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Amid the biggest vaccination campaign in history, more than 300 million COVID-19 jabs have now been administered across 114 countries. Millions of doses are injected into arms around the world every single day.
But while most of these vaccines have been given to people in rich and vaccine-producing countries, people in most low- and middle-income countries are forced to watch and wait.
As rich countries scramble to stockpile vaccines for their own citizens, the World Health Organization has urged them to think wider.
Since the start of the pandemic, WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has repeated his message that kindness and togetherness are key to beating COVID-19.
Nice to see Biden continuing the Trump tradition of outright lying about covid… Biden’s response to a mother attending with her eight-year-old daughter, who asked Biden when her children who “often ask if they will catch COVID, and if they do, will they die” would be vaccinated.
“First of all, kids don’t get … COVID very often, it’s unusual for that to happen,” Biden told the little girl. “Number two, you’re not likely to be able to be exposed to something and spread it to mommy and daddy, and it’s not likely mommy and daddy are able to spread it to you.”
My experience with what I used to describe as “making 100% of life and death policy decisions with 5% of the information you really need” was honed working as the senior global health policy expert at the US Agency for International Development in the US Department of State. I grappled daily with this conundrum, wearing my epidemiologist’s hat as I compiled policy papers in health and water that would influence hundreds of millions of dollars in donor aid.
My lived experience was the basis of my public health PhD thesis, “Where there is no data”.
Every day over the past year I have been tracking “what we know now that we wish we’d known then” about Covid-19, its transmission and prevention. And tracking the level of evidence that backs really important decisions relating to the pandemic.
Researchers found that warmer climates over the last century produced large forests where these mammals prefer to live, according to Fast Company. The study revealed that 40 bat species have moved into these areas, bringing with them 100 new types of coronaviruses.
A paramedic wearing a protective face mask and shield assists people waiting in line at a coronavirus disease testing clinic at Mona Vale Hospital in the wake of a new outbreak in the Northern Beaches area of Sydney on Dec 18, 2020. [Photo/Agencies]
A piece of great news has finally reached Diego Silva, a lecturer in bioethics at the University of Sydney s School of Public Health.
Silva is referring to an announcement by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, or TGA, on Monday that paves the way for Australia to begin COVID-19 vaccinations by the end of February. The Australian pharmaceutical regulator has approved the vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech for use in the country.