This blog is closing now but thanks very much for reading. We’ll be back in a few hours with more rolling coverage of the pandemic from all around the world.
In the meantime you can catch up with all our coverage of the pandemic here.
AstraZeneca has reported a threefold rise in sales of its Covid-19 vaccine from the first quarter of 2021 to the second – but its earnings remained significantly below those of its US rival Pfizer.
Britain’s biggest drugmaker revealed that it had generated $894m from Covid-19 vaccine sales in the three months to the end of June, following $275m in the first three months of the year. It has pledged to provide the jab, which it developed with Oxford University, on a not-for-profit basis during this pandemic.
The figures came a day after Pfizer said it made $7.8bn from the Covid jab it developed with Germany’s BioNTech in the second quarter, more than doubling its first-quarter takings of $3.5bn. It raised its 2021 sales forecast for the vaccine to $33.5bn from $26bn, as the Delta variant spreads rapidly and scientists debate whether people will need booster shots. Pfizer and BioNTech have tweaked their mRNA vaccine to target the Delta variant and will begin testing the modified jab on humans next month.
Moderna will reveal next Thursday how much it made from its coronavirus jab between April and June. The US drugs company brought in $1.7bn from sales of its Covid vaccine between January and March, helping it to its first quarterly profit since its foundation in 2010. In May, the firm forecast revenues of $19.2bn from the vaccine this year, but that estimate could rise next week.
GlaxoSmithKline posted £276m of Covid-19 sales on Wednesday, mainly from sales of its adjuvant – which boosts the efficacy of vaccines – to other drug makers. The UK’s second biggest pharmaceutical firm has not developed its own coronavirus shot, but is working with France’s Sanofi and Germany’s CureVac on new vaccines.
AstraZeneca said about $572m of vaccine sales came from Europe during the first half of 2021, in a period when the company was embroiled in a court battle with the European Commission over delivery delays, and a further $455m from emerging markets.
Read more here:
Ministers in the UK are facing growing criticism for putting France on the new “amber plus” travel list, after concerns were raised about whether they focused too much on variant cases in its Réunion Island territory 5,700 miles (9,180 km) from Paris.
The UK foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, admitted on Thursday the decision to impose tougher restrictions on millions of fully vaccinated French citizens and Britons holidaying or living across the Channel was partly due to the prevalence of the Beta variant on Réunion.
He defended the move, saying it was “not the distance that matters” but rather “the ease of travel between different component parts of any individual country”.
France was put on England’s amber plus list two weeks ago, after the government took advice from the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC).
At the time, the reason given by the Department of Health and Social Care was the “persistent presence of cases in France of the Beta variant”, but a diplomatic row with France began gathering pace.
In a stern rebuke of the JBC, Mary Gregory, a deputy director at the Office for Statistics Regulation, wrote to the organisation, criticising it for “not making the data and sources clear” for its advice on France.
She said there was confusion about “whether cases from overseas territories had been excluded for France” and that refusals to publish clear evidence underpinning the decision “fall short of our expectations on transparency”.
Gregory said the JBC had confirmed one of the ways it tracked variants was the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (Gisaid), which showed there had been 1,023 Beta cases in Réunion – equal to about a third of the total number discovered across mainland France, 2,974.
Réunion is still on England’s normal amber list even though the ratio of Beta cases to people is much higher, granting anyone travelling from the island who is fully vaccinated exemption from isolation on arrival, so long as they get two negative tests.
The Gisaid figures revealed the number of Beta cases across France had grown by just 1.9% in the past four weeks – significantly less than Spain, where they have risen 14.2% across the same period.
Read more from my colleagues Aubrey Allegretti and Natalie Grover here:
Joe Biden was poised on Thursday to announce that all civilian federal workers must be vaccinated against the coronavirus or face regular testing and stringent physical distancing, masking and travel restrictions.
Facing a political test as the Delta variant cuts a swath through unvaccinated Americans, the president was set to put the government in a position of leading by example and offer a potential model to corporate employers.
But not for the first time, the pandemic response in the US is hampered by its internal political divisions. Biden’s intervention was likely to produce a renewed backlash from Republican politicians warning against government encroachment on individual freedom.
The highly infectious Delta variant hascaused coronavirus cases and hospitalisations to rebound in many parts of the US, which is averaging nearly 62,000 new Covid-19 cases a day. The vast majority of those hospitalised and dying have not been vaccinated.
Biden missed his goal of having 70% of adults get at least one shot by 4 July; the latest figure is 69.3%. About 60% of American adults have been fully vaccinated meaning that, despite a head start, it now has a lower share of fully vaccinated people than the European Union and Canada.
Public opinion on the vaccines seems to have solidified, with a recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finding that among American adults who have not yet received a vaccine, 35% say they probably will not, and 45% say they definitely will not.
Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases expert, told Reuters: “It’s the just unfortunate conflation of two things, and that is a virus that has evolved to be extraordinarily efficient in transmitting from person to person … superimposed upon an almost inexplicable resistance to vaccinations.”
Read the full story here:
Northern Ireland is to follow the rest of the UK in allowing fully vaccinated travellers from EU amber countries and the US to enter without the need to quarantine.
The Stormont executive decided on Thursday to relax Covid-19 travel rules from 1 August. Ministers also agreed to let international cruise travel operate in Northern Ireland from Saturday, and to let UEFA VIP guests and Villarreal fans attend the Super Cup match against Chelsea in Belfast on 11 August without isolating.
The announcements came despite Covid-related pressure on hospitals and a warning that the region could face a more severe infection wave than other parts of the UK because of slumping vaccination rates.
The chief scientific adviser, Ian Young, told the Stormont assembly’s health committee that people in Northern Ireland appear less willing to receive a jab than elsewhere in the UK.
Patricia Donnelly, the head of the vaccination programme, said uptake rates had plunged since the rollout opened to under-30s.
However evidence that increasing positive case numbers may have plateaued this week appears to have emboldened the executive to relax rules.
The five-party coalition agreed to ease social distancing to one metre in certain contexts, such as shopping centres, from 6pm on Friday.
“The Executive remains concerned about the spread of the virus and its transmissibility,” it said in a statement. “The virus remains a risk to our health and economic wellbeing and the steps taken today must be seen in that context.”
Read more here:
- Campaigners said the global vaccine rollout may represent “the most lethal profiteering in history”, as the People’s Vaccine Alliance published an analysis suggesting pharmaceutical companies are charging at least five times above cost price. More than 4bn doses of Covid vaccines have now been administered around the world, eight months after the vaccination drive started, according to an AFP count, but distribution has been extremely skewed towards wealthier countries.
- Israel is to begin offering a third shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine to people over 60, local media said. The campaign will in effect turn Israel into a testing ground for the companies’ booster, which is likely to seek approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), amid significantly waning efficacy of the jabs.
- The British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has said it is considering its future in the vaccine market after it Covid jab generated $1.2bn in sales in the first half of the year, with quarterly sales tripling. They had decided to make the jab available at cost, after entering into an exclusive licensing agreement with Oxford University, who initially sought to work with manufacturers to produce without paying royalties.
- A “substantial chunk” of 9m Covid jab doses to be donated by the UK to developing states in the coming weeks expire at the end of September, “setting up African countries to fail”. Dr Ayoade Alakija, co-chair of the Africa Union Vaccine Delivery Alliance, said the donations were comparable to a “Trojan horse” and that “the limited shelf life could actually be detrimental to all of our efforts to contain this pandemic”.
- The Biden administration announced it will allow a nationwide ban on evictions to end on Saturday, claiming that its hands are tied after the supreme court signalled it would only be extended until the end of the month – putting millions at risk of eviction amid a sluggish distribution of promised support funds.
- The Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, said officials should detain those who refuse to be vaccinated against Covid inside their homes. Legal experts said the move would be unconstitutional and reflected his “militaristic mindset”, after Duterte claimed responding to the pandemic was more important than laws guaranteeing freedom of movement
- An alleged Sydney anti-lockdown protester accused of punching a police horse will remain behind bars after refusing a Covid test that was a prerequiste for him to appear in court. His barrister, Hollie Blake, claimed in court that corrective services officers were making it impossible to gain access to her client.
France’s Indian ocean territory of La Reunion will be put into a partial lockdown at the weekend due to a surge in Covid-19 infections.
AFP reports that there is growing concern among officials in Paris over the infection rates in France’s overseas territories in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and the Pacific where vaccination uptake is far lower than the mainland average.
La Reunion will from Saturday for the next two weeks go into partial lockdown, with movement only allowed 10km from people’s home in the daytime, said its top official, prefect Jacques Billant.
In the evenings, there will be a curfew from 6pm at night until 5am in the morning, with no movement allowed expect for essential reasons, he added. Cafes, restaurants and gyms will also close for the next two weeks.
He described the situation as “worrying”, saying that there was “unprecedented exponential growth of the epidemic” with 350 out of every 100,000 inhabitants infected.
The situation on La Reunion is being particularly closely watched after Britain said it was the main reason why travellers from France – unlike all other non-red list destinations – were still being obliged to quarantine for 10 days on arrival in the country.
Foreign secretary Dominic Raab told the BBC that this was due to the prevalence of the Beta variant on La Reunion, which is off Madagascar and over 9,000km from Paris. “It’s not the distance that matters, it’s the ease of travel between different component parts of any individual country,” he explained.
A spokesman for Brittany Ferries, which runs ferries across the Channel, however said this logic is “like France hammering British holidaymakers due to a Covid outbreak on the Falkland Islands.”
French European affairs minister Clement Beaune earlier lambasted the British restrictions as “discriminatory towards French people” and making “no sense in terms of health policy”.
A leading Israeli health provider has said it would soon begin offering a third, booster Covid-19 shot to patients over the age of 60 who have already been vaccinated.
Maccabi, one of Israel’s four publicly funded health maintenance organisations, said its members could already register and the vaccinations would start on Sunday.
The announcement came shortly ahead of a nationally televised news conference by prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who is expected to unveil a nationwide booster shot program. It would make Israel among the first countries to launch a widespread campaign offering its vaccinated citizens a third dose.
The Associated Press reports that early this year, Israel carried out one of the world’s most aggressive and successful vaccination campaigns. Over 57% of the country’s 9.3 million citizens have received two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and over 80% of the population over 40 is vaccinated.
The vaccination program allowed Israel to reopen its economy ahead of other countries. But there are signs that the vaccine’s efficacy significantly wears off over time, and Israel has seen a spike in cases of even among people who are vaccinated.
People over the age of 60 who were vaccinated more than five months ago will be eligible for the booster, Maccabi said.
A preprint not yet peer-reviewed yesterday reported that the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech fell from 96% to 84% over six months.
Stat News reported that an ongoing Pfizer study of more than 44,000 people, the vaccine’s efficacy in preventing any Covid-19 infection that causes even minor symptoms appeared to decline by an average of 6% every two months after administration.
The Pfizer study, which enrolled volunteers in Europe and the Americas, did not address whether the vaccine is less effective against the Delta variant.
The pharmaceutical company’s chief of research and development said he expected a third dose to be “somewhat more long lasting” than second dose.
The World Health Organization said earlier this month it is not clear whether Covid-19 booster vaccines would be useful to maintain protection against the virus, but that it would monitor emerging data.
Portugal has said it would lift a night-time curfew and restrictions on restaurants’ opening hours from Sunday, with around half of the population fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.
“Vaccination has contributed very significantly to [allow] these measures… but we cannot ignore the fact that… the virus continues to circulate…. the pandemic has not disappeared,” said the prime minister ,Antonio Costa.
Costa also said the compulsory use of masks in crowded outdoor areas would end in the beginning of September and nightclubs and bars, which have been shut since March last year, would be able to reopen the following month, Reuters reports.
Following on from our reports earlier, the Biden administration has announced it will allow a nationwide ban on evictions to end on Saturday, claiming that its hands are tied after the supreme court signalled it would only be extended until the end of the month.
The White House said President Joe Biden would have liked to extend the federal eviction moratorium due to spread of the highly contagious Delta variant, the Associated Press reports. Instead, Biden called on “Congress to extend the eviction moratorium to protect such vulnerable renters and their families without delay”.
The moratorium was put in place last September by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Given the recent spread of the Delta variant, including among those Americans both most likely to face evictions and lacking vaccinations, President Biden would have strongly supported a decision by the CDC to further extend this eviction moratorium to protect renters at this moment of heightened vulnerability,” the White House said. “Unfortunately, the supreme court has made clear that this option is no longer available.”
The court mustered a bare 5-4 majority last month to allow the eviction ban to continue through the end of July. One of those in the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, made clear he would block any additional extensions unless there was “clear and specific congressional authorisation”.
By the end of March, 6.4m American households were behind on their rent, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. As of 5 July, roughly 3.6m people in the U.S. said they faced eviction in the next two months, according to the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.
Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in June this would be the last time the moratorium would be extended when she set the deadline for 31 July. It was initially put in place to prevent further spread of Covid-19 by people put out on the streets and into shelters.
Housing advocates and some lawmakers have called for the moratorium to be extended due to the increase in coronavirus cases and the fact so little rental assistance has been distributed.
“The confluence of the surging Delta variant with 6.5m families behind on rent and at risk of eviction when the moratorium expires demands immediate action,” said Diane Yentel, executive director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
“The public health necessity of extended protections for renters is obvious. If federal court cases made a broad extension impossible, the Biden administration should implement all possible alternatives, including a more limited moratorium on federally backed properties.”
Some Democratic lawmakers had demanded the administration extend the moratorium.
“This pandemic is not behind us, and our federal housing policies should reflect that stark reality,” Democratic representatives Cori Bush of Missouri, Jimmy Gomez of California and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts said in a joint statement. “With the US facing the most severe eviction crisis in its history, our local and state governments still need more time to distribute critical rental assistance to help keep a roof over the heads of our constituents.”
But landlords, who have opposed the moratorium and challenged it repeatedly in court, were against any extension. They have argued the focus should be on speeding up the sluggish distribution of rental assistance.
The World Health Organization has said the Delta variant has led to a “surge” in coronavirus outbreaks triggering a “fourth wave” in the eastern Mediterranean region.
AFP reports that the global health body said the highly transmissible Delta strain, first detected in India, has been recorded in 15 out of the 22 countries of the region under its purview, stretching from Morocco to Pakistan.
“The circulation of the Delta variant is fuelling the surge in Covid-19 cases and deaths in an increasing number of countries in WHO’s eastern Mediterranean region,” it said in a statement.
“Most of the new cases and hospitalised patients are unvaccinated people. We are now in the fourth wave of Covid-19 across the region,” said Ahmed al-Mandhari, director of the region for WHO.
Infections have increased by 55% and deaths by 15% in the last month compared with the month before. More than 310,000 case and 3,500 deaths have been recorded weekly, though AFP did not report how many of these cases represented excess deaths.
The WHO noted the rapid spread of the Delta variant was quickly making it “the dominant strain” in the region.
According to a recent paper in the journal Virological, the amount of virus found in the first tests of patients with the Delta variant was 1,000 times higher than patients in the first wave of the virus in 2020, greatly increasing its contagiousness.
Pakistan is to controversially ban air travel for anyone without a Covid-19 vaccine certificate from August and will require all public sector workers to get vaccinated by the end of next month, the government announced along with a host of other draconian restrictions.
From 31 August, unvaccinated staff will no longer be allowed to enter government offices, schools, restaurants or shopping malls, said Asad Umar, who heads National Command and Operations Centre (NCOC), a military-run body that oversees the pandemic response, at a joint news conference with the health minister in Islamabad.
Teachers and students above 18, public transport and retail staff will also be required to get vaccinated, they said, amid rising cases, though the risk of death among children verges on statistical insignificance.
“If you’re not vaccinated you can’t go to teach at schools and colleges from 1 August,” Umar said. “We can’t put our children’s lives at risk just because that you’re not ready to get the vaccine.”
Reuters reports that after a sluggish start, the government ramped up its national vaccination drive, especially in the heartland Punjab province, with 850,000 doses administered yesterday across the country. Umar said the target is to touch one million doses a day.
According to the NCOC, over 27.8m have now received at least one vaccine shot, while 5.9m have been fully vaccinated out of a population of 220m.
It said Pakistan registered 4,497 new cases and 76 deaths in the last 24 hours, with over 3,000 people in critical condition. So far 23,209 people have died of Covid-19 in Pakistan in the near 18 months of the pandemic.
Only 13% of testing sites for fully vaccinated critical workers to free themselves from isolation are up and running, the UK government has admitted.
My colleagues Heather Stewart and Aubrey Allegretti report that an effort to avoid a major hit to the economy due to hundreds of thousands of people needing to quarantine after being identified as a close contact of a positive Covid case, the government set a target of establishing 2,000 sites where critical workers could get tested daily instead of having to isolate.
With the legal requirement to isolate if “pinged” or contacted by test and trace set to fall away after 16 August, ministers heralded the scheme as a way of avoiding further disruption to services including public transport, bin collections and food supply.
No 10 said on Thursday just 265 testing sites had been established, with a further 800 due to open within the next week – but gave no specific date for when the 1,000 or so centres remaining would follow suit, raising concerns about whether people would still be unnecessarily forced into isolation.
Statistics released on Thursday showed a record 689,313 people in England and Wales were contacted by the NHS Covid app and asked to self-isolate in the week to 12 July, underlining the widespread disruption caused by surging case rates.
Official data from the app showed an 11.4% increase in the number of people “pinged” over the previous week.
China’s new envoy to the US, Qin Gang, struck a conciliatory tone in his debut press conference upon arrival in Washington DC yesterday.
“I believe that the door of China-US relations, which is already open, cannot be closed,” Qin said, adding he would “endeavour to bring [bilateral] relations back on track, turning the way for the two countries to get along with each other … from a possibility into a reality.”
Meanwhile, Biden is expected to announce a vaccine mandate for federal employees later today.
You can join my colleague Joan E Greve for the latest US-focused updates.
US president, Joe Biden, has asked Congress to extend the eviction suspension to protect renters and their families amid rising coronavirus infections, the White House has said.
Biden also asked the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, and Veterans Affairs to extend their respective eviction bans through the end of September, it said, to protect Americans living in federally insured, single-family properties.
It comes after the leading US residential landlord association yesterday said it was suing the federal government over the stoppage on evictions during the pandemic.
The National Apartment Association claims that the national freeze cost owners about $27bn not covered by existing aid programs, with the moratorium set to expire in less than a week.
The New York Times reports that analysts cited in the landlords’ suit adjudged that 10m tenants owed $57bn in arrears by the end of 2020, and that another $17bn had since gone unpaid.
It is hoped by the group that the action would accelerate the disbursement of $47bn in emergency rent relief included in federal pandemic relief packages.
“If the government takes a hardline approach, renters and rental housing providers will suffer credit damage and economic harm that could follow them for years to come,” Robert Pinnegar, the association’s president, told the NYT.
The US health regulator has expanded the emergency use authorisation for Eli Lilly’s Covid-19 drug baricitinib, saying it could now be used without taking Gilead’s drug remdesivir along with it, Lilly has said.
In November, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Lilly and Incyte’s arthritis drug, baricitinib, in combination with remdesivir, to treat Covid-19 patients.
“Based on the increasing body of evidence, we are confident in the potential of baricitinib as an important treatment for the hospitalised Covid-19 patient population requiring supplemental oxygen,” Lilly said.
FDA’s expanded use for baricitinib was based on results from a trial done by the company in April.
The trial did not meet the main goal of preventing progression to ventilator use in hospitalised Covid-19 patients, Reuters reports. However, the study showed baricitinib-treated patients were less likely than those receiving standard of care to progress to ventilator use or death.
The study enrolled 1,525 hospitalised Covid-19 patients who received either baricitinib or a placebo, along with the standard of care, which included corticosteroids and remdesivir.
The world is witnessing the emergence of more infectious variants of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, write several World Health Organization envoys, but a stuttering race to ensure equitable access to vaccines has seen a handful of countries streak ahead, immunising their own populations, leaving many of the world’s vulnerable people in their wake.
Countries with the greatest stocks of vaccines should not hoard them and push to cover their entire populations while other countries do without. It is not even in their best interests, since the intense circulation of the virus in countries with no vaccines increases the possibility of more transmissible and dangerous variants, threatening to make current vaccines less effective.
The increasing polarisation and disinformation around the Covid-19 vaccine has led to some people attempting to “disguise their appearance” and get vaccinated in secret, according to a Missouri doctor.
Dr Priscilla Frase, a hospitalist and chief medical information officer at Ozarks Healthcare in West Plains, said physicians had experienced a number of people who have asked to covertly receive the vaccine to avoid conflict with vaccine sceptical family, friends and co-workers.
from WordPress https://ift.tt/3zStZ28
via
IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment