Europe has recorded a 60 percent drop in new coronavirus infections over the past month, the World Health Organization said Thursday, encouraging news that comes as the continent plans to reopen its borders. Still, “this progress is fragile,” a top agency official cautioned.
(New York Times) If all goes according to plan, the United States will soon send 80 million doses of Covid vaccines to help countries beleaguered by the coronavirus, President Biden said on Monday.
But world leaders, experts and advocates warn much more is needed to stop the virus from running rampant in much of the world, which gives it time to mutate and possibly evolve until it can evade vaccines.
Activists, too, have joined the cohort of voices calling on the Biden administration to move boldly. “Donating 80 million doses of vaccines without a plan to scale up production worldwide is like putting a Band-Aid on a machete wound,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a longtime AIDS activist.
In delivering vaccines, pharmaceutical companies aided by monumental government investments have given humanity a miraculous shot at liberation from the worst pandemic in a century.
But wealthy countries have captured an overwhelming share of the benefit. Only 0.3 percent of the vaccine doses administered globally have been given in the 29 poorest countries, home to about 9 percent of the world’s population.
A landmark programme to test potential COVID-19 therapies in dozens of countries is restarting with a fresh roster of treatments — this time aimed at tempering the raging immune responses that can worsen severe disease.
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