Hello and welcome to today’s coronavirus coverage with me, Helen Sullivan.
As always, you can find me on Twitter @helenrsullivan.
According to a new forecast, Canada will receive a significant amount of vaccines in the coming months through a platform designed to maximize supply to poor countries, despite the fact that most doses per person in the world are booked through direct transactions with pharmaceutical companies.
The Globe and Mail reports that Canada will be the only G7 country worldwide to accept vaccinations from the scheme.
My colleagues Michael Safi and Leyland Cecco report that Canada is entitled under the Covax scheme to receive shots, in which pre-purchases are used by affluent countries to endorse vaccine development and subsidize doses for poorer countries.
But Ottawa also led the world in direct deals with pharmaceutical companies to secure their own stock, and according to the Guardian analysis, reserved enough to cover about 9.6 doses per person.
More on this soon. Here are the other important recent developments:
- Regulators in Belgium are the latest in Europe to advise on the administration of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine to the elderly due to a lack of data on its effectiveness.
- Switzerland withdrew approval for Oxford / AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine, his drug regulator said today.
- Leaders in Europe recklessly endanger the health of their own public by using self-service scores to attack Britain’s coronavirus vaccine, British health experts have warned. “The views expressed by politicians in Europe are in stark contrast to the scientific view reached by the European regulator,” said a former head of medicine regulators.
- Greece’s new coronavirus infections rose by more than 1,000 for a second consecutive day, with health authorities 1 151 at the country’s score after a month of the daily figure remaining in the triple digits.
- Veterinarians in Germany have trained sniffer dogs to detect the coronavirus in saliva samples from humans with an accuracy of 94%.
- The Covax Facility Scheme aims to distribute at least 330 million doses in the first half of 2021, announced his fellow leaders Wednesday. It also entered into an agreement with the Serum Institute of India for doses of up to 1.1 billion doses of AstraZeneca and Novavax vaccines for $ 3 per dose for low- and middle-income countries.
- AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford aim to develop a next-generation vaccine to launch new variants by autumn, a senior executive at the manufacturer told Reuters.