INT: COVAX global Covid vaccine program secures nearly 2 billion doses as UNICEF prepares for distribution inlandnewstoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from inlandnewstoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The global surge in COVID cases and deaths requires an immediate international response
Last week, during the World Health Organization (WHO) press brief, Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director for the WHO emergencies program, observed, “We are not in an epidemiologically stable situation. The virus is still working its way through the human population. A vast majority of people remain susceptible. So, it has not settled down in a pattern that we can predict.” He also highlighted that though the pandemic is raging across Europe and North America, most of the world’s population remains susceptible to the coronavirus.
Brooklyn s Green-Wood Cemetery adorned with tributes to victims of COVID-19 in New York City, May 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
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COVID-19 has become the leading cause of death in five Latin American nations and the second most common cause in six others. The World Health Organization s Americas Region, which stretches from the Canadian Arctic to Cape Horn in Chile, has been hit harder by the pandemic than any other part of the globe. The region currently accounts for 48% of the 1.65 million COVID-19 deaths reported to WHO so far worldwide.
While the United States is a major contributor to that trend with more than 300,000 deaths, Peru s death rate from the disease is actually higher than the U.S.
COVID-19 now surpasses coronary heart disease as the No. 1 cause of death in Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Panama.
December 16, 2020
Armed with another significant commitment to the COVID-19 vaccination fund, Prime Minister Mia Mottley has announced that Barbados will begin purchasing and distributing immunisation vaccines only when world health bodies approve them.
She informed Parliament on Tuesday that last Friday the fund received a US$1.2 million pledge but noted that Barbados will await the all-clear from Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) and World Health Organisation (WHO) before rolling out its vaccination programme.
“When the time comes vaccines will be delivered as long as we can access them and as long as we are satisfied from WHO and PAHO that they are safe and ready … this country will do it in its right time,” she said adding that Barbados was in no race to implement the jabs programme.
NASSAU, BAHAMAS The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has approved a US $20 million loan to the government of The Bahamas to acquire the COVID-19 vaccine and help develop the infrastructure around its distribution, its president said yesterday.
The project is intended to strengthen response leadership at the country level, improve case detection and monitoring, support initiatives to break the illness’s transmission chain and improve service delivery capacity. The IDB recently announced that it will mobilize $1 billion to help Latin American and Caribbean countries acquire and distribute COVID-19 vaccines.
Speaking on the project, IDB president Mauricio Claver-Carone said: “This will facilitate access to the vaccine, it will also create an executing agency for it that is going to strengthen the Ministry of Health.”