We’re now closing this blog. Thanks for reading along. You can read all our coronavirus coverage here
A summary of today's developments
- The US Food and Drug Administration gave full approval to the Pfizer vaccine for Covid-19 in a decision likely to trigger a wave of formal vaccine requirements from government departments, businesses, schools and other bodies.
- New York City officials were first to announce a vaccine mandate for school employees including teachers, with the Pentagon later ssying it is preparing to make the jabs compsulsory for US military personnel.
- Experts warned that general authorisation was made behind closed doors based on six months worth of data from 12,000 people – making it an extremely rare case for a mass use vaccine that could “set a precedent of lowered standards for future vaccine approvals.”
- Pfizer shares were up around 2.5% and BioNTech shares were up more than 10% following the announcement.
- Vietnam deployed soldiers to help enforce a strict lockdown in Ho Chi Minh City, after authorities claimed enforcement of recent curbs has not been sufficiently strict – with people from today people from today generally prohibited from leaving their homes.
- The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that Covid-19 booster shots should be delayed as priority ought be given to raising vaccination rates in countries where only 2% of the population has been inoculated.
- Israel said it will offer Covid-19 vaccinations to students on school grounds as it announced the school year begin next week, despite opposition to the “divisive” plan from the education minister.
- New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian said zero-Covid strategies are “completely unrealistic”. The Australian regional head opined that all states and territories must learn to live with the virus when borders are eventually permitted reopen.
- Government policies – particularly mandatory masking – are being imposed on the basis of uncertain evidence, claimed Prof Robert Dingwall, a sociologist and critic of Covid jabs for children who recently left the UK government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation expert committee.
- A Spanish court rejected a renewed request, following a prior denial last week, by the regional government of Catalonia to reimpose a virus curfew in Barcelona and dozens of other cities, arguing the measure was “disproportionate” as infections have fallen.
- Berlin nightclubs are set to reopen after a court repealed a blanket ban on dance events in closed rooms in the German capital, but only for the vaccinated or those who have recently recovered from Covid.
We’re now closing this blog. You can read all our coronavirus coverage here. Take care.
Updated
Some more lines from Reuters on the FDA approval.
- In Pfizer’s clinical trial, approximately 12,000 recipients of the vaccine have been followed for at least six months.
- The FDA’s approval extends the shelf life of Pfizer shots from six months to nine months.
- It also confirms that the vaccine increases risk of heart inflammation, particularly among young men in the week following their second shot.
- The Pentagon said it is preparing to make the vaccine mandatory for US military personnel.
- The approval makes it easier for physicians to prescribe a third dose of Pfizer’s vaccine off-label for people who may benefit from additional protection.
- The FDA is not recommending that children under age 12 get the vaccine because there is not “proper data” proving its safety.
- Pfizer is expected to submit data this fall to support the shot’s emergency-use authorisation for children under 12 based on smaller doses.
- The American Academy of Pediatrics, representing children’s doctors, discouraged having children under 12 receive the vaccine.
- Pfizer shares were up around 2.5% and BioNTech shares were up more than 10%.
The full approval of the Pfizer jab in the US “should give added confidence” that it is safe and effective, president Joe Biden has said.
However, experts have warned of concerns that general authorisation was made behind closed doors based on six months worth of data despite trials being designed for two years – making it an extremely rare case for a mass use vaccine.
“There is no control group after Pfizer offered the product to placebo participants before the trials were completed,” Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate on the FDA’s psychopharmacologic drugs advisory committee told the BMJ.
“Full approval of Covid-19 vaccines must be done in an open public forum for all to see. It could set a precedent of lowered standards for future vaccine approvals.”
But the acting FDA commissioner, Janet Woodcock, who described approval of the vaccine as “a milestone as we continue to battle the Covid-19 pandemic”, said the data met its standards.
While this and other vaccines have met the FDA’s rigorous, scientific standards for emergency use authorisation, as the first FDA-approved Covid-19 vaccine, the public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product.
The FDA has officially approved the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. While all three COVID vaccines have met FDA's strict standards for emergency use, this FDA approval should give added confidence that this vaccine is safe and effective.
— President Biden (@POTUS) August 23, 2021
If you're not vaccinated yet, now is the time. https://t.co/XaxFdWHbRc
Updated
As we reported last week here on the blog, the BBC reports that Chinese state media have increasingly been pushing a campaign which falsely claims Covid-19 originated in the US – in an attempt to distract from growing scrutiny over virology labs in Wuhan.
Ahead of the release of a US intelligence investigation, following a congressional report which included circumstantial evidence implying a lab leak was at least plausible, Chinese propagandists have pushed a conspiracy suggesting that Covid was made and leaked from an American military base in Maryland, about 80 km north of Washington DC.
The BBC reports that it was previously the centre of the US biological weapons programme and now houses biomedical labs researching viruses including Ebola and smallpox. Experts suggest the campaign has succeeded in convincing many Chinese people.
“For the most part, the biggest concern [of the Chinese government] is domestic legitimacy,” Georgia State University global communication assistant professor Maria Repnikova told the BBC.
Zhao Lijian, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, recently backed a rap song by a Chinese nationalist group suggesting dastardly plots were cooked up in the facility.
With growing western coverage over the origin of the virus, with a Channel 4 documentary last night posing the question – did Covid-19 leak from a lab in China – the superpower’s media machine has been on the offensive.
The Chinese state broadcaster CCTV has aired a special report, “The Dark History behind Fort Detrick”, focusing on containment breaches at the lab in 2019, to reinforce claims of poor lab security made by Chinese officials, the BBC reports.
A global pandemic. A maze of unanswered questions.
— Channel 4 Dispatches (@C4Dispatches) August 22, 2021
The lethal cost of Covid-19 has been felt around the world - but where did the virus come from? Did it leak from a lab, or is that just a conspiracy theory? #CovidLeak?
Tonight at 10.15 on @Channel4 1/ pic.twitter.com/ZuIF8zREIB
Florida’s battle over school mask mandates has reached the governor’s doorstep after education leaders in the state capital, Tallahassee, became the latest to defy Ron DeSantis’s ban.
Rocky Hanna, superintendent of the Leon county school district, announced yesterday that masks would be required to be worn by students in pre-kindergarten to eighth grade, beginning today. Only medical exemptions will be allowed.
Updated
Anti-vaccine protesters occupied the headquarters of ITV News and Channel 4 News in London on Monday afternoon, the latest in a series of actions aimed at the media.
Jon Snow, the Channel 4 News presenter, was chased into one of the building’s side entrances by conspiracy theorists shouting at him.
Livestream footage showed hundreds of protesters shouting scientifically unsupported claims about the Covid-19 vaccine programme and blaming the media for promoting so-called vaccine passports, which they view as incompatible with British values.
Italy has reported 44 coronavirus-related deaths on Monday, compared with 23 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections fell to 4,168 from 5,923.
Rueters reports Italy has registered 128,795 deaths linked to Covid since its outbreak emerged in February last year, the second-highest toll in Europe after Britain and the eighth-highest in the world. The country has reported 4.49m cases to date.
Patients in hospital with Covid - not including those in intensive care - stood at 3,928 on Monday, up from 3,767 a day earlier.
There were 45 new admissions to intensive care units, up from 33 on Sunday. The total number of intensive care patients increased to 485 from a previous 472.
Some 101,341 tests for Covid were carried out in the past day, compared with a previous 175,539, the health ministry said.
China’s health authority has reported no new locally transmitted symptomatic Covid cases for the first time since the recent Delta variant outbreak began in July.
While it is unclear whether the figure will remain at zero in the weeks to come, experts said it was yet another sign that Beijing’s tough “zero tolerance” approach was unlikely to be changed.
More than 1,200 people have been confirmed infected in an outbreak that officials said was mainly driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant, which was brought in from abroad and caused a cluster in late July in the eastern city of Nanjing.
Updated
UK reports 31,914 new cases and 40 further deaths
In the UK, 31,914 people have tested positive for Covid in the last 24 hours.
A further 40 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus, according to the latest update to the government’s coronavirus dashboard on Monday.
Official figures showed another 40,345 people had their first dose of a Covid vaccine, with 116,352 getting their second jab. This means almost 77% of the adult population are fully vaccinated.
Updated
Following the full US approval for the Pfizer jab, New York City officials have been first to announce a vaccine mandate for school employees – in what is expected to be a flurry of such moves across the country.
The Associated Press reports that officials have said all New York City public school teachers and other staffers will have to get vaccinated against the coronavirus as the nation’s largest school system prepares for classes to start next month.
The city previously said teachers, like other city employees, would have to get the shots or get tested weekly for the virus. The new policy marks the first no-option vaccination mandate for a broad group of city workers in the nation’s most populous city, though mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Friday that coaches and students in football, basketball and other purportedly “high-risk” sports would have to get inoculated before play begins.
Now, about 148,000 school employees – and contractors who work in schools – would have to get at least a first dose by 27 September, according to an announcement from the Democratic mayor and the city health and education departments.
The city has not immediately said what the penalty will be for refusing, or whether there will be exemptions. The previous vaccinate-or-test requirement had provisions for unpaid suspensions for workers who did not comply.
At least 63% of school employees have been vaccinated. That figure doesn’t include those who may have gotten their shots outside the city.
New York City last week began requiring proof of vaccination t o enter restaurant dining rooms, gyms and many other public places, a first-in-the-nation policy that a few other cities have copied since it was announced. Meanwhile, New York state announced last week that hospital and nursing home workers would have to get inoculated, the AP reports.
Updated
Berlin nightclubs are set to reopen after a court repealed a blanket ban on dance events in closed rooms in the German capital, but only for the vaccinated or those who have recently recovered from Covid.
After a nightclub owner sued local authorities, a Berlin-Brandenburg court said that the restrictions were fair and sensible but “likely to be disproportionate” for those who have been vaccinated or recently recovered, DJ Mag reports.
However, for unvaccinated people – even with a negative test result – the ban continues to apply. The court said that an epidemic situation of national scope remained, and therefore that the regulations should continue to be generally applied, according to local media.
Updated
In other news, the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has said that he will ask his health minister to set an end date for the use of face masks as a means of reducing Covid transmission
Reuters reports that masks have become a political issue in Brazil, with Bolsonaro long ranting against their use and frequently refusing to wear one in public despite a legal requirement to do so.
In a radio interview, the president argued that with much of the population already vaccinated or having caught the virus, masks are not needed and that he hoped a date would be set by the end of the day.
Any such move could prove to be largely moot, however, with states and municipalities free to set their own Covid-19 restrictions in Brazil. Any federal government position on the matter would likely only function as a guideline, though it would be considered a victory by Bolsonaro’s far-right base.
Some epidemiologists say it is too early for such a move, especially due to the rise of the Delta variant in Brazil. Although nearly 60% of Brazil’s population have received their first dose, only 25% are fully vaccinated.
Bolsonaro said he had also commissioned a study into the use of mask wearing with a view to recommending an end to their widespread use.
Brazil, which at over 570,000 has the world’s second highest coronavirus death toll behind only the US, has faced claims that a lack of coordinated national social distancing measures have propelled the death rate.
Updated
But the acting FDA commissioner, Janet Woodcock, who said approval of the vaccine was “a milestone as we continue to battle the Covid-19 pandemic”, said the data has met its standards.
While this and other vaccines have met the FDA’s rigorous, scientific standards for emergency use authorisation, as the first FDA-approved Covid-19 vaccine, the public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product.
While millions of people have already safely received Covid-19 vaccines, we recognise that for some, the FDA approval of a vaccine may now instil additional confidence to get vaccinated. Today’s milestone puts us one step closer to altering the course of this pandemic in the US.
However, the decision to grant full approval has already met criticism. The British Medical Journal reports that the FDA should demand adequate, controlled studies with long term follow up, and make data publicly available, before authorising.
It said that Pfizer and BioNTech posted updated results for their ongoing phase 3 trial on 28 July, but without any new data and containing an identical topline efficacy result as the previous preprint – following its admission of significantly waning efficacy that it used to justify calls for booster shots.
Senior BMJ editor Peter Doshi writes:
Whatever one thinks about the ‘95% effective’ claims even the most enthusiastic commentators have acknowledged that measuring vaccine efficacy two months after dosing says little about just how long vaccine-induced immunity will last. The concern, of course, was decreased efficacy over time. ‘Waning immunity’ is a known problem for influenza vaccines, with some studies showing near zero effectiveness after just three months, meaning a vaccine taken early may ultimately provide no protection by the time ‘flu season’ arrives some months later.
If vaccine efficacy wanes over time, the crucial question becomes what level of effectiveness will the vaccine provide when a person is actually exposed to the virus? Unlike Covid vaccines, influenza vaccine performance has always been judged over a full season, not a couple months.
And so the recent reports from Israel’s ministry of health caught my eye. In early July, they reported that efficacy against infection and symptomatic disease “fell to 64%.” By late July it had fallen to 39% where Delta is the dominant strain. This is very low. For context, the FDA’s expectation is of “at least 50%” efficacy for any approvable vaccine.
He added that Pfizer allowed all trial participants to be formally de-anonymised to researchers starting last December, and placebo recipients to get vaccinated, after it received emergency approval. By 13 March, 93% of trial participants had been unblinded, officially entering “open-label followup” and therefore the preprint was based on the 7% of trial participants who remained anonymous at six months.
FDA gives full approval to Pfizer vaccine for Covid-19
The US Food and Drug Administration has given full approval to the Pfizer vaccine for Covid-19. The vaccine and others have been in use under emergency use authorisation.
The decision is likely to trigger a wave of formal vaccine requirements from government departments, businesses, schools and other bodies.
Many observers hope formal approval will spur an increase in vaccine take-up among sections of the population, particularly in Republican-led states, so-far resistant to government advice.
Vietnam: soldiers to enforce Ho Chi Minh City lockdown
Vietnam has today deployed soldiers to help enforce a strict lockdown in Ho Chi Minh City, its biggest urban area and centre of its worst coronavirus outbreak to date.
Reuters reports that Vietnam implemented movement restrictions in the capital in early July, but announced its harshest curbs last week as infections have continued to surge. Authorities claimed enforcement of recent curbs has not been sufficiently strict.
The government said on Friday a tighter lockdown would begin today, prohibiting people from leaving their homes, controversially even for food, and said the military would step in to help.
The announcement, later amended so that people in some areas could still shop for food, was subsequently reverted to a total ban, triggering confusion and panic-buying at supermarkets in the city over the weekend.
Witnesses said soldiers were delivering food to residents of the city and images broadcast by state media showed armed soldiers manning checkpoints and checking documents.
Vietnam has over recent weeks sent 14,600 additional doctors and nurses to the city and its neighbouring provinces to support its overwhelmed medical system, the ministry said. Even patients with mild or no symptoms have been told to self-isolate at home.
Updated
A Spanish court has rejected a request by the regional government of Catalonia to reimpose a virus curfew in Barcelona and dozens of other cities, arguing the measure was “disproportionate” as infections have fallen.
AFP reports that the Catalan government on Friday sought court approval to impose a nightly curfew in municipalities of 20,000 residents or more where infection rates exceed 125 cases per 100,000 inhabitants over a seven-day period.
It came a day after Catalonia’s top court refused to blanket-extend across most municipalities in the north-eastern region, which is home to 7.8 million people. The high court of justice of Catalonia had given the green light to extend the curfew three times, but it argued the measure was now only justified in 19 municipalities.
Today, it ruled that the new request for a curfew “was even more unnecessary and disproportionate”.
Updated
Prof Robert Dingwall, a sociologist and critic of Covid jabs for children who recently left the UK government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation expert committee, has claimed government policies are being imposed on the basis of uncertain evidence.
In a blogpost, made a number of comments, including:
Nowhere, perhaps, is this more obvious than in the case of mandatory face masks in community settings, particularly, but not exclusively, in the USA. Otherwise well-respected scientists and scholars seem to have decided that, if they announce that black is white often enough, then this will indeed be the case.
Nothing that follows should be taken as an argument against the truly voluntary adoption of face masks by those who feel personally reassured by wearing them, regardless of the paucity of evidence. However, for masks to be mandated as an act of policy, whether by public or private interests, the bar must be set higher … Interventions without an evidence base are arbitrary acts of power, which rest on coercion, whether direct or indirect, for compliance rather than on the willing assent of those affected.
Classically, the most robust type of evidence for evaluating interventions of this kind is a randomized controlled trial (RCT). There is a dearth of these – and most have been conducted in the context of other respiratory infections – but they generally find little or no benefit. Well-respected figures in public health have been calling for investment in RCTs since the late spring or early summer of 2020 but opportunities have not been taken. Policy leaders have failed to fund RCTs of any NPI (non-pharmaceutical intervention) in the way they have funded trials of potential therapies or vaccine development.
The consequence, of course, is that we are nudged towards regarding our fellow human beings as no more than potential vectors of infection. Everyone is guilty until proven innocent. The trust on which everyday life depends in modern societies is fatally compromised.
If we do not think it is acceptable to have our lives ordered in ways that discriminate against large sections of the population, that impair the development of children, that damage the mental health of the nation and that make each of us fearful of the other, then it is time to hold the advocates of masking to account for the quality of evidence.
Updated
New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian has said zero-Covid strategies are ’completely unrealistic’
Reiterating a previously stated view, the Australian regional head told ABC that all states and territories must learn to live with the virus when borders are eventually permitted reopen.
It’s completely unrealistic. I don’t know any state or nation on the planet who abides by those rules. It’s just not possible. We can’t pretend we’re extra special or very different from other places.
There are opportunities for us to do everything we can to suppress the cases, to reduce the number of people we end up having in hospital, but also accept that every state’s going to have to go through a transition.
Even a state that’s had zero cases for a long time is going to have to open up its borders eventually. And whenever that happens, and whenever that is, you’re going to see an influx of cases. That’s just how the virus works. No amount of government intervention or lockdown is going to get you to zero cases.
I don’t want to ever, ever give a number [of deaths] that’s acceptable, never. And our job is to prevent death and keep people safe. But what we do have to accept is when you are in the middle of a pandemic which is impacting our nation as it has been other nations that we need to appreciate that, unfortunately, lives will be lost.
Updated
Reuters has this fun piece from Lesotho.
Suggest a holiday in Africa and most people picture baking hot sun, palm-fringed beaches or herds of wildebeest galloping across the savannah. Few think of skiing.
Yet the continent contains five mountain ranges with enough seasonal snow to make potential slopes, of which two host rudimentary ski resorts.
Tucked into South Africa’s stunning Drakensburg range, one such resort in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho attracts tourists seeking a more adventurous skiing destination - despite visitor numbers being drastically slashed by Covid-19.
“Yes, it isn’t much,” said snowboard instructor Hope Ramokotjo, glancing over his shoulder at bare brown hills beyond a lone white slope. “But people come here and have a whole lot of fun. For me, as a local, I don’t have to fly out: I’ve got a vacation right here.”
As with other tourist spots, the pandemic – and severe travel restrictions enforced worldwide to try to curb it – has drastically slashed visitor numbers.
They fell to virtually nothing last year and are still only half the usual 17,000 this year, owner of the nearly two-decade old Afriski Resort, Pieter Peyper, said.
The Wall Street Journal has queried why the Food and Drug Administration is attacking ivermectin, a medication it certified as a safe and effective anti-parasitic in 1996 which has received a Nobel prize and has been administered billions of times around the world.
It reports that a group of 10 doctors who call themselves the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance have said ivermectin – which cam fight a number of viruses – is “one of the safest, low-cost, and widely available drugs in the history of medicine”.
The FDA’s warning against ivermectin includes this statement: “Meanwhile, effective ways to limit the spread of Covid-19 continue to be to wear your mask, stay at least 6 feet from others who don’t live with you, wash hands frequently, and avoid crowds.” The WSJ said this was not based on the quality data that the FDA requires for drug approvals.
Ivermectin is being studied by University of Oxford scientists as a possible Covid treatment as part of a UK government-backed study that aims to aid recoveries in non-hospital settings.
It is being used officially to treat Covid in some countries, including India, Mexico, Bolivia, and elsewhere in South America and Asia, despite the lack of World Health Organization approval.
A report in the Times has described ivermectin as a Covid “wonder drug” saying that the data from where it was being used was “compelling” and suggested mortality had fallen.
The Financial Times has also reported on a University of Liverpool metaanalysis which it said “could cut chance of Covid-19 deaths by up to 75%” – with striking results from a number of smaller RCTs.
Updated
As full US authorisation of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine drew near, the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is urging people not to take anti-parasite drug ivermectin.
As with other purported alternative treatments for Covid-19, misinformation about ivermectin has spread on social media and through rightwing media and politicians.
In July, Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, told Fox News host Tucker Carlson: “[If] ivermectin is what those of us who have looked at the evidence think it is … the debate about the vaccines would be over by definition.”
In a Senate hearing last December, doctors touted ivermectin alongside hydroxychloroquine, once championed by Donald Trump, and other alternatives.
In comments shared widely on social media, Dr Pierre Kory, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Aurora St Luke’s medical center in Milwaukee, called ivermectin a “wonder drug”.
Experts said then that test results suggesting ivermectin could inhibit replication of the Sars-CoV-2 virus did not amount to official authorisation for use.
Updated
The de facto leader of a group of New York state hospital employees who are against mandatory vaccination and testing has been suspended without pay.
John Matland, a CT scan technician at Staten Island University hospital, has led opposition to his employer Northwell Health requiring unvaccinated staff to get weekly coronavirus tests by nasal swab or risk losing their jobs, the New York Times reports.
It comes after governor Andrew Cuomo announced that all healthcare workers must have at least one dose of the vaccine by 27 September.
Matland and his allies have said they are being singled out because testing is not required for vaccinated people, despite them still being able to get infected and transmit the virus.
At the radiology department at the hospital’s southern campus, Matland said four out of 10 staff were unvaccinated and “many will not cave”. He told the NYT: “Losing four of us in radiology would cripple the entire department.”
Phlebotomist Nelly DeSilvio told the paper that half of the 30 people in her department were unvaccinated: “If we all left, this would be huge. We are already short-staffed now.”
Updated
A new study from researchers at the University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke’s hospital suggests that hospital-acquired Covid-19 tends to be picked up from other patients, not from healthcare workers.
The peer-reviewed paper analysing data from 22 cases where patients were infected in hospital between March and June last year established that a minority of individuals can cause most of the transmission. It said 20 of the infections were the result of inter-patient spreading.
Dr Chris Illingworth, a lead author on the study, who carried out his research while at Cambridge’s MRC Biostatistics Unit, said:
The fact that the vast majority of infections were between patients suggests that measures taken by hospital staff to prevent staff transmitting the virus to patients, such as the wearing of masks, were likely to have been effective. But it also highlights why it is important that patients themselves are screened for Covid-19 regularly, even if asymptomatic, and wear face masks where possible.
The World Health Organization has posted this video on what it knows about natural immunity v vaccine-induced immunity, featuring its chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan.
If you had #COVID19 do you still need the vaccine? How long should you wait after recovery to get vaccinated? What do we know about natural immunity vs vaccine induced immunity? WHO’s Chief Scientist @doctorsoumya explains in #ScienceIn5 this week ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/70mtKDyVWj
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) August 22, 2021
It follows an interesting story on the BBC which asked whether the differences to your immune defence following a natural infection after Covid could for some people effectively be more robust than those gleaned from vaccination.
Even asking the question bordered on heresy a year ago, when catching Covid for the first time could be deadly, especially for the elderly or people already in poor health. Now, we’re no longer starting with zero immunity as the overwhelming majority of people have either been vaccinated or have already caught the virus.
It is now a serious question that has implications for whether children should ever be vaccinated. And whether we use the virus or booster shots to top up immunity in adults. Both have become contentious issues.
“We could be digging ourselves into a hole, for a very long time, where we think we can only keep Covid away by boosting every year,” Prof Eleanor Riley, an immunologist from the University of Edinburgh, told me.
Prof Adam Finn, a government vaccine adviser, said over-vaccinating people, when other parts of the world had none, was “a bit insane, it’s not just inequitable, it’s stupid”.
You get a broader immune response after being infected with the virus than vaccination. Whether you’ve had Moderna or Pfizer or Oxford-AstraZeneca, your body is learning to spot just one thing - the spike protein.
This is the critical part of the virus to make antibodies to, and the results - by keeping most out of hospital - have been spectacular. But having the other 28 proteins to target too, would give T-cells far more to go at.
“That means if you had a real humdinger of an infection, you may have better immunity to any new variants that pop up as you have immunity to more than just spike,” said Prof Riley.
There is clear evidence that adults who have not had any vaccine dose will have stronger immune defences if they do get vaccinated, even if they have caught Covid before.
But there are two big questions: do vaccinated adults need to be boosted, or is exposure to the virus enough; do children need vaccinating at all, or does a lifetime of encountering build a good immune defence?
Updated
Covid-19 was the 22nd leading cause of death in Wales last month, according to analysis by the Office for National Statistics.
The BBC reports that Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease were the leading causes of death in the UK nation in July, followed by heart disease, but for six of the last 16 months Covid was the main cause – the last time being in February.
Flu and pneumonia were ranked the sixth leading causes of death in July – although its mortality rate was nearly 22% lower than the five-year average, according to the BBC.
In Wales, 1.2% of all deaths registered last month were due to Covid; in June it had been 0.1%, the lowest proportion seen during the pandemic. In England, Covid was the ninth leading cause of death.
The UK government has said it has agreed a contract for 35m more doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, to be delivered from the second half of next year.
It comes after criticism over vaccine stockpiling while other countries are in need of jabs to provide first doses to their populations, and the government acknowledged it was “future-proofing” with its surplus.
In a statement, it said:
The government, through the vaccine taskforce, is putting in place preparations to future-proof the country from the threat of Covid-19 and its variants through safe and effective vaccines, as the UK’s world-renowned vaccination programme continues to protect the population.
These include robust plans for ensuring the country remains ahead of the virus for years to come and for any future booster programmes, as well as working to make the UK a global centre of excellence for the next generation of vaccines.
The health and social care secretary, Sajid Javid, said:
The UK’s phenomenal vaccination programme is providing tens of millions of people with protection from Covid-19, saving 95,200 lives and preventing 82,100 hospitalisations in the over-65s in England alone.
While we continue to build this wall of defence from Covid-19, it’s also vital we do everything we can to protect the country for the future too – whether that’s from the virus as we know it or new variants.
The UK has about 467m jabs on order, with 306m due to be delivered to the UK by the end of 2021, data from life science analytics company Airfinity has found. However, only about 95m jabs will be needed to fulfil the expected demand of vaccinating all over-16s and giving a booster dose to the most vulnerable in autumn.
Updated
Full Pfizer authorisation 'could set precedent for lower vaccine approval standards'
The US Food and Drug Administration is poised to give full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine later today, in the hopes it will facilitate further vaccine mandates and an increase in take-up rates – despite an absence of long-term data of the jab’s efficacy and safety.
The British Medical Journal reports that transparency advocates have criticised the FDA’s decision not to hold a formal advisory committee meeting to discuss Pfizer’s application for full approval, despite last year committing to it.
It had said it was “committed to use an advisory committee composed of independent experts to ensure deliberations about authorisation or licensure are transparent for the public.”
The BMJ cites experts suggesting the decision not to meet to discuss the data was politically driven.
Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate on the FDA’s psychopharmacologic drugs advisory committee, told the BMJ it removed an important scrutiny mechanism for looking at the data and “we have no idea what the data looks like” without a meeting.
These public meetings are imperative in building trust and confidence especially when the vaccines came to market at lightning speed under emergency use authorisation. The public deserves a transparent process, especially as the call for boosters and mandates are rapidly increasing. These meetings offer a platform where questions can be raised, problems tackled, and data scrutinised in advance of an approval.
It is already concerning that full approval is being based on 6 months’ worth of data despite the clinical trials designed for two years. There is no control group after Pfizer offered the product to placebo participants before the trials were completed. Full approval of Covid-19 vaccines must be done in an open public forum for all to see. It could set a precedent of lowered standards for future vaccine approvals.
Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, told the BMJ:
It’s obvious that the FDA has no intention of hearing anyone else’s opinion. But if you make decisions behind closed doors it can feed into hesitancy. It’s important to have a public discussion about what kind of data are there and what the limitations are. As we think about risk versus benefit, we need to know.
Updated
WHO chief suggests booster shots may not be effective, in criticism of Hungary and others
The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has said that Covid-19 booster shots should be delayed as priority should be given to raising vaccination rates in countries where only 1% or 2% of the population has been inoculated.
If vaccination rates are not raised globally, stronger variants of the coronavirus could develop and vaccines intended as booster shots should be donated to countries where people have not received their first or second doses, he said today during a visit to Budapest.
“In addition, there is a debate about whether booster shots are effective at all,” Ghebreyesus told a news conference with the Hungarian foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó.
Those whose immune system is compromised should get a booster shot, though they represent only small percentage of the population, he added.
The WHO said last week current data did not indicate that Covid-19 booster shots are needed and that the most vulnerable people worldwide should be fully vaccinated before high-income countries deploy a top-up.
Hungary has already started widely distributing booster shots, with anyone eligible four months after they received their second dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
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Israel has said it will offer Covid-19 vaccinations to students on school grounds as it announced the school year begin next week, despite opposition to the “divisive” plan from the education minister.
“Pupils... will be vaccinated on school grounds during school hours, subject to parental approval,” a government statement said, confirming classes would begin on 1 September.
Israeli leaders say they are trying to avoid repeating disruptive school closures amid the Covid-19 pandemic. But education minister Yifat Shasha-Biton, who has been bypassed over the decision, said in July that students could feel peer pressure to get vaccines.
“These children are returning after a year and a half. We have to be very sensitive; we are talking about creating boycotts that stress the children. After all, the parents are the ones who should decide if their child will be vaccinated,” she said according to local media.
High school classes in cities with high rates of transmission would require 70% of students to be vaccinated or move to online learning, in another move to coerce people into getting vaccinated.
Ran Balicer, chairman of Israel’s national expert panel on Covid-19, warned on public radio, “of course it will not be possible to completely prevent infections”.
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The British government has said it has warned dozens of domestic private medical testing companies over “misleading prices” for coronavirus travel tests, following a review of costs and standards.
AFP reports that the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) said more than 80 firms would be issued a “two-strike warning” and could be removed from the government’s online database of test providers if they fail to accurately advertise their prices.
It added that the companies would now also face regular spot checks to ensure prices are accurate and providers are legitimate. As many as 82 firms - around 18% of the database - were identified as displaying lower prices on the list than are actually available on their website at the point of checkout, according to the ministry.
It launched the review amid a public backlash over the cost of compulsory Covid-19 tests after returning to the UK from abroad.
The government currently requires a range of tests depending on where the traveller has come from, with even fully vaccinated UK residents required to take at least one test two days after their return.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) regulator is also carrying out a review of the market amid the concerns about the high cost of PCR tests for travel.
Earlier this month, the DHSC said the cost of tests supplied by the state-run health service for international arrivals would be reduced from £88 to £68 for fully vaccinated travellers or those not required to quarantine under the travel rules.
Hello and greetings to everyone reading, wherever you are in the world. Mattha Busby here to take you through the next few hours of global Covid developments. Thanks to my colleague Robyn Vinter for covering the blog up until now. Please feel free to drop me a line on Twitter or message me via email (mattha.busby.freelance@guardian.co.uk) with any tips or thoughts on our coverage.
Updated
Qantas has released a new ad that promotes getting a Covid-19 vaccine by tugging at the heart strings. The ad, which some say has reduced them to tears, appeals to the many Australians who have been separated from loved ones overseas or interstate.
It aims to inspire people to look forward to a vaccinated future where travel is allowed again, with scenes of long-stranded travellers returning home and setting off to see family.
However, the travel ban preventing Australians in India from returning home could breach the law. Scott Morrison’s government was condemned for its “outrageous” decision to introduce fines of up to $66,600 or five years in prison, or both, for anyone defying a travel ban preventing Australians returning home from India.
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The pandemic drove many people to the cookie jar and helped Nabisco, maker of Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, Fig Newtons and other sweet treats weather the worst of the outbreak. But as the company’s profits continue to recover, workers at its US plants are striking over the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico and concessions demanded by their employer in new union contract negotiations.
On 10 August, about 200 workers in Portland, Oregon, represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) went on strike. Union workers in Aurora, Colorado, began their strike on 12 August, followed by those in Richmond, Virginia, on 16 August and Chicago, Illinois on 19 August.
Through the pandemic, Nabisco’s parent company, Mondelēz International, has recorded billions in profits; in the second quarter of 2021, the company reported more than $5.5bn in profits and spent $1.5bn on stock buybacks in the first half of 2021. The CEO of Mondelez International received $16.8m in total compensation in 2020, 544 times the company’s median employee annual compensation of $31,000.
Summary
That’s all from me but before I hand over to my colleague Mattha Busby, here’s a summary of what’s been going on around the world so far today:
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Sweden is likely to see Covid-19 infections gain momentum in the coming months while the curbs to limit the spread will need to be maintained until a higher proportion of the adult population is vaccinated, the health agency has said.
- The arrival of the Delta strain in New Zealand has prompted the country’s Covid-19 response minister to question the efficacy of its ambitious elimination strategy – an approach that has been the backbone of the country’s pandemic response.
- Weeks after the Delta variant of the coronavirus ripped through Jakarta, the Indonesian capital has reached “herd immunity”, the city’s deputy governor said, ahead of an expected decision by the president today on whether to extend Covid-19 curbs.
- China’s health authority reported that there were no new locally transmitted Covid cases for the first time since July, offering more signs that the current outbreak that began late last month may be tapering off soon.
- The Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, received her first dose of the island’s domestically developed coronavirus vaccine, launching its rollout to the public.
- Iran has reported an all-time daily coronavirus death toll, with 684 further fatalities recorded. Sunday’s figure passes the 655 deaths recorded in 24 hours on 16 August.
- Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City is preparing to enter lockdown as cases in the south-east Asian country’s most populous city surge. Residents will be under stay at home orders from Monday, with the army and police deployed.
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Israel has launched an antibody testing programme for children aged three and above as it seeks to monitor much protection from the virus unvaccinated children have developed. Meanwhile, a third dose of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine has significantly improved protection from infection and serious illness among people aged 60 and older in Israel compared with those who received two shots.
- Prime minister Scott Morrison has said Australia’s stringent lockdown strategy will remain in place until at least 70% of country is fully vaccinated as the country records record numbers of cases.
- Japan’s top coronavirus adviser has asked the government to call on doctors who have not been treating Covid patients to help tackle the wave of rapidly rising infections.
Updated
The Japanese government and the Tokyo Metropolitan government has appealed to hospitals in the capital to accept more Covid-19 patients as increasing infections have made it increasingly difficult to get access to care.
Fewer than one in 10 coronavirus patients is hospitalised in Tokyo, fuelling public frustration with the government’s Covid-19 response and undermining voter support for the prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, Reuters reports.
Health minister Norihisa Tamura said, as he stood with the Tokyo governor, Yuriko Koike:
The Delta variant’s strong infectiousness just isn’t comparable to previous ones. We would like to have further support from the medical community to secure hospital beds for coronavirus patients.
This was the first time the national government had issued such a request based on the infectious diseases control law, Tamura said.
With infections showing no sign of slowing down, the government is considering expanding areas covered by state of emergency measures, the Kyodo news agency said. Emergency measures are now in force in 13 prefectures, including Tokyo.
While infection numbers in Japan have been setting daily records, the number of deaths per day has stayed at less than a quarter of the record 216 fatalities recorded on 18 May, as more people are vaccinated.
On Sunday, Japan reported 22,302 Covid-19 cases and 24 deaths, according to public broadcaster NHK.
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Covid is spreading rapidly in the majority Aboriginal town of Wilcannia in far western New South Wales, Australia, with at least 39 cases recorded in a week in a community of just 750 people.
Locals say the Delta outbreak could be worse than daily case numbers show amid long delays in test results and reports that swabs taken last week were not collected for processing over the weekend.
The World Health Organization director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has said that Covid-19 booster shots should be delayed, as priority should be given to raising vaccination rates in countries where only 1% or 2% of the population has been inoculated.
If vaccination rates are not raised globally, stronger variants of the coronavirus could develop and vaccines intended as booster shots should be donated to countries where people have not received their first or second doses, he said during visit to Budapest.
Updated
Shaftesbury, the central London landlord that owns parts of Chinatown, Soho and Covent Garden, has reported that Londoners and domestic tourists are returning in growing numbers, bringing footfall back to about half the level before the pandemic.
The cafes, bars and restaurants in the capital’s West End are experiencing a strong recovery as visitors spend time in the area’s hospitality and leisure venues. Footfall has risen to 50-60% of pre-Covid levels.
Australian police have issued 31 fines to people who attended an illegal Sunday night church service in Blacktown in the heart of Sydney’s Covid-19 outbreak hotspots.
Police went to Christ Embassy Sydney church around 7.30pm on Sunday after being tipped off about a gathering in breach of public health orders.
Sweden warns of rising Covid-19 infections over the coming months
Sweden is likely to see Covid-19 infections gain momentum in the coming months while the curbs to limit the spread will need to be maintained until a higher proportion of the adult population is vaccinated, the Health Agency has said.
Sweden, which has opted against lockdowns and mostly relied on voluntary measures, has experienced a lull in the pandemic during the summer with few deaths and hospitalisations, Reuters reports. However, cases have risen in recent weeks and that trend is expected to continue as schools reopen and people return to work.
The Health Agency said in a statement:
All our three scenarios point to increased spread during the autumn. More people are assumed to need hospital and intensive care, but at significantly lower levels than before during the pandemic.
While infections have been lower during summer, the rapid spread of the highly infectious Delta variant has led authorities to urge Swedes to remain on their guard, especially as colder weather forces people indoors.
It said that current restrictions and recommendations, mainly to limit social interactions, isolate if sick and work from home if possible, should be kept in place until more people had received Covid jabs. Around 65% of the adult population is fully vaccinated.
It said:
When the vaccination coverage rate is high enough so that healthcare does not risk being overloaded the Public Health Agency considers it reasonable to phase out most infection control measures, despite a spread of the virus.
Sweden has seen significantly higher deaths per capita than its Nordic neighbours during the pandemic but lower than in most European countries.
Updated
Russia reported 19,454 new Covid-19 cases on Monday, the first time the daily tally has dipped below 20,000 since 23 June as authorities blamed a case surge on the infectious Delta variant.
The government coronavirus task force also reported 776 coronavirus-related deaths in the last 24 hours nationwide.
Former Indonesian social affairs minister Juliari Batubara has been sentenced to 12 years in prison over a multimillion dollar Covid-19 graft scandal, the Jakarta Corruption Court has ruled.
A judge said the former politician was found “convincingly guilty of corruption” after receiving 32.4bn rupiah ($2.25m) in kickbacks in relation to the procurement of goods intended for Covid-19 social assistance packages.
The politician, who the court found had intervened in the tender process, was also fined 500m rupiah, and ordered to pay back 14.5bn rupiah in embezzled funds used for personal expenses, Reuters reports.
In the streamed ruling, the judges said Juliari would also be banned from public office for four years after serving his prison term.
Juliari had denied wrong doing. His lawyer Maqdir Ismail on Monday described the sentence, which was one year longer than investigators had demanded, as too harsh and said they were considering whether to appeal.
Indonesia’s anti-graft commission (KPK) named Juliari as a suspect in the case last December along with four others.
At the time, anti-corruption investigators discovered more than $1m in cash stuffed into suitcases and other containers, a day before the former minister turned himself in.
President Joko Widodo was elected in 2014 on a pledge to fight graft and some prominent politicians have been jailed for corruption during his administration, but there are concerns the anti-graft agency*s clout has weakened.
Updated
In case you missed it yesterday from Ed Augustin and Daniel Montero in Havana, after recording one of the world’s lowest Covid rates last year, Cuba now has one of the western hemisphere’s highest. The island, which reported 12,225 confirmed cases in all of 2020, has reported almost 50 times that so far this year. And with the Delta variant having taken root, a lack of medical supplies is crippling the medical response.
An insight here from news agency AP on the current state of Lebanese heath services, where hospitals are at breaking point and medical staff exhausted:
Drenched in sweat, doctors check patients lying on stretchers in the reception area of Lebanon’s largest public hospital. Air conditioners are turned off, except in operating rooms and storage units, to save on fuel.
Medics scramble to find alternatives to saline solutions after the hospital ran out. The shortages are overwhelming, the medical staff exhausted. And with a new surge in coronavirus cases, Lebanon’s hospitals are at a breaking point.
The country’s health sector is a casualty of the multiple crises that have plunged Lebanon into a downward spiral – a financial and economic meltdown, compounded by a complete failure of the government, runaway corruption and a pandemic that isn’t going away.
The collapse is all the more dramatic since only a few years ago, Lebanon was a leader in medical care in the Arab world. The region’s rich and famous came to this small Mideast nation of 6 million for everything, from major hospital procedures to plastic surgeries.
The Rafik Hariri University hospital is Lebanon’s largest public hospital and the country’s No 1 for the treatment of coronavirus patients. Lebanon has so far registered nearly 590,000 infections and over 8,000 deaths.
The hospital, which depended on the state power company, had to start relying on generators for at least 12 hours a day. Since last Monday, the generators have been the only source of power, running non-stop. Most of the hospital’s diesel, sold at the black market at five times the official price, is either donated by political parties or international aid groups.
To save on fuel, some rooms run only electrical fans in the sweltering summer heat. Not all hospital elevators are working. Bed capacity has been downsized by about 15% and the ER admits only life-threatening cases.
It is a perpetual crisis that has left the hospital always on the brink, says its director, Firas Abiad. There are “shortages of almost everything.”
Every day, he struggles to secure more fuel – the hospital has a maximum two-day supply at any time. Shelves are thin on medicines, including for cancer patients and dialysis. A new aid shipment of blood serum will last just a few days.
“We can hardly get by,” said Jihad Bikai, head of the ER. He recently had to send a critical patient to another hospital because he no longer has a vascular surgeon on staff.
On a recent afternoon at the Rafik Hariri hospital, nurse Mustafa Harqous, 39, tried to ignore the ruckus outside the coronavirus ER: patients with oxygen masks waiting for a bed to free up, families pressing to visit sick relatives, others arguing over out-of-stock drugs.
He went about his work in the 25-bed room. Except for a month-old baby, the patients were mostly men in their 30s and 40s.
“Some people understand the shortages are not our fault,” he said. “But many don’t.”
He worries how he will fill up his car for the drive home, an hour and a half away. The government, he said, is “leaving people in the middle of the sea with no rescue boat.”
Reports say at least 2,500 doctors and nurses have left Lebanon this year. At the Rafik Hariri hospital, at least 30% of doctors and more than 10% of nurses left, most recently five in one day. Many private hospitals, who offer 80% of Lebanon’s medical services, are shutting down because of lack of resources or turning away patients who can’t pay.
Bikai, the 37-year-old ER chief, was offered a job in a neighbouring country. His salary is barely enough to cover his son’s dentist’s bills. His wife, also a doctor, works by his side in the ER.
“There is a moment, when you are pushing hard to get over a mountain, and you get to a place, you can’t move,” he said. “I worry we’ll get to that.”
Abiad, the hospital director, struggles to remain positive for his staff.
“Our country is disintegrating in front of our eyes,” he said. “The most difficult part is … we can’t seem to be able to find a way to stop this deterioration.”
Updated
'Groundhog day': Australian PM says lockdowns must end soon as vaccinations rise
Australia must start to learn to live with Covid-19 when higher vaccination targets are reached, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Monday, despite concerns in some states about the impact of a surge in cases in Sydney.
With over half of all Australians stuck in weeks-long lockdowns to curb the highly infectious Delta strain, Morrison said the country had to move forward and start reducing restrictions as more people became vaccinated, Reuters reports.
He said during a televised media conference in Canberra:
(Lockdowns) cannot go on forever. This is not a sustainable way to live in this country.
This groundhog day has to end, and it will end when we start getting to 70% and 80% (vaccination rates).
Morrison spoke just as tighter restrictions took effect in Australia’s largest city, Sydney. As of Monday, masks are mandated outside the home, except when exercising, and a night time curfew is in place in the 12 worst-affected council areas.
The federal government last month unveiled a four-stage plan to relax restrictions once 70% of its 25 million people aged over 16 are vaccinated, with stringent lockdowns “unlikely” to be required.
When vaccination coverage reaches 80% only “highly targeted lockdowns” would be necessary and inoculated Australians would be free to travel interstate.
Differences have emerged between states that want to maintain a focus on suppressing the virus and the largest state of New South Wales, which is seeking a path out of lockdowns through vaccinations following a large Delta outbreak.
Western Australia and Queensland states, which are largely coronavirus-free, have flagged they may still maintain some restrictions even when vaccination targets are reached.
They say the national plan, which was agreed before the NSW outbreak, was based on having only small outbreaks present in the community.
On Monday, NSW reported 818 cases, most of them in Sydney, slightly down from the record 830 a day earlier.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian urged people to focus less on cases and more on the immunisation rollout.
“Once you get to 80% double dose, every state will have to live with Covid. You cannot keep Delta out forever,” she said.
In Victoria, home to Melbourne, 71 new cases were detected with 55 having spent time in the community while infectious, which state Premier Daniel Andrews said could derail plans to exit lockdown on 2 September.
While Australia has managed the pandemic better than many other developed countries, a slow vaccine rollout has taken the gloss off its early success.
Nationally, 30% of people above 16 are fully vaccinated, while 52% have had a least one dose. Vaccinations are running at a record pace but the target of 80% fully vaccinated will not be reached until December at the current rate.
Australia has reported just over 44,600 cases in total. There have been 984 deaths, although the death rate has declined since last year.
Updated
‘Big questions’: New Zealand Covid minister raises doubts about elimination strategy
The arrival of the Delta strain in New Zealand has prompted the country’s Covid-19 response minister to question the efficacy of its ambitious elimination strategy – an approach that has been the backbone of the country’s pandemic response.
Chris Hipkins told current affairs programme Q+A on Sunday that Delta raised “big questions about the long-term future of our plans”.
“Delta does raise some big questions that we’re going to have to grapple with, you know less than a 24-hour period for someone getting it and passing it on to others … that’s like nothing we’ve dealt with in this pandemic so far, and it does change everything,” he said.
Updated
This is the kind of comic relief we need on a Monday.
At a media briefing on Sunday, New Zealand’s Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins urged New Zealanders to socially distance when they go outside to “spread their legs”.
It’s been a long pandemic.
Updated
This is interesting from my Observer colleague Michael Savage, if you missed it yesterday.
Scientists in Britain are examining whether smaller doses of the Covid vaccine could be used as part of booster programmes, amid hopes that the approach could also increase the supply of jabs across the world.
It comes after the World Health Organization criticised Israel for beginning a programme of third jabs for its citizens, when many countries are struggling to get hold of adequate supplies to carry out first vaccinations.
US civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and his wife are “responding positively” to treatments after catching Covid-19, their son said in a statement.
Physicians at the Northwestern University Memorial Hospital in Chicago are carefully monitoring Jackson, 79, and his wife, Jacqueline, 77, Reuters reports, a day after the two were hospitalised, their son Jonathan said in a statement issued by the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a group founded by his father.
“Both are resting comfortably and are responding positively to their treatments,” he said.
Jackson, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017, has been a leader of the U.S. civil rights movement since the mid-1960s and was with Martin Luther King when he was assassinated in 1968.
Jackson sought the Democratic presidential nomination twice in the 1980s, but fell short of becoming the first Black major party White House nominee.
He was awarded the Legion d’Honneur by French president Emmanuel Macron in July, one of France’s highest honours, in recognition of what he called “a long walk towards emancipation and justice”.
Jakarta has reached 'herd immunity', official claims
Weeks after the Delta variant of the coronavirus ripped through Jakarta, the Indonesian capital has reached “herd immunity”, the city’s deputy governor said, ahead of an expected decision by the president today on whether to extend Covid-19 curbs.
For much of last month, Jakarta was devastated by the outbreak with inundated hospitals, oxygen shortages and Covid-19 patients dying at home, but in recent weeks case numbers have dropped sharply, while vaccination rates have climbed.
On 12 July, Jakarta recorded more than 14,600 infections, but by Sunday the figure had fallen to 700, Reuters reports.
“Jakarta has entered the green zone and has reached herd immunity,” deputy Jakarta governor Ahmad Rizia Patria told reporters on Sunday.
The deputy governor was referring to high vaccination rates in the capital, where more than 54% of residents are fully vaccinated and most have received one shot.
Nationally, just over 11% of the population have been fully vaccinated since the south-east Asian nation began its inoculation programme this January.
Pandu Riono, an epidemiologist at the University of Indonesia, said the deputy governor had misunderstood the concept of herd immunity.
“Even if we reach 100% vaccine coverage, the immunity level is still below 80%,” he said, adding that vaccine efficacy levels were only about 55%.
Home to more than 10 million people, Jakarta has predominately administered China’s Sinovac vaccine, while some residents have received Astra Zeneca and Sinopharm shots.
President Joko Widodo is expected to announce on Monday whether current social restrictions that have been in place since July in Java and Bali will be relaxed or extended.
The government has in recent weeks maintained social curbs but permitted limited capacity at malls and restaurants.
Despite an overall decline in cases nationally, Indonesia still recorded more than 12,000 cases on Sunday, as it continues to battle one of Asia’s worst coronavirus outbreaks.
Since mid-July the country has also recorded more than than 1,000 deaths from Covid-19 each day, one of the highest rates globally.
While cases have declined in Jakarta and some parts of Java, the highly contagious Delta continues to surge in other islands, including in parts of Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and remote Papua.
Updated
Hello! It’s Robyn Vinter here, taking over the live blog.
An interesting story here from the UK:
Young patients experiencing the debilitating effects of long Covid have urged people to get their vaccine in an NHS video.
The video features three previously healthy people in their early 20s and 30s, including a man who thought he would die with the virus in hospital.
Pfizer booster shot significantly lowers infection risk – Israeli study
A third dose of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine has significantly improved protection from infection and serious illness among people aged 60 and older in Israel compared with those who received two shots, findings published by the health ministry showed on Sunday.
The data were presented at a meeting of a ministry panel of vaccination experts on Thursday and uploaded to its website on Sunday, though the full details of the study were not released.
The findings were on par with separate statistics reported last week by Israel’s Maccabi healthcare provider, one of several organisations administering booster shots to try to curb the Delta coronavirus variant.
Updated
China reports zero new cases for first time since July
China’s health authority reported on Monday that there were no new locally transmitted Covid cases for the first time since July, offering more signs that the current outbreak that began late last month may be tapering off soon.
Reuters: The latest outbreak was driven mainly by infections first detected among a few airport workers in the eastern city of Nanjing on 20 July. Since then, more than 1,200 people in China have been confirmed to be infected.
The outbreak has spurred local authorities across the country to impose tough counter-epidemic measures including mass testing for millions of people to identify and isolate carriers, as well as treat the infected.
No one has died in the current outbreak, which has largely focused on the cities of Nanjing and Yangzhou in the province of Jiangsu, near the financial hub of Shanghai. Across China, new local cases fell to the single-digits last week, after peaking in early August.
But over the weekend, Shanghai placed hundreds of people under quarantine after infections were found in cargo workers at one of its two airports, sparking concerns of a fresh outbreak in the city.
Shanghai has reported no new local infections since then.
Updated
Taiwan rolling out domestic vaccine
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen received her first dose of the island’s domestically developed coronavirus vaccine on Monday, launching its rollout to the public.
The vaccine, made by Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corp., was given emergency approval by regulators in July using a shortcut that prompted fierce opposition from parts of Taiwan’s medical and scientific community, AP reports.
Taiwanese regulators bypassed the large-scale, longer term studies that are typically used to approve vaccines. Instead, they compared the level of antibodies that Medigen’s vaccine was able to generate with that of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which has been approved by many governments and has undergone the full three stages of clinical trials.
The two-dose Medigen protein subunit vaccine uses a piece of the coronavirus to teach the body to mount an immune response.
Tsai received her first dose of the vaccine on Monday morning at a gymnasium at National Taiwan University in Taipei.
As of last Friday, 40% of Taiwan’s population of 23 million had received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine. The island’s vaccination policy is to prioritise first shots, with only the most high-risk groups initially getting the full two doses, such as medical workers.
That’s a large leap from May, when less than 5% of the population had received a vaccine.
Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen received her first dose of the island’s domestically developed coronavirus vaccine on Monday, launching its rollout to the public.
The vaccine was given emergency approval by regulators in July using a shortcut that prompted fierce opposition from parts of Taiwan’s medical and scientific community, AP reports.
Meanwhile China’s health authority reported on Monday that there were no new locally transmitted cases of Covid-19 for the first time since July, offering more signs that the current outbreak which began late last month may be tapering off.
Here are the other key recent developments:
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People in the UK will be able to receive Covid-19 antibody tests for the first time next week as part of a new government programme. Up to 8,000 adults will be able to take part in the scheme.
- Iran has reported an all-time daily coronavirus death toll, with 684 further fatalities recorded. Sunday’s figure passes the 655 deaths recorded in 24 hours on 16 August.
- Russia reported 20,564 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, bringing the national tally to 6,747,087. Of this total, 1,661 were recorded in Moscow and 1,481 in St. Petersburg.
- Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City is preparing to enter lockdown as cases in the southeast Asian country’s most populous city surge. Residents will be under stay at home orders from Monday, with the army and police deployed.
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Israel has launched an antibody testing programme for children aged three and above as it seeks to monitor much protection from the virus unvaccinated children have developed.
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Prime minister Scott Morrison has said Australia’s stringent lockdown strategy will remain in place until at least 70% of country is fully vaccinated as the country sees record numbers of cases.
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Vaccinated Filipino workers will be allowed to enter Hong Kong from 30 August, Manila’s labour minister has said.
- Japan’s top coronavirus adviser has asked the government to call on doctors who have not been treating Covid patients to help tackle the wave of rapidly rising infections.
