Health News at Your Fingertips

Oxygen firms have been accused of intimidating hospitals in Mexico and spreading fear, doubt and misinformation, according to an investigation.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism claims that the companies Grupo Infra and Praxair Mexico sent letters to Mexican hospitals in an attempt to deter them from switching to cheaper and more convenient oxygen generator plants and threatening legal action if they did.

Mexico has the world’s fourth highest Covid death toll and demand for oxygen has soared. In December 2020, cases in Mexico City overwhelmed hospitals and the national guard was deployed to protect oxygen delivery lorries.

Read the full report here:

The United States will provide an additional 1 million Covid vaccine doses to Vietnam, US Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Wednesday.

Speaking at the top of a bilateral meeting with Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, Harris said the additional doses would begin to arrive within the next 24 hours.

The US has donated a total of 6 million doses to Vietnam, which is grappling with record high infections driven by the highly contagious Delta variant and stubbornly low vaccination rates.

The surge in cases prompted a recent lockdown in Ho Chi Minh City, with residents under stay-at-home orders and the army and police deployed to enforce the restrictions and deliver essentials to those in need.

The number of young adults who smoke in England rose by about a quarter in the first lockdown, research has suggested.

Nevertheless, the number of people who stopped smoking altogether increased – almost doubling during the first national lockdown when compared with the period immediately prior.

Researchers said the widespread belief that smoking and drinking relieved stress could be a factor in the apparent increased prevalence among people aged 18 to 34 years, but they said their data did not indicate what the causes may be.

Read the full report here:

Taiwan reported zero new domestic Covid cases on Wednesday, the first time it has logged no community transmissions since 9 May.

On Monday, the Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, received her first dose of the island’s domestically developed coronavirus vaccine, launching its rollout to the public.

The protection provided by two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech and the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines starts to wane within six months, new research suggests.

The Pfizer jab has been shown to be 88% effective at preventing Covid-19 infection a month after the second dose. After five to six months, protection decreased to 74%, PA reports.

The AstraZeneca vaccine provides 77% protection against infection one month after the second dose. After four to five months, protection decreased to 67%.

This latest analysis from the Zoe Covid study drew on more than 1.2 million test results and participants. Real-world analysis would be expected to show less protection than clinical trials, and the vaccines were not trialled against the now dominant Delta variant.

Professor Tim Spector, lead scientist on the study, said: “In my opinion, a reasonable worst-case scenario could see protection below 50% for the elderly and healthcare workers by winter.

“If high levels of infection in the UK, driven by loosened social restrictions and a highly transmissible variant, this scenario could mean increased hospitalisations and deaths.”

Two more athletes have tested positive for Covid-19 in the Paralympic village, with officials awaiting information to confirm if a cluster of infection has broken out, after a first case was discovered on Tuesday.

The news comes as ParalympicsGB announced a member of their coaching staff, part of the wheelchair tennis team, has been confirmed as having the virus and is in isolation:

Japan is set to expand a state of emergency to eight more prefectures, taking the total to 21, the minister in charge of coronavirus countermeasures said on Wednesday, as a surge in cases overwhelms its hospitals.

Economy minister Yasutoshi Nishimura said the expansion, which would cover almost half the country’s 47 prefectures, was approved by a panel of external experts. It is expected to be formally approved at a government taskforce meeting later on Wednesday.

“The most important task is to beef up the medical system,” Nishimura said, adding that securing oxygen stations and nurses was among the priorities.

With the Delta variant spreading fast, the government has struggled to bring infections under control as citizens grow weary of life under restrictions and many companies ignore repeated requests to promote work-from-home.

Public broadcaster NHK reported 21,570 new cases and 42 deaths on Tuesday. Japan’s case fatality rate stands at about 1.2%, compared with 1.7% in the US and 2.0% in Britain.

Months of emergency curbs in the capital, Tokyo, and surrounding areas have failed to reverse a surge in infections and about 90% of the city’s critical care beds are occupied.

“The working-age demographic is the driving force [behind the rise in infections],” Nishimura said. “We need to halve the movement of people.”

The review into Covid’s origins ordered by the Biden administration 90 days ago is inconclusive, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, citing US officials familiar with the matter.

The report’s findings are due to be unclassified any day now but are reportedly inconclusive on whether the virus jumped from animals to humans or escaped from a Wuhan laboratory.

The Washington Post writes:

The assessment is the result of a 90-day sprint after Biden tasked his intelligence agencies in May to produce a report ‘that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion’ on the origins of a virus that has killed more than 4 million people globally and wrecked national economies. But despite analysing a raft of existing intelligence and searching for new clues, intelligence officials fell short of a consensus, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report is not yet public.

Covid has killed 4.6 million people worldwide, but its precise origins remain mysterious. The first known cases emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019 and US agencies started looking into the origins shortly afterwards.

US spy agencies initially strongly favoured the explanation that the virus originated in nature, Reuters reports.

A team led by the World Health Organization (WHO) that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal.

But their March report, which was written jointly with Chinese scientists and concluded that the lab theory was “extremely unlikely,” did not satisfy Washington.

Meanwhile, China has refused to give US researchers the kind of access to the Wuhan lab and officials there that the US believes it would need to definitively try to determine the virus’s origins.

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

Japan is set to expand a state of emergency to a further eight prefectures, taking the total to 21, the minister in charge of coronavirus countermeasures said on Wednesday, as a surge in cases overwhelms its hospitals.

And the review into Covid’s origins ordered by the Biden administration 90 days ago is inconclusive, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, citing US officials familiar with the matter.

The report’s findings are due to be unclassified any day now but are reportedly inconclusive on whether the virus jumped from animals to humans or escaped from a Wuhan laboratory.

More on this story shortly. In the meantime, here are the key developments from the last few hours:

• New daily coronavirus infections in Israel are approaching record levels, despite the country’s largely successful vaccination campaign and the recent rollout of the world’s first widespread booster shot. The spread of the virus has been driven by a surge in the Delta variant even among the vaccinated.
• Bereaved families call for UK-wide Covid inquiry to start before end of the year. The UK government, Welsh and Northern Irish administrations must “show some leadership” and ensure that statutory coronavirus inquiries start before the year is out, campaigners have said.
• Growing numbers of US districts have stopped in-person learning at schools. More than 80 school districts or charter networks have closed or delayed in-person classes for at least one entire school in more than a dozen states because of an increase in Covid cases.
• The vaccine supply contract between Brazil and Pfizer has been made public, in what is believed to be the first such time in history between a state and a pharmaceutical company.
• The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has launched a £7.5m emergency appeal after it lost millions of pounds during the Covid pandemic. The festival’s directors said the crisis had had a devastating impact on the event, which until last year was the world’s largest annual arts festival. It was entirely shut down in 2020 and this year has operated at a fifth of its normal size.
• In Australia, Indigenous Covid vaccination rates have risen rapidly in the past month, but new data shows the gap is widening between First Nations people and overall vaccination rates in almost every state and territory.
• The Greek government has announced that all indoor eateries, bars, clubs and entertainment venues will be off limits for unvaccinated citizens. The ban starts next month.
• More than 5bn anti-Covid jabs have been delivered globally, an AFP tally of official sources shows. While it took around 140 days to administer the 1bn shots, the third, fourth and fifth billions each took between 26 and 30 days, the data show.
• Covid booster shots may only be needed for about 40% of immunosuppressed people, preliminary UK data suggests.Researchers looked at immune responses after two shots of either the Oxford/AstraZeneca or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines in people with compromised immune systems, due to underlying disease or the medicines they are taking for their underlying disease.