COVID19

GHealth News - Biotechnology company Novavax announced on Friday that its Covid-19 vaccine has been authorized for emergency use by the U.S Food and Drug Administration for adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17. In July, Novavax’s two-dose Covid-19 vaccine for adults ages 18 and over got its emergency approval from the FDA. Having more vaccine options for adults and children will “hopefully help increase vaccination rates, particularly as we prepare for ongoing surges of Covid-19 with the start of fall and the back-to-school season,” Stanley C. Erck, president and CEO of Novavax, said in a statement. Novavax was one of the original participants in the U.S. government’s race to develop a Covid vaccine in 2020, receiving $1.8 billion in taxpayer funding from Operation Warp Speed...

GHealth News - The World Health Organization said that COVID-19 remains a global emergency, nearly 2-1/2 years after it was first declared. The Emergency Committee, made up of independent experts, said in a statement that rising cases, ongoing viral evolution and pressure on health services in a number of countries meant that the situation was still an emergency. Cases reported to WHO had risen by 30% in the last fortnight, although increased population immunity, largely from vaccines, had seen a "decoupling" of cases from hospitalisations and deaths, the committee's statement said. "COVID-19 is nowhere near over," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual press conference from Geneva after the announcement. "As the virus pushes at us, we must push back." T...

GHealth News - Africa’s top public health agency (CDC) said it signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Pfizer for countries on the continent to receive supplies of the Paxlovid pill to treat Covid-19. Data from a mid-to-late stage study last November showed the antiviral medication was nearly 90 percent effective in preventing hospitalisations and deaths compared with a placebo, in adults at high risk of severe illness. “We have signed the MOU with Pfizer and we are going to be able to make that particular treatment available to African countries,” said Ahmed Ogwell Ouma, the acting director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Ouma said the MOU would allow African countries to access Paxlovid at cost. The Africa CDC, an agency of the 55-member Afri...

GHealth News - Agreements including waiving patents for Covid vaccines and aiming to reduce overfishing have been passed by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The group of 164 countries spent five days negotiating deals which included pledges on health and food security. The partial intellectual property waiver deal for coronavirus jabs will allow developing countries to produce and export vaccines. But it will only last five years, and excludes disease treatments and tests. Director-general of the WTO Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said the agreements, reached at a conference in Geneva, would "make a difference to the lives of people around the world". "The outcomes demonstrate that the WTO is in fact capable of responding to emergencies of our time," she added. The package of the...

GHealth News - Covid-19 cases in China’s largest city of Shanghai have risen again as millions remain isolated at home under a sweeping lockdown. Health officials on Sunday reported 438 confirmed cases detected over the previous 24 hours, along with 7,788 asymptomatic cases. Both figures were up slightly from the day before. While small by the standards of some countries, the daily case numbers are some of the largest since the virus was first detected in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019. Shanghai with its 26 million people last week began a two-stage lockdown, with residents of the eastern Pudong section supposed to be allowed to leave their homes Friday, while their neighbours in the western Puxi section underwent their own four-day isolation period.Advertisement Despit...

GHealth News - After several weeks of declines in new reported cases of COVID-19, the numbers are increasing globally once again, particularly in parts of Asia and Western Europe, the World Health Organization says. "These increases are occurring despite reductions in testing in some countries, which means the cases we're seeing are just the tip of the iceberg," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, PhD, said at a news briefing Wednesday. As a result, local outbreaks and surges in COVID-19 cases are likely, "particularly in areas where measures to prevent transmission have been lifted," he said. And death rates remain high in many nations, particularly those with low levels of vaccination. "Each country is facing a different situation with different challenges, but t...

By: Lawrence O. Gostin Italian army nurse helps a COVID patient at a camp hospital in Perugia that was opened to relieve the burden on nearby Santa Maria della Misericordia hospital. In December of 2020, the world continued to struggle with the pandemic's successive waves. Credit: Tommaso Ausili/Contrasto/Redux Pictures Moments of existential crisis can turn into opportunities for bold reform. World War II led to the creation of transformative institutions—the United Nations in 1945 and the World Health Organization in 1948. The birth of the WHO came the same year that the U.N. adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The COVID pandemic marks just such a moment of crisis. But instead of ushering in significant change, it has fractured global solidarity. That, in turn, ha...

GHealth News - People with a vitamin D deficiency are more likely to have a severe or critical case of COVID-19, according to a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE. The study is based on data from Israel’s first two coronavirus waves before vaccines were widely available. The scientists stressed that vitamin supplements aren’t a substitute for vaccines but that they can help immunity levels. “We found it remarkable, and striking, to see the difference in the chances of becoming a severe patient when you are lacking in vitamin D compared to when you’re not,” Amiel Dror, MD, the lead study author and a doctor at Galilee Medical Center, told The Times of Israel. Although the study was conducted before the Omicron var...

WHO has recommended two new drugs for COVID-19, providing yet more options for treating the disease. The extent to which these medicines will save lives depends on how widely available and affordable they will be. The first drug, baricitinib, is strongly recommended for patients with severe or critical COVID-19. It is part of a class of drugs called Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors that suppress the overstimulation of the immune system. WHO recommends that it is given with corticosteroids. Baricitinib is an oral drug, used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. It provides an alternative to other arthritis drugs called Interleukin-6 receptor blockers, recommended by WHO in July 2021. WHO has also conditionally recommended the use of a monoclonal antibody drug, sotrov...

Conditions are ripe for Covid-19 to mutate into more new variants, and it is dangerous to assume the pandemic is approaching its endgame, the WHO’s top official warned on Monday. Addressing the WHO’s executive board, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said since the omicron variant was identified just nine weeks ago, more than 80 million Covid cases had been reported to the WHO — more than were reported in the whole of 2020. Last week, an average 100 cases were reported to the WHO every three seconds, Tedros added, and someone lost their life to the virus every 12 seconds. While cases have been surging, Tedros noted that the “explosion” in cases had not been matched by a surge in deaths, although fatalities were rising in all regions, particularly in Africa where cou...