GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization is in advanced negotiations with Pfizer about including the company s COVID-19 vaccine in the agency s portfolio of shots to be shared with poorer countries, a senior WHO official said on Monday. We are in . detailed discussions with Pfizer. We believe very soon we will have access to that product, Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser, said at the WHO s executive board meeting, adding that it would then look to add other vaccines. The WHO s vaccine-sharing scheme COVAX is set to start rolling out vaccines to poor and middle income countries in February with 2 of 3 billion targeted doses expected to be delivered this year. WHO already has deals with several suppliers, including AstraZeneca and the Serum Institute of India. However, critics say the absence of Pfizer s shot is an important gap and one of the reasons that poorer countries are lagging behind wealthier ones in administering vaccines. So far, 44 countries out of the 50 that have alr
(Reuters) - The world is on the brink of catastrophic moral failure in sharing COVID-19 vaccines, the head of the World Health Organization said, urging countries and manufacturers to spread doses more fairly. EUROPE Britain s vaccine rollout is limited by a lumpy manufacturing process affecting supplies of both Pfizer and AstraZeneca, but is on track to hit its targets, Vaccine Deployment Minister Nadhim Zahawi said. Norway will ease some restrictions as extra measures in place for two weeks seem to have had the desired effect, Prime Minister Erna Solberg said, although she said infection rates remained too high for comfort. Germany s health minister said new measures would be needed to slow the spread of new, more infectious variants of the virus, including more health checks for cross-border commuters and intensified gene sequencing of virus samples. Austria, Denmark and Greece will jointly pressure the European Medicines Agency to approve AstraZeneca s vaccine as quickly as
BEIJING (Reuters) - Mainland China reported 109 new COVID-19 cases on Jan. 16, down from 130 a day earlier, the country s national health authority said on Sunday. The National Health Commission said in a statement that 96 of the new cases were local infections, 72 of them in Hebei province surrounding Beijing city, 12 in northeastern Heilongjiang province, 10 in northeastern Jilin province and two in Beijing. The number of new asymptomatic cases, which China does not classify as confirmed cases, rose to 119 from 79 a day earlier. Shijiazhuang, Hebei s capital and the hardest-hit spot in the latest surge of infections, reported 65 new locally transmitted confirmed cases on Jan. 16, Health Commission of Hebei Province said on its website. The total of confirmed COVID-19 cases in mainland China stands at 88,227, while the death toll remains unchanged at 4,635. (Reporting by Shivani Singh and Roxanne Liu; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Dan Grebler and William Mallard)
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With help from a second round of the federal Paycheck Protection Program, restaurateur Jon Kodama is hopeful his eateries will limp along until spring and be among the local survivors of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We will get back to some kind of normal eventually and the normal is not going to be upside down or opposite of what it was,” said Kodama, who owns four local restaurants and has been in the food service business for 48 years.
“At some point we are going to get back to normal and it is going to be some version of what it was and probably closer to what it was than something different,” he said.