Health News at Your Fingertips

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The World Bank said it will support African countries with a campaign to quickly acquire and administer vaccine doses for 400 million people.

The World Bank said it will support the African Union for the Africa Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT) initiative, and allow access to its $12bn fund for buying vaccines – whether through Covax or bilateral deals.

“As a result of this joint initiative between the World Bank and African institutions such as the Africa Import Export Bank and the Africa Centre for Disease Control, we now have the capacity to vaccinate at least 400 million people, or 30% of our population of 1.3 billion,” said AU special envoy Strive Masiyiwa, the coordinator of the vaccine initiative.

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) welcomed the announcement that a centre for transferring vaccine technology will be set up in South Africa.

“It’s good news that the first mRNA technology transfer hub will be set up on the African continent, which has been particularly neglected when it comes to vaccine production capacity and is one of the key factors exacerbating COVID-19 vaccine inequity,” said Kate Stegeman, Advocacy Coordinator for the MSF Access Campaign in South Africa.

“What needs to happen next is Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech must immediately share their mRNA technology with the hub so that many more mRNA vaccines can be produced independently by manufacturers in South Africa and more broadly on the African continent, as soon as possible.”

MSF Access has called for a waiver on vaccine patents so that manufacturers around the world can quickly produce vaccines, which are in short supply in low and middle-income countries.

“The inequitable access to vaccines has demonstrated that in a crisis, low-income countries cannot rely on vaccine-producing countries to supply their needs,” said WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhamon Ghebreyesus at a media briefing.

“While a handful of countries have high vaccination rates and are now seeing lower numbers of hospitalisations and deaths, other countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia are now facing steep epidemics.”

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has threatened jail time for anyone refusing to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

“You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” Duterte said in a televised address on Monday, Reuters reported.

He said he was “exasperated” by citizens as the country struggles with its vaccination campaign, which has only fully vaccinated 2.1 million people of the 70 million targeted by the end of the year.

The Philippines has had 1.3 million cases and 23,000 deaths.

Venezuelans trying to get their second doses of Covid-19 vaccines are being turned away from appointments, Reuters reports.

Jamie Lorenzo, director of the Doctors United for Venezuela advocacy group said the shortage of doses was contributing to “anarchy” at vaccination centres.

“Before beginning a vaccination process, you must be sure of vaccine supply so that once you begin, you don’t run out,” said Lorenzo.

Venezuela has vaccinated 0.8% of its population since beginning its campaign in May with Russian Sputnik V and China’s Sinopharm vaccines.

More than 400,000 refugee children in Turkey are still out of school as a result of the pandemic, according to the UN’s children agency.

Unicef said coronavirus-related restrictions, reimposed earlier this year because of rising cases that peaked in April, have affected enrolment and attendance at schools, including for Syrian refugees.

They are one of the most vulnerable groups in Turkey, facing multiple child protection risks, including psychosocial distress, child labour, child marriage and other forms of exploitation and abuse. The socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, discontinuation of face-to-face learning, lack of interaction with peers and a reported increase in the level of domestic violence are likely to result in reversed learning gains and increased protection risks for vulnerable children, including refugees.

Hi, this is Kaamil Ahmed taking over the live blog for the night. Feel free to get in touch if I’ve missed anything.

Turkey is further relaxing restrictions imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus, president Tayyip Erdogan has said, after the number of daily cases fell to around 5,000.

From 1 July, lockdowns that had been imposed on Sunday’s and curfews after 7pm on weekdays are to be lifted, Erdogan announced.

“Public transportation restrictions will also be lifted and public institutions will return to normal working hours,” he said.

Reuters reports that Turkey started easing curbs in recent weeks, limiting the lockdown to Sunday and opening restaurants to a limited number of guests, after daily cases began to fall from a peak above 60,000 in April.

Following on from news that the US is to miss its self-ascribed target of vaccines to send around the world, the World Health Organization says that more than half of poorer countries receiving doses via the Covax vaccine-sharing programme do not have enough supplies to continue.

“I would say of the 80 [low and middle-income] countries at least well over a half of them would not have sufficient vaccine to be able to sustain their programmes right now,” WHO senior adviser Bruce Aylward told a briefing, referring to an advance market commitment to low and middle-income countries, saying the actual portion was probably “much higher”. Some of them had completely ran out, he added.

India gave out a record 8.3 million vaccine doses today under a federal campaign to inoculate all adults for free after weeks of criticism that a chaotic rollout had worsened a second wave that killed hundreds of thousands.

India’s previous record of 4.5 million doses was on 5 April, followed by a sharp decline with average daily inoculation falling below 3 million.

“If supply remains consistent, we will be on course to inoculate most of our population by the end of the year, D N Patil, a senior health official in the country’s richest state of Maharashtra, population more than 125 million, told Reuters.

Government adviser Vinod Kumar Paul said that administering 10 million shots per day was not a “set goal”. He added: “There is a demonstration by the system of how much can be done on a given day, at least this is something that should become obvious by the end of the day.”

The country is using domestically made doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine and Indian company Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin. The government is attempting to secure foreign vaccines such as Pfizer’s and has waived strict rules to allow quicker imports.

In other vaccine news, Senegal, Rwanda and South Africa are in talks with investors to start the production of coronavirus jabs in Africa, Rwandan president Paul Kagame has said.

Africa was “trying to find partners, to start manufacturing vaccines on our continent,” Kagame said at the Qatar Economic Forum. “We are discussing with people who will help with financing and I think in a few months we should hear a different story.”

Kagame also suggested that a Eurobond was one option to help pay for the creation of vaccine manufacturers in Africa. “Rwanda has been having a very good B+ credit rating. The Eurobond is one good option that will provide us with resources we are looking for,” he said, according to Reuters.