) January 26, 2021
Billions of dollars of debt owed by poor countries must be permanently cancelled in order to stave off a “looming financial tsunami” caused by Covid-19 and the ensuing global recession, a cross-party committee of UK MPs has warned.
Debt relief will not be enough to help the world’s most vulnerable economies as they face skyrocketing levels of hunger and unemployment, according to an inquiry into Covid-19’s secondary impacts in developing countries.
Despite being granted roughly $5bn (£3.6bn) in debt suspension last year, more than 70 countries are still struggling to pay off $33bn under threat of being sued in UK courts if they default on their loans, the committee found.
The UK government’s decision to slash overseas aid from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income – which charities predicted could trigger huge numbers of deaths – has compounded the crisis by causing uncertainty for aid programmes across the globe, the IDC said.
Updated
Vaccine rollouts boost global growth forecast – IMF
The International Monetary Fund has raised its forecast for global economic growth in 2021 and said the coronavirus-triggered downturn in 2020 would be nearly a full percentage point less severe than expected, Reuters reports.
The IMF said multiple vaccine approvals and the launch of vaccinations in some countries in December had boosted hopes of an eventual end to the pandemic that has now infected nearly 100 million people and claimed the lives of over 2.1 million globally.
But it warned that the world economy continued to face “exceptional uncertainty” and new waves of Covid-19 infections and variants posed risks, and global activity would remain well below pre-Covid projections made one year ago.
Close to 90 million people are likely to fall below the extreme poverty threshold during 2020-2021, with the pandemic wiping out progress made in reducing poverty over the past two decades. Large numbers of people remained unemployed and underemployed in many countries, including the United States.
It predicted global growth of 5.5% in 2021, an increase of 0.3 percentage points from the October forecast, citing expectations of a vaccine-powered uptick later in the year and added policy support in the United States, Japan and a few other large economies.
Updated
Iran has approved Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine and plans to both import it and produce it, the foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has said.
“The Sputnik V vaccine was yesterday also registered and approved by our health authorities,” Zarif said at a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Moscow on Tuesday. “In the near future, we hope to be able to purchase it, as well as start joint production.”
Earlier this month supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s highest authority, banned the government from importing vaccines from the US and the UK.
Iran, which has a population of 83 million, has recorded over 1.38 million cases and 57,560 deaths, according to the latest government data, but there has been a decline in new infections in recent weeks.
Updated
Thailand’s health minister has sought to explain the country’s coronavirus vaccine procurement plan amid criticism that the government has lacked transparency and been too slow in securing supplies.
The strategy came under scrutiny last week when banned opposition politician Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit said the government had been too reliant on a company owned by King Maha Vajiralongkorn to produce vaccines for Thais while failing to negotiate multiple deals, as other countries have, Reuters reports.
Thanathorn faces a royal insult lawsuit for mentioning the king in questions he had raised regarding royal-owned Siam Bioscience, which will manufacture the AstraZeneca vaccine locally for regional distribution.
Public health minister Anutin Charnvirakul said Thailand started negotiating in April with “every vaccine producer” but its laws prevented government agencies from making non-refundable down-payments for products not yet manufactured.
AstraZeneca presented the best option with its lower-priced vaccines and promised technology transfer to Siam Bioscience, he said. “The offer from AstraZeneca to use a factory in Thailand to produce its vaccines to sell in south-east Asia means vaccine security for Thailand,” Anutin said in a Facebook post addressed to Thanathorn. “Please believe that we don’t have a political aim and don’t wish to use public health and safety as a political tool.”
Updated
Johnson & Johnson, the healthcare conglomerate, has forecast 2021 profit above Wall Street estimates and promised data from its widely watched coronavirus vaccine trial soon, as it races to develop a potential single-dose vaccine for Covid-19, Reuters reports.
The company had previously signalled that it expected to deliver data on the trial before the end of January, at a time when global hopes of defeating the virus are riding on securing adequate supplies of multiple vaccines.
Johnson & Johnson, which runs a large medical device business in addition to its pharmaceuticals unit, forecast 2021 adjusted profit of between $9.40 and $9.60 per share, compared with analysts’ estimates of $8.99 per share, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
The company’s fourth-quarter profit fell 56.7% to $1.74bn. The company reported that it had recorded litigation expenses of $2.9bn in the fourth quarter. J&J faces a litany of lawsuits over its marketing of opioids, its pelvic meshes and body powders.
Updated
No serious Covid cases among those receiving both Pfizer jabs in Israel, minister says
Israel, which has already given a full set of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccinations to over 6% of its citizens, has not registered a single serious Covid case among them, even as infections surge in the wider population, the government has said, Reuters reports.
Health minister Yuli Edelstein told a parliamentary panel that new infections and hospital admissions for serious or critical Covid-19 complications were now at record numbers. But he said he knew of “no serious morbidity” among Israelis eligible for the vaccination certificate – a document issued by the state a week after the second dose is administered, when Pfizer says the vaccine is 95% effective.
He said 0.014% had contracted milder forms of Covid-19. According to health ministry figures, 23% have received the first shot and more than 6% the second, between 21 and 28 days later. A week after beginning vaccinations, it imposed its third national lockdown, which officials say may need to be extended into February.
But last Thursday it reported a reproduction number - known as R - of less than 1, which indicates that epidemic is no longer growing.
Updated
World Health Organization experts have cautiously backed delaying second injections of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine in some situations, as they have already done for the Pfizer-BioNTech jabs, AFP reports.
The WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunisation (Sage) also insisted that international travellers should not be prioritised for any Covid-19 jabs for the time being.
During a meeting last week, the experts had discussed the Moderna vaccine, which, like the Pfizer-BioNTech one, uses mRNA technology and is being rolled out in a number of countries.
Both vaccines require boosters after three to four weeks, but several countries facing limited vaccine supplies have said they will delay administering the second injection so that more people can get the first dose.
The WHO’s vaccine advisory group said it was best to respect the tested intervals of 28 days between doses. But earlier this month, it said that in “exceptional circumstances” it was possible to wait for up to 42 days to administer the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and on Tuesday, it said the same for the Moderna jabs.
It warned though that “the evidence for this is not strong,” and stressed that “Sage does not recommend halving the dose.” The UN health agency has so far only approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for emergency use, but it is expected to soon issue approval for the Moderna jab as well.
Updated
A group of UN experts has criticised Sri Lanka’s requirement that those who die of Covid be cremated, even if it goes against religious beliefs, and warned that decisions based on “discrimination and aggressive nationalism” could incite hatred and violence, AP reports.
The experts, who are part of the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council, said in a statement that rule amounts to a human rights violation.
“We deplore the implementation of such public health decisions based on discrimination, aggressive nationalism and ethnocentrism amounting to persecution of Muslims and other minorities in the country,” the experts said. “Such hostility against the minorities exacerbates existing prejudices, intercommunal tensions, and religious intolerance, sowing fear and distrust while inciting further hatred and violence.”
Sri Lanka introduced the rule in March, saying there was a risk that bodies with the coronavirus could contaminate the ground water if they were buried. The WHO, as well as Sri Lankan medical groups, have said that burial of those who died of Covid is safe.
More than 70% of Sri Lankans are Buddhist, a faith in which cremation is common. But 9% of people in Sri Lanka are Muslims and many say cremation goes against their religious beliefs.
Sri Lanka, which has a population of 22 million, has seen 283 deaths from the coronavirus out of more than 59,000 reported infections.
Updated
Mauritius, the island nation east of Madagascar, has begun its vaccination campaign, with medical staff the first to receive the jabs.
Those vaccinated will get a second dose of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine in about 20 days, the BBC reports, after Mauritius received 100,000 doses from India last week which were handed over during a ceremony.
A batch of 240,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine is expected to arrive by 15 February, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) representative, Laurent Musango. The Pfizer/BioNtech vaccines were obtained through Covax - a global initiative led by the WHO.
AFP have a bit more on this:
Health minister Kailesh Jagutpal said the campaign would initially target frontline healthcare staff treating patients with Covid-19, and workers meeting passengers at the airport.
Mauritius, with a population of 1.3 million, has officially recorded 568 cases and 10 deaths since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. But the economic cost has been severe for Mauritius, an idyllic beach holiday destination reliant on tourism.
Jugnauth said Friday that the country plans to vaccinate 60 percent of its population in 2021 in the hope of kickstarting economic activity and its tourism sector.
“The vaccination campaign will enable Mauritius to review the conditions of entry of passengers to Mauritius and allow the tourism sector, which was the economic sector most affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, to restart”, he said.
Updated
The German government has challenged reports of a lower-than-expected efficacy rate of the AstraZeneca vaccine for older people, while reiterating concerns about the British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant’s data reporting.
An article in German business daily Handelsblatt had reported that the German government was expecting the European Medical Agency’s (EMA) assessment to show the AstraZeneca vaccine to be only 8% effective among the over 65s, describing it a “setback for Berlin’s vaccination strategy”.
AstraZeneca instantly dismissed the reports on Monday night, saying the 8% figure was “completely incorrect”. The German health minister, Jens Spahn, on Tuesday morning described the report as “speculation” and declined to comment while EMA’s analysis of AstraZeneca’s trial data was ongoing.
A later statement by the German health ministry suggested that the report had mixed up the efficacy rate for over 65s with the number of seniors involved in AstraZeneca’s trials.
“At first sight it appears that two things have been muddled in the reports”, said the statement. “Around 8% of participants in the AstraZeneca efficacy trials were aged between 56 and 69 years old, only three to four percent were over 70. This does not result in an efficacy of only 8% among seniors.”
But the German government also voiced concerns about AstraZeneca’s data reporting: “It has been known since the autumn that fewer seniors were included in the trials supplied by AstraZeneca than the trials of other manufacturers.”
Scientists have previously raised questions about the representative value of AstraZeneca’s trial design.
Updated
Italy’s state agency Invitalia has said it will invest €81m euros in local biotech company ReiThera to support the development of its Covid-19 vaccine, as frustration with the multinational pharmaceutical companies deepens, Reuters reports.
Most of the money is slated for research and development while around €12m will be used to expand the ReiThera vaccine production site, close to Rome.
ReiThera is developing the vaccine with Germany’s Leukocare and Belgium’s Univercells and started talks with the European Union in September about supplying the bloc with doses. The initial trial gave encouraging results.
The company aims to produce some 100m shots of its vaccine per year. Invitalia will buy a 30% stake in ReiThera, the statement said.
This is Mattha Busby here taking over from my magnificent colleague Damien Gayle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. Drop me a line on Twitter or via email on mattha.busby.freelance@guardian.co.uk with any tips or thoughts.
Updated
EU could sue AstraZeneca over vaccine hold-ups, says Latvian minister
Latvia’s foreign affairs minister has said that European Union member states could sue UK-based drug maker AstraZeneca for breach of contract if it fails to honour its Covid-19 vaccine delivery schedule.
AstraZeneca, which developed its shot with Oxford University, told the EU on Friday it could not meet agreed supply targets up to the end of March. Each EU member state has a separate supply contract with the company.
“The possibility [of legal action] should be evaluated, and it should be coordinated among the EU countries,” Edgars Rinkevics, Latvia’s foreign minister, told Reuters, via his spokesman.
His comments were reinforced by senior a official from another EU state, who told Reuters: “Coordinated court cases would be more effective way to ensure that AstraZeneca keeps to its commitments than unilateral legal action from member states.”
Italy said on Sunday it would take legal action against Pfizer and AstraZeneca over delays in deliveries of Covid-19 vaccines.
Colombia’s government has announced the death of its defence minister from viral pneumonia related to Covid-19.
Carlos Holmes Trujillo was reported infected with coronavirus earlier this month and was treated in an intensive care unit.
Colombia has reported more than 2m coronavirus infections, as well as close to 52,000 deaths due to Covid-19, the disease caused by the Sars-CoV-2 virus.
The World Health Organization has issued new clinical advice for treating Covid-19 patients, including those displaying persistent symptoms after recovery, and also said it advised using low-dose coagulants to prevent blood clots. According to the Reuters news agency:
WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told a UN briefing in Geneva that a WHO-led team of independent experts, currently in the central Chinese city of Wuhan where the first human cases were detected in December 2019, is due to leave quarantine in the next two days to pursue its work on the virus origins.
Harris declined to comment on reports of delays in roll-out of vaccines in the European Union. She said she had no specific data and the WHO’s priority was for health workers in all countries to be vaccinated in the first 100 days of the year.
Sweden stops Pfizer payments amid vaccine disagreement
Sweden has stopped vaccine payments to Pfizer amid a disagreement over the number of doses of vaccine in each vial delivered by the drug company, according to a report in the Swedish press. Reuters has the story:
Sweden is seeking clarification on the number of doses it has been billed after Pfizer charged for six doses in each vial. It originally was thought only five doses could be extracted from each vial and Sweden now want the EU Commission and Pfizer to reach an agreement on how many doses there are in each vial.
“Until then, we have told the company that we must wait with the invoices that are available until we get clarity on what applies,” chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell told Dagens Nyheter.
Pfizer Sweden declined to comment on the report.
Updated
Here’s more from Jon Henley, the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, on the latest night of rioting to hit cities in the Netherlands, where mostly young people are railing against the imposition of a nighttime curfew.
About 150 people were arrested on Monday in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, where shops were vandalised and looted, and the mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb, issued an emergency decree giving police broader powers of arrest.
“These people are shameless thieves, I cannot say otherwise,” he said. “I had to threaten them with the use of teargas – a far-reaching measure. I find that sad, because I have never had to do that in my entire career as mayor.”
But trouble also flared in smaller centres around the country such as Den Bosch, Zwolle, Amersfoort, Alkmaar, Hoorn, Gouda – where several cars were set on fire – and Haarlem, where police were attacked with stones.
Officials said the rioters, who reportedly used social media apps to organise, were overwhelmingly teenagers, and questioned the extent to which they were motivated by opposition to the 9pm curfew, which came into force on Saturday.
More than 1m cases of coronavirus have now been detected in Indonesia since the pandemic began, with the Southeast Asian country passing the milestone as it launches one of the world’s biggest vaccine drives.
Indonesia has recorded 1,012,350 virus cases and almost 29,000 deaths, according to official data. But, according to the AFP news agency, low testing rates mean the crisis is believed to be much bigger than those figures suggest.
Pandu Riono, a University of Indonesia epidemiologist, told AFP:
I think we hit one million cases of Covid-19 a long time ago. We are still climbing a mountain and we don’t even know where the peak is. This is a never-ending climb.
Indonesia is now beginning the mass distribution of vaccines, produced by Chinese company Sinovac, with health workers and other high-risk groups among the first in the queue.
The president, Joko Widodo, received the country’s first Covid-19 jab on live television along with his health minister, several senior officials, as well as business and religious leaders.
The Guardian US has an interesting story just out on allegations that employers in the country are exploiting coronavirus-related unemployment as tool to attack unions. Michael Sainato writes:
Dalroy Connell has worked as a stagehand for the Portland Trailblazers since 1995 when the basketball team began playing games at the Rose Garden Arena. When the pandemic hit the US in March 2020, public events were shut down and NBA games were briefly suspended before the season moved to a “bubble” in Orlando, Florida, and the season recommenced without fans in July 2020.
Connell and his colleagues have been on unemployment ever since, but when the 2020-2021 NBA season began in December 2020, instead of bringing back several of these workers, the Portland Trailblazers replaced most of the unionized crew who work their games with non-union workers, even as their jobs running the sound and lighting equipment are required whether or not fans are in attendance.
Like many workers around the US Connell believes he has been locked out from his job by a company that has used the coronavirus pandemic as a tool to break unions.
Sweden’s foreign ministry has extended its advice to nationals not to take any non-essential trips to countries outside Europe until 15 April. Reuters has details of the update:
“There is a lot of uncertainty, and it’s not possible to predict when it will be possible to travel safely and freely in the whole world regarding the corona pandemic and its consequences,” the ministry said.
Sweden on 14 March last year advised against non-essential travel to all countries due to the spread of Covid-19, but have since removed that recommendation for a number of countries in Europe.
South African president accuses rich countries of "vaccine nationalism"
The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has called on wealthy countries to stop hoarding excess Covid-19 vaccines, as he said the world needed to act together to fight the pandemic.
Ramaphosa told a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum that he was concerned about “vaccine nationalism”.
“We need those who have hoarded the vaccines to release the vaccines so that other countries can have them,” Ramaphosa said in a special address on day two of the WEF’s annual meeting, which brings together politicians and wealthy tycoons. He said:
The rich countries of the world went out, acquired large doses of vaccines from the developers and manufacturers of these vaccines and some countries have even gone beyond and acquired up to four times what their population needs. And that was aimed at hoarding these vaccines. And now this is being done to the exclusion of other countries in the world that most need this.
Ramaphosa, who currently chairs the African Union, said African countries wanted access to vaccines as quickly as other nations.
South Africa’s Covid outbreak is the worst in Africa, with 1,417,537 cases confirmed since the start of the pandemic, and 41,117.
The Philippines has abandoned plans to relax it’s lockdown by allowing some children out of their homes after the country confirmed domestic transmission of the highly contagious British variant of coronavirus.
“Right now, we have local transmission where this individual or these cases with the variant have already infected their community, their family,” the ealth undersecretary, Maria Rosario Vergeire, told news channel ANC on Tuesday. Reuters has the story:
The world is scrambling to contain the spread of the B.1.1.7 variant, despite travel bans, new lockdowns and a tightening quarantine measures in dozens of countries, amid concerns it could not only be more transmissible, but deadlier.
The Philippine health ministry said the B.1.1.7 variant had spread among 12 people in Bontoc, a mountainous northern province, with 17 such cases in the country.
Its first case of the British variant was found in a Filipino who had travelled from the United Arab Emirates.
Citing the British variant, the president, Rodrigo Duterte, said he had scrapped a plan to allow children ages 10 to 14 in low-risk areas to go outside the home starting on 1 February.
The Philippines, which has imposed some of the world’s toughest coronavirus restrictions, including internal travel bans, has since March last year officially prohibited minors from leaving the home.
German health minister backs limits on EU vaccine exports
Europe should have its “fair share” of vaccines, Germany’s health minister has said as he backed European Union proposals to limit exports of vaccines - a move which has been met with concern in the UK.
According to Reuters, Jens Spahn told Germany’s ZDF broadcaster: “I can understand that there are production problems but then it must affect everyone in the same way.”
“This is not about Europe first but about Europe’s fair share,” he said, adding it therefore made sense to have export limits on vaccines.
Reuters reports that the EU has proposed a register of vaccine exports, in response to supply delays in deliveries of AstraZeneca’s vaccine and an announcement by Pfizer of a temporary slowdown in supplies in January.
Richard Partington, the Guardian’s economics correspondent, has now written on the UK unemployment figures published by the Office for National Statistics this morning.
Unemployment in the UK has reached the highest level for more than four years as the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic and tougher lockdown measures place more pressure on businesses and workers.
The Office for National Statistics said the unemployment rate rose to 5% in the three months to the end of November – representing more than 1.7 million people – from 4.9% in the three months to the end of October, reaching the highest level since April 2016. Unemployment was 4% in February before the pandemic struck.
In a snapshot of the jobs market during the second English lockdown and as tough restrictions were imposed in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to limit the spread of Covid-19, the ONS said redundancies hit a record high during the quarter.
Police in Greece have acted to thwart plans for protests on a number of issues expected over the next few days by using public health as a pretext for a weeklong ban on large gatherings.
“All public gatherings of over 100 people (are restricted) until February 1,” the police said in a statement, reported by the French state-backed news agency AFP.
The new restriction has been imposed following weeks of protests by students against plans to introduce a special police force on university campuses, with another protest on the issue expected on Thursday.
On Friday a protest had been called in support of Dimitris Koufintinas, a leader of a leftwing revolutionary group November 17 and convicted terrorist, who began a hunger strike this month to demand a prison transfer.
The following Monday, anarchists were also expected to protest outside Athens city hall against an urban redevelopment plan.
The police said large protests posed a “danger of further boosting the spread of the coronavirus.” But in a follow-up statement, the police denied the ban was linked to the planned protests.
More than 5,600 deaths in Greece have been attributed to coronavirus since the start of the pandemic. Over 280 people are in intensive care.
The UK minister for Covid vaccine deployment, Nadhim Zahawi, has said that he is confident that vaccine makers would honour their supply agreements with the UK, following reports that the European Union had threated to block suppply. Zahawi told Sky News:
I’m confident that the Pfizer vaccine will be delivered. Pfizer have made sure that they have always delivered for us, they will continue to do so.
They have made a very important announcement on the equitable supply of the whole world, including the European Union, and I’m sure they will deliver for the European Union, the United Kingdom and for the rest of the world.
We have got 367 million vaccines that we have ordered from seven different suppliers, so I’m confident we will meet our target and continue to vaccinate the whole of the adult population by the autumn.
The European Union could restrict supply of Covid-19 vaccines to the UK, two UK national papers report this morning.
The Times and the Telegraph both splash on news of the possible restrictions to supply of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which is manufactured in Belgium, but give slightly different reasons.
TIMES: Warn us before jabs go to Britain, EU tells @pfizer #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/91srPC0dju
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) January 25, 2021
According to the Times, Europe has threatened to impose the restrictions over fears that they may lead to a shortfall in supply for European vaccinations programmes. It reports:
The European Union has told Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies that they must get its permission to export vaccine doses to Britain amid concerns about the level of supply.
Brussels announced plans yesterday for new controls on the export of vaccines in response to public anger at the pace of immunisation programmes in the EU. Companies will have to provide “early notification” of exports of all jabs manufactured in the bloc in an attempt to prevent shortfalls.
The intervention will raise questions about whether Britain’s supplies of the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine, which is manufactured in Belgium, could be disrupted.
Tuesday's Telegraph: Brussels threatens to block vaccine #TomorrowsPapersToday #DailyTelegraph #Telegraph pic.twitter.com/8QI6D14Bzc
— Tomorrows Papers Today (@TmorrowsPapers) January 25, 2021
The Telegraph reports that the potential restrictions to supply of Pfizer vaccines are a result of a row with AstraZeneca, the UK-based drug company that is making a vaccine developed in conjunction with Oxford University. According to the paper:
Brussels decided to impose tighter controls on exports after reacting with anger to the news that AstraZeneca will deliver 50 million fewer doses to the EU than it had expected.
Ministers now fear that deliveries of the Pfizer jabs will, at best, be delayed by extra paperwork, and that the EU could try to stop doses being sent to non-EU countries after saying it would “take any action required to protect its citizens”.
Last March, the EU imposed export restrictions on personal protective equipment after it struggled with supply to its member states.
UK unemployment has reached 5% for the first time in four years, 1.2 percentage points higher than this time last year, according to statistics released this morning by the Office for National Statistics.
The increase in unemployment is also a 0.6 percentage point rise on the previous quarter, and comes despite the continuing furlough scheme in which the government is subsidising the pay for millions of workers whose jobs are not possible during pandemic restrictions.
According to the ONS:
Since February 2020, the number of payroll employees has fallen by 828,000; however, the larger falls were seen at the start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Data from our Labour Force Survey (LFS) show a large increase in the unemployment rate while the employment rate continues to fall. The number of redundancies reached a record high in September to November 2020, although the weekly data show it has dropped from the peak in September.
You can read more on the ONS website and we’ll have more reporting and analysis later this morning.
Good morning, this is Damien Gayle taking the blog reins in London, where the sun is yet to rise but the news doesn’t stop. I’ll be taking you through the next few hours of coronavirus-related updates from the UK and around the world.
If you have any comments, tips or suggestions for coverage - or you just want to reach out and say hello - then you can drop me a line either via email, to damien.gayle@theguardian.com, or via Twitter DM to @damiengayle. I can’t guarantee you a reply, but I read every one.
Sixty million more women and girls in the world’s poorest countries are now using modern contraceptives, after an eight-year global effort to expand family planning services.
But the FP2020 global partnership, launched in London in 2012, warned that the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting financial crisis imperils further progress.
According to the FP2020’s final progress report, published on Tuesday, 320 million women and girls are using some form of modern contraception in the 69 focus countries, up from 260 million in 2012:
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, in Sydney where it is evening on Invasion Day. Take a look at Guardian Australia’s account of the massacres in the country between 1794 and 1928:
This #InvasionDay, know your history. A timelapse of the more than 300 massacres of Indigenous Australians between 1794 and 1928. From our #KillingTimes database https://t.co/6zAtCLTNOu https://t.co/Imjggh0u3V
— Guardian Australia (@GuardianAus) January 26, 2021
Summary
Here are the key developments from the last few hours:
- Joe Biden warned of 600k deaths before US turns corner. US President Joe Biden warned the nation was going to be “in this for a while, and could see between “600,000 and 660,000 deaths before we begin to turn the corner in a major way.” The US toll is currently just over 420,000.
- Indonesia is set to officially surpass one million coronavirus cases on Tuesday, a grim milestone for the Southeast Asian nation that has struggled since last March to get the Covid-19 pandemic under control.
- The Australian government expects doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to be rolled out in March and that there will be no shortfalls, despite threats by the European Union to block exports of the vaccine due to a lack of supply.
- New Zealand and “the world” need to return to some semblance of normality before the country’s borders open to foreign nationals, said New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern. The prime minister shut the border in mid-March and said on Tuesday she would not open it again until New Zealanders were “vaccinated and protected” – a process that will not start for the general population until the middle of this year.
- California eased strict stay-at-home orders on Monday, allowing restaurants to reopen for outdoor dining and greater social mixing as state public health officials cited slowing rates of coronavirus infections and hospitalisations.
- A Minnesota lab confirmed the first US coronavirus case associated with Brazil variant. Laboratory testing by the Minnesota Department of Health has confirmed the first known coronavirus case in the United States associated with a more contagious variant of the novel coronavirus originally seen in Brazil, the agency said on Monday.
- Wuhan doctor: China authorities stopped me sounding alarm on Covid. A doctor from the Wuhan hospital hit hardest by the Covid-19 epidemic has said he and colleagues suspected the virus was highly transmissible in early January last year, weeks before Chinese authorities admitted it, but were prevented from warning anyone.
- Mexico’s official death toll from the coronavirus passed 150,000 on Monday following a surge in infections in recent weeks that has stretched the health system in the capital to the limit and led to the president contracting Covid.
- The Covid-19 vaccine divide between rich and poor nations is worsening by the day, the World Health Organization warned Monday, insisting the failure to distribute doses fairly could cost the global economy trillions of dollars.
- Moderna said on Monday it believes its coronavirus vaccine protects against the British and South African variants, although it will test a new booster shot aimed at the South Africa variant after concluding the antibody response could be diminished. Britain’s health minister and health officials have said they believe the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines being rolled out in the country work against the UK variant.
Kazakhstan may have to impose another lockdown to avoid overcrowding hospitals in March when it expects a fresh peak in Covid-19 cases, Reuters cites the healthcare minister Alexei Tsoy telling a government meeting on Tuesday.
The Central Asian of 19 million bordering China and Russia introduced two lockdowns last year to contain the spread of the virus.
A 23-year-old student from China and his parents arrived in the UK last January. Here’s a short timeline of what happened next in a timeline of the UK’s coronavirus cases:
The full story in Indonesia nearing 1m cases:
Australia expects AstraZeneca vaccine to be rolled out in March despite EU export threat
The Australian government expects doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to be rolled out in March and that there will be no shortfalls, despite threats by the European Union to block exports of the vaccine due to a lack of supply.
A spokesman for the health minister, Greg Hunt, said there was immense competition for Covid-19 vaccines around the world.
“We foresaw that early on,” the spokesman said. “We have the comfort and security of sovereign production here in Australia. That is why Australia has a contract with AstraZeneca and CSL for the onshore manufacture of approximately 50 million doses ... these doses are being manufactured in Melbourne.
“This puts us in a strong position and it’s expected that doses will be available in March, as will international doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.”
As well as the 50 million doses being produced on-shore, Australia will also import 3.8 million doses:
Indonesia on brink of 1m cases
Indonesia is set to officially surpass one million coronavirus cases on Tuesday, a grim milestone for the Southeast Asian nation that has struggled since last March to get the Covid-19 pandemic under control, Reuters reports.
The world’s fourth-most-populous country had recorded 999,256 coronavirus infections as of Monday, with the average daily increase running above 11,000 for more than a week, according to official data. Deaths from the respiratory disease have totalled 28,132.
Those numbers are some of the highest in Asia but health experts believe the true spread is likely to be far worse.
The government started its vaccination programme and tightened movement restrictions earlier this month as hospitals came under mounting strain.
Indonesia has been criticised for having among the lowest testing and contact-tracing rates globally, and for focusing on securing vaccines at the expense of trying to enforce health protocols.
The full story on the latest from New Zealand now:
The former head of a Canadian casino company and his actor wife have been fined after chartering a private plane to a remote community near the Alaska border and receiving coronavirus vaccines meant for vulnerable Indigenous residents.
According to officials, Rodney and Ekaterina Baker travelled by chartered plane to Beaver Creek, a community of 100 in Canada’s Yukon territory, where a mobile team was administering the Moderna vaccine to residents. Among those slated for the vaccine were elderly members of the White River First Nation.
At the mobile clinic, the Bakers claimed to be workers at a local motel, according to reporting by the Yukon News.
But after the couple asked for a ride to the airport and the hotel confirmed they weren’t employees, staff with the mobile clinic called enforcement officers:
Britain will offer its genomics expertise to countries lacking resources to identify new variants of the virus that causes Covid-19, AFP reports that the government will announce Tuesday.
“This pandemic has shown that the foundations of so many of the exciting experiences that make life worth living are contingent not just on our health, or the health of our neighbours, but the health of people we’ve never met,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock was to say, according to extracts of his speech released by the government.
“When one of us suffers, we all suffer. So we must work to promote health security in every single part of the world,” he was to add.
Britain hopes to use its presidency of the G7 this year to push for a “more collaborative and effective global health system” to ensure the international community is better prepared for future threats.
As part of this, Britain will offer resources to help countries analyse new strains through the “New Variant Assessment Platform”, which will be led by Public Health England (PHE) in partnership with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) SARS-CoV-2 Global Laboratory Working Group.
British laboratories will work directly on samples sent from abroad or will provide “expert advice and support remotely” where needed, said the government.
Countries will apply for help through the WHO.
Britain has carried out more than half of all SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences submitted to the global database, and its scientists identified the variant currently running rampant across the country.
Mexico death toll passes 150,000
Mexico’s official death toll from the coronavirus passed 150,000 on Monday following a surge in infections in recent weeks that has stretched the health system in the capital to the limit and led to the president contracting Covid.
The Health Ministry on Monday reported 659 new deaths, bringing the total death toll to 150,273. There were 8,521 new cases on Monday for a total of 1,771,740 confirmed infections.
The government says the real number of infected people is likely significantly higher than the confirmed cases.
Mexico has struggled to contain the pandemic and has the fourth-highest death toll worldwide. In the capital, Mexico City, families are struggling to buy or rent vital tanks of oxygen for relatives suffering from Covid.
On Sunday, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, 67, who has a history of heart problems and high blood pressure, said he had tested positive for Covid and was being treated for mild symptoms.
Government officials close to Lopez Obrador said on Monday they would undergo testing. Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell, who has spearheaded Mexico’s response to the outbreak, said in a video call during a regular government news conference that he was self-isolating due to potential exposure.
Updated
Vaccine hesitancy: what is behind the fears circulating in BAME communities?
Several national surveys suggest people from black, Asian and minority backgrounds are far more likely to reject having the Covid-19 vaccine than their white counterparts. Nazia Parveen and Annabel Sowemimo explain the root causes of this hesitancy:
More from New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern who has just held her first post-cabinet press conference of 2021 and asked her people to remain “unified”.
“New Zealand will only truly feel like it returns to normal when there is a certain level of normality in the rest of the world too.”
“But given the risks in the world around us and the uncertainty of the global rollout of the vaccine, we can expect our borders to be impacted for much of this year.”
“For travel to restart, we need one of two things. We either need the confidence that being vaccinated means you don’t pass Covid-19 on to others – and we don’t know that yet – or we need enough of our population to be vaccinated and protected that people can safely re-enter New Zealand. Both possibilities will take some time.”
“In the meantime, we will continue to pursue travel bubbles with Australia and the Pacific, but the rest of the world simply poses too great a risk to our health and our economy to take the risk at this stage.”
“Our team of 5 million worked too hard last year for us to risk any of the gains we have made. Health gains that see us going about our daily lives pretty much as normal, and saw the economy bounce back strongly from the initial shock. We need to remain unified, we showed last year how good we are at that and that’s exactly what we intend and need to do for 2021.”
Ardern disappointed that Australia PM closed border with New Zealand following new case
Ardern’s comments about keeping borders closed do not apply to the travel bubble with Australia.
Ardern said on Tuesday she is “disappointed” that Australian Scott Morrison decided to close its border to New Zealand after a single case was identified in the community this week.
Ardern said her government was still working to have a travel bubble up and running with Australia in the first quarter of this year, but a country to country bubble was now looking unlikely, as each state in Australia had different Covid-19 restrictions.
The prime minister said she needs to have confidence the two-way bubble won’t be susceptible to “short-notice border closures” such as happened on Monday.
Although it was Australia’s decision to close its border to New Zealand, Ardern offered assurance that the sole Northland community case was “well under control”.
New Zealand PM: borders to remain closed to foreign nationals until Kiwis 'vaccinated and protected'
Prime minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern has said her country’s borders will remain closed to foreign nationals until Kiwis are “vaccinated and protected” and this would be “some time away”.
“We have taken a conservative approach and I stand by that decision,” Ardern said.
Vaccination of the general New Zealand population is not slated to begin until at least the middle of 2021, while border workers and health workers will begin receiving vaccinations in the second quarter of this year.
Ardern said her government would prioritise travel bubbles with Australia and the Pacific but any opening up to the rest of the globe would need her country - and the rest of the world - to return to some state of normal.
Updated
California leaders have reached an agreement to extend the state’s eviction moratorium through the end of June in an effort to stave off an expected surge in housing displacement as Covid continues to spread.
The plan, agreed on by top legislative leaders and the governor, extends until 30 June a state law scheduled to expire next Monday that prevents landlords from evicting tenants who could not pay their rent between March and August because of the coronavirus pandemic and those who have been able to pay at least 25% of their rent:
Updated
Coronavirus deaths and cases per day in the US dropped markedly over the past couple of weeks but are still running at alarmingly high levels, and the effort to snuff out coronavirus is becoming an ever more urgent race between the vaccine and the mutating virus, AP reports.
The government’s top infectious-disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, said the improvement in numbers around the country appears to reflect a “natural peaking and then plateauing” after a holiday surge, rather than the arrival of the vaccine in mid-December.
The US is recording just under 3,100 deaths a day on average, down from more than 3,350 less than two weeks ago. New cases are averaging about 170,000 a day after peaking at almost 250,000 on 11 January. The number of hospitalised Covid patients has fallen to about 110,000 from a high of 132,000 on 7 January.
Wuhan doctor: China authorities stopped me sounding alarm on Covid
A doctor from the Wuhan hospital hit hardest by the Covid-19 epidemic has said he and colleagues suspected the virus was highly transmissible in early January last year, weeks before Chinese authorities admitted it, but were prevented from warning anyone.
The doctor’s testimony – in a new BBC documentary on the 54 days between the first known case of coronavirus and the Wuhan lockdown – adds to mounting evidence of Beijing’s early attempts to cover up the virus outbreak, and intimidate healthworkers into staying quiet:
Minnesota lab confirms first US coronavirus case associated with Brazil variant
Laboratory testing by the Minnesota Department of Health has confirmed the first known coronavirus case in the United States associated with a more contagious variant of the novel coronavirus originally seen in Brazil, the agency said on Monday.
Reuters: The announcement came as President Joe Biden signed an order extending a travel ban barring nearly all non-US citizens who have recently been to Brazil, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Ireland and 26 other European countries from entering the United States.
The director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday that the federal government is stepping up efforts to track coronavirus mutations as a flurry of more infectious variants emerge around the globe.
The variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus known as Brazil P.1 was detected in a specimen from a Minnesota resident with recent travel history to Brazil, the state health department said in a press release. The agency said it marks the first documented instance of the P.1 variant in the United States.
While the Brazil variant is thought to be more transmissible than the initial strain of virus that causes Covid-19, it is not known whether the illness it causes is more severe.
Similarities between the Brazilian variant and a South African variety that reduces the efficacy of three antibody treatments developed for patients suggest the Brazil P.1 form may likewise resist antibody treatment, scientists have said.
The so-called UK variant that first emerged in Britain has already been detected in at least 20 US states.
On Christmas morning, Siouxsie Wiles got a call from her father-in-law. He he had woken up feeling fluey after attending an event a few days before.
As he spoke, Wiles looked up his closest Covid-19 testing centre on her phone. “I recommend you give them a call,” she told him, “because you are not coming for Christmas dinner.”
Her parents-in-law had been down to bring the ham. Christmas was, if not exactly cancelled, deferred to the day after Boxing Day, when Wiles’ father-in-law’s test came back negative.
It will no doubt have struck some as an overreaction. Wiles and her family live in Auckland, where local transmission of coronavirus had not been recorded since November. Since then, life in New Zealand had seemed deceptively normal.
That is what concerns Wiles. Last January she was a microbiologist at the University of Auckland, specialising in the scientific possibilities of bioluminescence, as well as a widely awarded media commentator.
Twelve months later, Wiles is New Zealand’s most famous scientist (at least its most visible, thanks to her trademark pink hair) and a lynchpin of its pandemic success, having been tireless and ever-present in her efforts to explain how the virus spreads:
Rich and poor vaccine divide worsening, warns WHO
The Covid-19 vaccine divide between rich and poor nations is worsening by the day, the World Health Organization warned Monday, insisting the failure to distribute doses fairly could cost the global economy trillions of dollars.
AFP reports that the WHO said it needed $26bn this year for its programme aimed at speeding up the development, procurement and equitable delivery of vaccines, treatments and tests to beat the coronavirus pandemic.
“Rich countries are rolling out vaccines, while the world’s least-developed countries watch and wait,” lamented WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“Every day that passes, the divide grows larger between the world’s haves and have nots,” he told a press conference.
“Vaccine nationalism might serve short-term political goals. But it’s in every nation’s own medium and long-term economic interest to support vaccine equity.”
Tedros cited a study commissioned by the Research Foundation of the International Chamber of Commerce, which represents more than 45 million companies in over 100 countries.
“Vaccine nationalism could cost the global economy up to $9.2tn, and almost half of that - $4.5tn - would be incurred in the wealthiest economies,” he said.
The report said that the financial damage of the pandemic in wealthy countries could not be fixed unless the impact of the crisis in developing nations was also addressed, due to the inter-connectivity of economies around the globe.
Tedros said investing in the so-called ACT Accelerator programme, to try to curtail the pandemic on a pooled and equitable basis, was therefore not charity, but simply “economic common sense”.
Moderna says its jab works against new variants
Moderna said on Monday it believes its coronavirus vaccine protects against the British and South African variants, although it will test a new booster shot aimed at the South Africa variant after concluding the antibody response could be diminished, Reuters reports.
Britain’s health minister and health officials have said they believe the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines being rolled out in the country work against the UK variant.
California eases lockdown
Meanwhile the US state of California eased strict stay-at-home orders on Monday, allowing restaurants to reopen for outdoor dining and greater social mixing as state public health officials cited slowing rates of coronavirus infections and hospitalisations.
Reuters: the announcement marked the most tangible sign yet that California, which emerged in recent months as a leading US hotspot of the pandemic, has moved beyond the worst days of a crisis that pushed much of its healthcare system to the breaking point.
The improved outlook in California, the most populous US state with 40 million residents, came as the country as a whole surpassed the alarming milestone of 25 million known infections, with nearly 419,000 lives lost during the pandemic.
California’s stay-at-home restrictions, among the most stringent constraints on business and social life imposed anywhere in the country, were triggered in early December when available space in hospital intensive care units reached maximum capacity.
Governor Gavin Newsom said infection rates and hospital admissions have since declined dramatically. Projections show available ICU capacity climbing well above minimum thresholds over the next month.
Biden warns deaths will pass 600,000 before US turns corner
US President Joe Biden on Monday appeared to boost his goal for coronavirus vaccinations in his first 100 days in office, suggesting that the nation could soon be vaccinating 1.5 million Americans on average per day, AP reports.
Biden signalled his increasing bullishness on the pace of vaccinations after signing an executive order to boost government purchases from US manufacturers. It was among a flurry of moves by Biden during his first full week to show he’s taking swift action to heal an ailing economy as talks with Congress over a $1.9tn stimulus package showed few signs of progress.
Biden’s new vaccination target comes after he and his aides faced criticism for the 100 million goal in his first 100 days in office. The US has exceeded a pace of 1 million doses per day over the last week.
“I think we may be able to get that to ... 1.5 million a day, rather than 1 million a day,” Biden said, “but we have to meet that goal of a million a day.”
Biden added that he expects widespread availability of the vaccines for Americans by spring, with the US “well on our way to herd immunity” necessary to end the pandemic by summer. Even so, he warned the nation was going to be “in this for a while, and could see between “600,000 and 660,000 deaths before we begin to turn the corner in a major way.”
A toll of 660,000 would be roughly equivalent to one in 500 Americans.
The current US death toll is 420,000.
Updated
Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.
You can find me on Twitter @helenrsullivan.
US President Joe Biden says that he expects widespread availability of the vaccines for Americans by spring, with the U.S. “well on our way to herd immunity” necessary to end the pandemic by summer. Even so, he warned the nation was going to be “in this for a while, and could see between “600,000 and 660,000 deaths before we begin to turn the corner in a major way.”
The US toll is currently just over 420,000.
Here are the other key developments from the last few hours:
- The UK will announce on Tuesday enforced quarantine for travellers arriving in the country from abroad, the broadcaster ITV reported, after prime minister Boris Johnson said that new coronavirus variants were prompting a review of border policy.
- The Italian government on Monday sent a letter of formal notice to Pfizer calling on the drug company to respect its contractual commitments over its Covid-19 vaccine deliveries, the government special commissioner said.
- Spain has recorded a record number of weekend cases, logging 93,822 infections between Friday and Monday, and 767 deaths. The latest statistics, published by the health ministry on Monday, make the last weekend the worst of the entire pandemic in terms of new cases. The number of cases of the virus per 100,ooo people over the past 14 days rose from 829 on Friday to 885 on Monday.
- Rioting broke out for a third night in Dutch cities on Monday, initially linked to protests over a government decision to add a night time curfew to the Netherlands’ already strict lockdown.
- The number of people hospitalised in France for Covid-19 rose by more than a 1,000 over the last two days, a trend unseen since November 16, and the number of patients in intensive care units for the disease exceeded 3,000 for the first time since December 9. The country’s Covid-19 death toll was up by 445, at 73,494, the world’s seventh highest, versus a rise of 172 on Sunday.
- People in Iceland will soon receive vaccination certificates that could allow them to circumvent quarantine requirements. Iceland’s Directorate of Health said on Monday is in the process of finalising a system for Icelanders who have been fully vaccinated to obtain a Covid-19 vaccination certificate.
- The World Health Organization is providing risk management advice to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Japanese authorities regarding the holding of the Tokyo Olympics, but the top priority is vaccinating health workers worldwide against Covid-19, its top emergency expert said.
- Moderna has confirmed that its Covid-19 vaccine is expected to be protective against the two new South African and British strains of the virus, Reuters reports.
- Some 8.8% of global working hours were lost in 2020 due to the pandemic, roughly four times the number lost in the 2009 financial crisis, but there are “tentative signs” of recovery, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said.
