For the first time ever, India had increased its total number of Covid -19 vaccination in a day as the country vaccinated 10 million in a day.
This is to show their commitment to fighting this pandemic despite their large population and by achieving a 10 million a day milestone on Friday 27th August, 2021, they have been able to beat their previous record of 9.2 million daily.
The Prime Minister, Narendra Modi praised this achievement and tagged it a “Momentous Feat” as the country had really faced lots of death as over 200,000 people lost their lives in May and June due to covid -19 alone and the increased fear of another surge in infections.
Kudos to those getting vaccinated and those making the vaccination drive a success” Modi said on Twitter.
This is indeed a great proof that despite the challenges such as shortages and the people’s hesitation to get the vaccine, the country stands a chance at meeting their target of vaccinating 1.1 billion persons by end of the year.
Bill Gates also hailed India for the “tremendous milestone” as he commended everyone involved in achieving the success.
“Congratulations, India, on reaching this tremendous milestone, the collective effort of the government, vaccine manufacturers, health workers and the research and development community made this feet possible,” he said in his tweet where he tagged India Prime minister and the union of ministry of health and family welfare.
A recent US opinion poll showed as many as 49% of Republican male supporters did not want to get vaccinated.
Mr Trump last month said “everybody, go get your shot” at a conservative forum.
It was the first time he publicly encouraged Americans to do so. He has not commented on the issue since then.
Mr Trump, who was privately vaccinated in January, was absent when four other ex-presidents – Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter – appeared last week in a public service announcement for the vaccination.
The US is by the world’s worst-hit country by the pandemic, with more than 530,000 Covid-related deaths and nearly 29.5 million infections, according to Johns Hopkins University.
What did Dr Fauci say?
Dr Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, told Fox News Sunday: “If he [Trump] came out and said ‘Go and get vaccinated, it’s really important for your health, the health of your family, and the health of the country’, it seems absolutely inevitable that the vast majority of people who are his followers would listen to him.
“He’s such a strongly popular person. I cannot imagine that if he comes out that they would not get vaccinated.”
Dr Fauci said the Trump administration was “very successful in getting us the vaccines we have right now”.
“It seems like an intrinsic contradiction, the fact that you have a programme that was started during his presidency, and he’s not out telling people to get vaccinated.
“I wish he would. He has such incredible influence over people in the Republican party – it would really be a game-changer if he did,” Dr Fauci said
The Italian government has blocked the export of an Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine shipment to Australia.
The decision affects 250,000 doses of the vaccine produced at an AstraZeneca facility in Italy.
Italy is the first EU country to use the bloc’s new regulations allowing exports to be stopped if the company providing the vaccines has failed to meet its obligations to the EU.
The move has been backed by the European Commission, reports say.
AstraZeneca is on track to provide only 40% of the agreed supply to member states in the first three months of the year. It has cited production problems for the shortfall.
In January, then Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte described delays in vaccine supplies by both AstraZeneca and Pfizer as “unacceptable” and accused the companies of violating their contracts.
The EU has been widely criticised for the slow pace of its vaccination programme.
Under the EU vaccine scheme, which was established in June last year, the bloc has negotiated the purchase of vaccines on behalf of member states.
There has been no official comment on the Italian move by Australia, the EU or AstraZeneca.
image captionVaccinations began in Australia last week using the Pfizer jab
One week after Pfizer’s made a major breakthrough in the race for development of COVID-19 vaccine, another Coronavirus vaccine candidate has been shown to be more than 90 per cent effective in preventing disease among infected persons.
The vaccine, which has been tested on 30,000 people in the United States and so far proven to be safe, was developed by American biotech firm Moderna.
According to reports, early trial data shows that 95 Coronavirus infections had been recorded from Moderna’s ongoing phase three study, with the virus observed in 90 volunteers from the placebo group and five participants who had received the vaccine, returning an efficacy rate of 94.5 per cent.
The company, which hinted that its intends to submit for an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) with US regulators in the coming weeks, however said it would continue its large-scale trial until 151 cases had been reached,
“This positive interim analysis from our phase-3 study has given us the first clinical validation that our vaccine can prevent Covid-19 disease, including severe disease,” CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, said.
Describing the development as “pivotal’, Bancel said, “This milestone is only possible because of the hard work and sacrifices of so many.”
Coronavirus: US hospital admissions reach record high as cases surge
image captionHospital staff treat a Covid patient in Houston, Texas
The number of Americans in hospital with Covid-19 reached record levels on Tuesday, as more than a million new cases were confirmed in November.
There are over 10 million confirmed US cases and 239,732 deaths so far – and the death toll is rising to an average of over 900 a day amid the new spikes.
As of Tuesday, 61,964 people are receiving hospital care for the virus, the Covid Tracking Project reports.
Experts warn hospitals across the country could soon be overwhelmed.
The US has been seeing more than 100,000 new cases per day over the last 10 days in what experts say may be a worse outbreak than those seen in the spring and summer.
States across the US have broken new case records this week. On 10 November, Texas became the first state to hit one million total cases. That takes its case count above that of Italy – one of the worst-hit countries during the first wave in March and April.
The same day, Texas – America’s second most-populous state – saw over 10,800 new cases.
Other states, including Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California and Florida, have also seen numbers rise. CBS News reports 15 states saw the numbers of patients in hospital due to the virus double in the last month.
Some hospitals, such as in Idaho and Missouri, have had to turn patients away because they ran out of room.
State leaders have been re-imposing pandemic restrictions as a result. Residents of Wisconsin and Nevada have been urged to stay at home for two weeks. In Minnesota, bars and restaurants must shut by 22:00.
On Tuesday, epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who has been tapped to join President-elect Joe Biden’s virus advisory group, warned of a “perfect storm”.
image captionA queue for testing in California
Speaking to the CBS This Morning programme, Mr Osterholm said there was “no question that our hospitals are about to be overrun”. He noted “the darkest days of this pandemic between now and next spring”, before the vaccine arrives.
Mr Osterholm, who heads the infectious disease research centre at the University of Minnesota, said during the summer spike after the Labour Day national holiday, new cases rose to 32,000 a day.
“Now we’re running in the 120- to 130,000 cases a day,” he said. “Do not be at all surprised when we hit 200,000 cases a day.”
The same day, US infectious disease chief Dr Anthony Fauci offered some hopeful news. He said the new Covid vaccine by Pfizer was expected to go through an emergency authorisation process in the next week or so. Human trials suggest it is 90% effective.https://emp.bbc.com/emp/SMPj/2.36.3/iframe.htmlmedia captionHow close are we to Covid immunisation?
Dr Fauci told MSNBC: “I’m going to look at the data, but I trust Pfizer, I trust the [Food and Drug Administration]. These are colleagues of mine for decades, the career scientists.”
Amid the ongoing outbreak, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has updated its research around masks, saying that wearing one not only protects others but also the person wearing the mask.
Previous guidance had rested on the idea that the main benefit of mask-wearing came from potentially stopping an infected person transmitting Covid to others.
The CDC referenced several studies, including one case where two Covid-positive hair stylists interacted with 139 clients – but of the 67 clients researchers tested, none developed an infection. The stylists and all clients had worn masks in the salon.
Another study looking into the outbreak aboard the UUS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier found mask-wearing seemed to have reduced the risk of virus transmission by 70%, the CDC said.
News about the world’s first successful trial of a coronavirus vaccine was greeted with jubilation on Monday.
But while there are a number of reasons to remain cautious, there’s at least one one big practical hurdle to overcome.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Health Secretary Matt Hancock spoke of the “mammoth logistical operation” of transporting the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine from its point of manufacture to the arm of the patient.
That’s because it cannot be removed from a temperature of -70C (-94F) more than four times.
And that temperature is about four times as cold as the average home freezer.
Most other vaccines do not require anywhere near such low storage temperatures, so there is not a widespread infrastructure already in place.
In its own disclosure notice, Pfizer acknowledges there are “challenges related to our vaccine candidate’s ultra-low temperature formulation and attendant storage, distribution and administration requirements”.
At the Downing Street press conference on Monday, England’s deputy chief medical officer Prof Jonathan Van-Tam warned that even in normal times, “things can and do and have always gone wrong” when it comes to both vaccine manufacture and distribution.
How will it travel?
In the short-term, Pfizer has a plan.
The vaccine will be distributed from its own centres in the US, Germany and Belgium. It will need to travel both on land and by air, face potential storage in distribution centres in between stages and the final hurdle will be local delivery to clinics, surgeries, pharmacies, hospitals – anywhere the vaccine will be administered.
As revealed by the Wall Street Journal, Pfizer has developed a special transport box the size of a suitcase, packed with dry ice and installed with GPS trackers, which can keep up to 5,000 doses of the vaccine at the right temperature for 10 days, as long as it remains unopened. The boxes are also reusable.
Wiltshire-based firm Polar Thermals makes similar boxes for other vaccines and counts Pfizer among its clients, but not so far for this particular purpose.
image captionPolar Thermal’s “thermal shipper” can be reused thousands of times
The box is not likely to be cheap. Head of sales Paul Harrison says a standard chilled transport box, which will retain a temperature of up to -8C (not -80C) for five days and is big enough to hold 1,200 vaccines, costs about £5,000 per unit – although they can be re-used thousands of times.
His firm uses aerogel as insulation, rather than dry ice – which could come in handy if a global shortage of carbon dioxide from earlier this year continues to affect the availability of related products, of which dry ice is one.
The vaccine can survive for a further five days once thawed, Pfizer has said, but this does not buy a great deal of extra time.
In the longer-term, Public Health England says that in the UK “national preparations” are under way regarding both central storage and distribution of the vaccine across the country, but declines to give details.
As it stands, extreme cold storage is certainly not commonplace, and your local GP is unlikely to have it.
“We do not have fridges in general practice that go down to that sort of temperature,” GP professor Sam Everington told the BBC’s Newsnight programme on Monday. “So we will need them.”
And that issue is not exclusive to the UK. Dr Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, told Reuters: “We’re a major medical centre and we don’t have storage capacity like this.”
Some institutions, such as universities and research labs, do have the right storage capacity. Is there a possibility they could be donated or lent out as temporary vaccination homes? In the UK, universities shared resources at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, including PPE-making equipment and ventilators.
“We may see existing fridges donated,” said Dr Michael Head, epidemiologist at the University of Southampton
Virus to stay ‘at least until next summer’ – France’s Macron
French President Emmanuel Macron says his country will be fighting the virus until at least the middle of next year as cases there surged past a million.
On Friday France recorded more than 40,000 new cases and 298 deaths. Other nations including Russia, Poland, Italy and Switzerland also saw new highs.
The World Health Organization said the spike in European cases was a critical moment in the fight against the virus. It called for quick action to prevent health services being overwhelmed.
Daily infections in Europe have more than doubled in the past 10 days. The continent has now seen a total of 7.8m cases and about 247,000 deaths.
“The next few months are going to be very tough and some countries are on a dangerous track,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.
Globally there have been more than 42m cases and 1.1m deaths.
Scientists have warned that although progress is being made at unprecedented speed to create a vaccine, it would not return life to normal in spring. A vaccine could take up to a year to roll out, they have suggested.
Speaking on a visit to a hospital in the Paris region, Mr Macron said scientists were telling him that they believed the virus would be present “at best until next summer”, he said.
But he said it was still too early to say whether France would go into a new full or partial lockdown.
An overnight curfew in the country is being extended to about two-thirds of the country – 46 million people – from Friday night for six weeks.
The curfew could be relaxed when new infections dropped back down to between 3,000 and 5,000 a day, Mr Macron said – a level of infection that was last seen at the end of August.
Meanwhile the head of a Paris hospital group warned that the second wave of infections could be worse than the first.
“There has been a perception in recent months that a second wave does not exist, or that it is a small wave. The situation is the opposite,” Martin Hirsch, the head of the AP-HP hospital group, told local media.
People in much of France must be home by 21:00 local time from Friday
Many of those currently in intensive care in his hospitals were older people who had been self-isolating but had become infected when their children visited them, Mr Hirsch said.
“There are many positive people, infectious, in the streets without knowing it and without anyone else knowing it,” he added.
Covid patients currently occupy nearly half of France’s 5,000 intensive care beds.
And Prime Minister Jean Castex said a further influx of patients was likely – “The new cases of today are the hospitalised patients of tomorrow. The month of November will be difficult,” he said.
Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine trial paused due to ill volunteer
A notable company Johnson & Johnson has paused its Covid vaccine trial to investigate why one participant in the study fell ill.
The company said an independent review would check if the person’s unexplained symptoms were related to the jab.
Therefore as a precaution, recruitment to the phase three trial has been suspended.
It said in large trials, with tens of thousands of volunteers, it was to be expected that some may become unwell during the study period.
The company said that for privacy reasons, it could not give more details about the ill participant.
According to the company, “More is being learnt about this participant’s illness, and it’s important to have all the facts before additional information is shared.”
It is not the first Covid vaccine trial to be suspended – a participant in the UK’s Oxford University study had an unexplained illness too, but it has since been deemed safe to resume, except for in the US where regulators are still in discussions with manufacturer Astra Zeneca.
There are nearly 180 vaccine candidates being tested around the world, but none has yet completed clinical trials.
The Johnson & Johnson jab, like the Oxford University Astra Zeneca one, is in the advanced stage of testing.
Both use a modified common cold virus to prime the immune system against Covid.
The Johnson & Johnson trial had started recruiting participants in late September, with a goal of enrolling up to 60,000 volunteers across more than 200 sites in the US as well as in South America and South Africa.
Even an effective coronavirus vaccine will not return life to normal in spring, a group of leading scientists has warned.
A vaccine is often seen as the holy grail that will end the pandemic.
But a report, from researchers brought together by the Royal Society, said we needed to be “realistic” about what a vaccine could achieve and when.
They said restrictions may need to be “gradually relaxed” as it could take up to a year to roll the vaccine out.
More than 200 vaccines to protect against the virus are being developed by scientists around the world in a process that is taking place at unprecedented speed.
“A vaccine offers great hope for potentially ending the pandemic, but we do know that the history of vaccine development is littered with lots of failures,” said Dr Fiona Culley, from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London.
There is optimism, including from the UK government’s scientific advisers, that some people may get a vaccine this year and mass vaccination may start early next year.
However, the Royal Society report warns it will be a long process.
“Even when the vaccine is available it doesn’t mean within a month everybody is going to be vaccinated, we’re talking about six months, nine months… a year,” said Prof Nilay Shah, head of chemical engineering at Imperial College London.
The report said there were still “enormous” challenges ahead.
Some of the experimental approaches being taken – such as RNA vaccines – have never been mass produced before.
There are questions around raw materials – both for the vaccine and glass vials – and refrigerator capacity, with some vaccines needing storage at minus 80C.
Prof Shah estimates vaccinating people would have to take place at a pace, 10 times faster than the annual flu campaign and would be a full-time job for up to 30,000 trained staff.
“I do worry, is enough thinking going into the whole system?” he says.
Early trial data has suggested that vaccines are triggering an immune response, but studies have not yet shown if this is enough to either offer complete protection or lessen the symptoms of Covid.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE VACCINE Prof Charles Bangham, chair of immunology of Imperial College London, said: “We simply don’t know when an effective vaccine will be available, how effective it will be and of course, crucially, how quickly it can be distributed.
“Even if it is effective, it is unlikely that we will be able to get back completely to normal, so there’s going to be a sliding scale, even after the introduction of a vaccine that we know to be effective.
“We will have to gradually relax some of the other interventions.”
And many questions that will dictate the vaccination strategy remain unanswered, such as:
Will one shot be enough or will boosters be required?
will the vaccine work well enough in older people with aged immune systems? The researchers warn the issue of long-term immunity will still take some time to answer, and we still do not know if people need vaccinating every couple of years or if one shot will do.
Commenting on the study, Dr Andrew Preston from the University of Bath, said: “Clearly the vaccine has been portrayed as a silver bullet and ultimately it will be our salvation, but it may not be an immediate process.”
He said there would need to be discussion of whether “vaccine passports” are needed to ensure people coming into the country are immunised.
And Dr Preston warned that vaccine hesitancy seemed to be a growing problem that had become embroiled in anti-mask, anti-lockdown ideologies.
“If cohorts of people refuse to have the vaccine, do we leave them to fend for themselves or have mandatory vaccination for children to go to schools, or for staff in care homes? There are lots of difficult questions.”
“There’s not a question of life suddenly returning to normal in March.”
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