YEREVAN, 8 FEBRUARY, ARMENPRESS/ PARTNER NEWS: When Israel began on Thursday vaccinating citizens over the age of 16, the state’s vaccination program once again made international headlines. While several European states have been halted in their vaccine endeavors by limited access to vaccines – and programs in many states around the world have not yet begun – Israel has thus far administered nearly 5.5 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, as data by the University of Oxford’s ‘Our World in Data’ tracker showed on Saturday.
Plant-based antiviral said to be ‘highly effective’ against Covid-19 – dpa international
DUBLIN The little-known drug thapsigargin has proven “highly effective” against Covid-19, according to a University of Nottingham research team, which said the findings are “hugely significant.”
The research, published on Wednesday in the journal
Viruses, found that the plant-derived antiviral “triggers a highly effective broad-spectrum host-centred antiviral innate immune response against three major types of human respiratory viruses,” including the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
Though “more testing is clearly needed,” according to research team leader Professor Kin-Chow Chang, “current findings strongly indicate that thapsigargin and its derivatives are promising antiviral treatments against Covid-19 and influenza virus.”
Huge Covid-related death toll reported in Irish nursing homes – dpa international
DUBLIN Almost half of Ireland’s coronavirus-related fatalities have been in nursing homes, the parliamentary health committee heard on Tuesday.
Health Department official Kathleen MacLellan told members of the Dáil, or parliament, that “1,543 people have lost their lives to Covid-19 in nursing homes, 369 of these in the past month.”
By Tuesday morning Ireland’s Department of Health had reported 3,317 “probable and possible” Covid-related deaths, one-third of which were recorded in January. Covid-19 is the respiratory disease sometimes caused by the novel coronavirus.
Of the almost 200,000 cases of the novel coronavirus reported since the first positive test almost one year ago, more than half were recorded last month, when Ireland was for a time recording the most cases per million of any country in Europe.
What is vaccine nationalism and why should Americans care about it? Eve Hartley
As more vaccines for the coronavirus are approved by regulatory bodies across the world, countries are scrambling to inoculate their citizens.
In the U.S., more than 32.7 million coronavirus vaccine doses have been administered so far, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 26.4 million people have received at least one dose, and an increasing number have gotten both.
The same fast-paced rollout is happening in other nations such as Israel, which is currently the world leader in administering the vaccine, having provided 57.65 doses per 100 people, according to the University of Oxford’s Our World In Data Project. Second in the world by the same measurement is the United Arab Emirates (34.79 per 100 people), followed by the U.K. (14.42), Bahrain (10.16) and the U.S. (9.63).