Data indicating that a vaccine being developed against Covid-19 is highly effective is the “best science news of the year”, a pharmaceutical industry association chief said, voicing hope that other vaccine candidates would show equally good results.

“A vaccine that has 90 percent efficacy and is pretty safe, that is a historic breakthrough,” the head of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA), Thomas Cueni, said.

American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech announced Monday that their vaccine had proven 90 percent effective in preventing Covid-19 infections in ongoing Phase 3 trials involving more than 40,000 people.

“This was the best science news of the year,” IFPMA’s director general told AFP in an interview.

Hopes are also high that one or several of the vaccines under development will also help rein in the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed nearly 1.3 million people out of the over 51.5 million infected.

There are currently more than 40 candidate vaccines against Covid-19 being tested on humans, with a handful in the most advanced Phase 3 trials.

Cueni acknowledged that more data was needed on the Pfizer and BioNTech candidate, which is based on an innovative technology that has never been approved for use before.

The companies based their announcement on interim results from the last step in their clinical trial before officially applying for approval.

– ‘Reason for optimism’ –

Cueni voiced confidence that any major safety concerns with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine would have been known.

“We still need to see the (full) efficacy and the safety data,” Cueni said, but stressed: “There is now genuine reason for optimism that these vaccines are basically considered safe.”

He said there is still a long list of unknowns about the vaccine’s protection, including whether it will be equally effective in all age groups and how long the protection might last.

Another pressing question is whether it will not only protect a person from Covid-19 infection but also prevent that person from transmitting the virus.

But Cueni said the data so far indicated the vaccine candidate was far more effective in preventing Covid-19 infections than the 50-percent efficacy threshold required by some regulators before considering authorisation.

This was “big news”, he said, particularly “since I think there is reason to hope it won’t be the only one.”

“We will see more good results.”

Cueni said safety and efficacy data on at least four other vaccine candidates, being developed by Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson, would be known within the next few months.

– Vaccine hesitancy –

He was optimistic that enough data would soon be available to win approval for using one or more of the Covid-19 vaccines.

And the large developers had already scaled up their manufacturing capacities, and were each in a position to produce upwards of a billion doses next year, he said.

But Cueni acknowledged there were numerous logistical challenges to actually inoculating the huge numbers of people it would take to bring the pandemic to a halt.

And he voiced concern about high levels of vaccine hesitancy in many countries.

Pharmaceutical companies were taking that challenge particularly seriously, he said, insisting they were going “way above and beyond the normal regulatory requirements” in terms transparency and data-sharing from trials.

The industry understood the importance of ensuring any authorised vaccine is trusted, he said.

“This is not only about Covid-19.”

Without trust, “the negative spillover on vaccination overall would be disastrous.”

Source: AFP

A more conservative Supreme Court appears unwilling to do what Republicans have long desired: kill off the Affordable Care Act, including its key protections for pre-existing health conditions and subsidized insurance premiums that affect tens of millions of Americans.

Meeting remotely a week after the election and in the midst of a pandemic that has closed their majestic courtroom, the justices on Tuesday took on the latest Republican challenge to the Obama-era health care law, with three appointees of President Donald Trump, an avowed foe of the law, among them.

But at least one of those Trump appointees, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, seemed likely to vote to leave the bulk of the law intact, even if he were to find the law’s now-toothless mandate that everyone obtain health insurance to be unconstitutional.

“It does seem fairly clear that the proper remedy would be to sever the mandate provision and leave the rest of the act in place,” Kavanaugh said.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote two earlier opinions preserving the law, stated similar views, and the court’s three liberal justices are almost certain to vote to uphold the law in its entirety. That presumably would form a majority by joining a decision to cut away only the mandate, which now has no financial penalty attached to it. Congress zeroed out the penalty in 2017, but left the rest of the law untouched.

Source: AFP

US President-elect Joe Biden Monday hailed as a cause for “hope” the news that a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech was 90 percent effective — but warned of a long battle still ahead.

“I congratulate the brilliant women and men who helped produce this breakthrough and to give us such cause for hope,” Biden said in a statement, adding that he received advance notice of the announcement on Sunday night.

“At the same time, it is also important to understand that the end of the battle against COVID-19 is still months away,” he added — stressing the continued importance of mask-wearing for the foreseeable future.

He spoke as European stock markets and oil prices jumped on the vaccine announcement.

Pfizer and BioNTech said that according to preliminary findings, protection in patients was achieved seven days after the second of two doses, and 28 days after the first.

The companies said they expect to supply up to 50 million vaccine doses globally in 2020, and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.

US President Donald Trump also hailed the news, calling it “great” on Twitter.

Soaring coronavirus cases across the world have forced many millions of people back into lockdown, causing further damage to ravaged economies.

In the US cases have been surging across the country in recent weeks. Trump’s defeat to Biden last week was blamed in part on his administration’s response to the pandemic.

Also on Monday Biden named the scientists who will lead his administration’s pandemic response, signaling his plans to prioritize Covid-19 from the outset.

The advisory board will be led by three co-chairs: epidemiologist and former Federal Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner David Kessler, former surgeon general Vivek Murthy, and Yale public health professor Marcella Nunez-Smith.

In addition, the board will have 10 members, ranging from immunologists and epidemiologists to biodefense experts and leading public health officials.

Among them is Rick Bright, the virologist who was ousted by the Trump administration in April from his post as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the agency charged with developing a vaccine.

A month later he warned Congress that Trump had no “master plan” to fight the pandemic.

Covid-19 has left more than 237,000 people dead in the US, the worst death toll globally.

According to a Johns Hopkins University tracker, the number of new US cases has topped 100,000 every 24 hours for several days running, and is nearing 10 million in total — despite Trump’s claim the world’s biggest economy is “rounding the corner”.

Biden said the board will help shape his approach on the surge in cases across the country as well as ensuring a safe vaccine is distributed efficiently, creating a blueprint he will begin implementing on day one of his presidency.

Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will receive a joint virus briefing Monday in Wilmington, Delaware from their advisory team.

Biden will then deliver remarks on coronavirus and economic recovery.

Source: AFP

The Ambazonia Vice President Dabney Yerima has called the attention of the international community to the plight of innocent Southern Cameroons children and warned of the highest level of malnutrition among kids in the rural areas of the territory that has been totally and completely destroyed by invading French Cameroun army soldiers.

Vice President Yerima said on Saturday that more than a quarter of a million Ambazonian children under four are suffering malnutrition in both the Northern and Southern zones of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia.

Yerima furthered during Saturday’s war cabinet briefing that Southern Cameroons children have been abandoned by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Program and the UN children’s fund UNICEF and are facing a high risk of dying unless they receive urgent treatment.

The Southern Cameroons leader also noted that acute malnutrition among Ambazonia children is hitting the highest levels the Interim Government has seen since French Cameroun president Paul Biya declared war against the people of Southern Cameroons.

Ever since the French Cameroun genocidal campaign started in British Southern Cameroons, the UN and the African Union have been issuing empty statements and have turned a blind eye while Southern Cameroons is on the brink of a catastrophic food security crisis.

“If the Southern Cameroons diaspora fails to finance the Amba resistance, we are nearing an irreversible situation and risk losing an entire generation of Southern Cameroons’s young children,” the Ambazonia Vice President warned.

Cameroon’s unwinnable war

Southern Cameroons is facing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis after the regime in Yaoundé launched a war against the English speaking community four years ago.

The ongoing war was meant to subdue a popular uprising that had declared the independence of the people of Southern Cameroons. While the French Cameroun war has failed to achieve that objective, its military and civil administrators have been continuing often blind operations that kill and maim civilians, including children.

The recent killing of 8 children in Kumba, the chief town in the Meme County revealed to the world that Southern Cameroons children are among the most vulnerable victims of the war, but the issue has barely drawn any international response.

At the heart of the crisis, which started in 2016, was a strike by teachers and lawyers, in the English-speaking regions of Cameroon. The professionals, supported by citizens of their areas, protested the unfair use of the French language and unjustified appointments of French speakers in their territories. Cameroon is a bilingual country. By 2017, the situation had spiralled out of control and developed into a fully-fledged separatist war. Both government forces and separatists are now bogged down in a conflict, that observers say, can only be resolved through dialogue.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

Spain has become the first European Union nation to surpass a million coronavirus infections, official data showed Wednesday. The Mediterranean country doubled its tally in just six weeks despite the government’s fresh restrictions on public life to curb the spread of the disease.

The country recorded 16,973 confirmed cases of Covid-19 over the past 24 hours, the health ministry announced Wednesday, taking the total to 1,005,295 since its first case was diagnosed on January 31 on the remote island of La Gomera, in the Canary Islands.

Of this number, 34,366 people have died, after 156 more deaths were recorded in the previous 24 hours.

After slowing to a trickle in the wake of Spain’s strict March to June lockdown, the infection rate accelerated to frequently exceed 10,000 cases a day from late August, and hit a new peak of more than 16,000 last week.

Hurried lockdown exit

A hurried exit from confinement before tracing systems were in place let transmission get out of hand faster than in other countries, said Dr. Rafael Bengoa, co-founder of Bilbao’s Institute for Health and Strategy.

Spain, which is home to around 47 million people, is only the sixth country in the world to cross this grim milestone after the United States, India, Brazil, Russia and Argentina, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

The new wave of contagion has been less deadly than in late March and April and the height of the health crisis, when fatalities routinely exceeded 800 per day, as the median age of new infections has dropped.

But with healthcare workers warning the spike could once again overwhelm hospitals, health minister Salvador Illa said Tuesday the government is considering several new measures, including night-time curfews such as those recently put in place in France and Belgium.

“We are facing very tough weeks ahead, winter is coming, the second wave is no longer a threat, it is a reality across Europe,” he told a news conference, adding the government was “open to everything” to contain the virus.

‘Political weapon’

The health ministry is set to meet Thursday with representatives from Spain’s powerful regional governments, who are in charge of healthcare, to update the country’s plan to respond to the pandemic.

Spain was one of the worst-affected countries when the coronavirus struck Europe early this year before one of the world’s most stringent lockdowns helped reduce the outbreak’s spread.

But infections have surged since the lockdown measures were fully removed at the end of June, with the rise blamed on the rapid return of nightlife and a lack of an efficient system to track and trace infections.

Messy disagreements between the central and regional governments, and between political parties, have also hampered the response, experts say. “The pandemic has been used as a political weapon to fight and argue with your adversaries instead of trying to find a middle ground and the best solution for everyone,” Salvador Macip, an expert in health sciences at Catalonia’s Open University who has written a book called “The Great Modern Plagues”, told AFP.

Fresh restrictions in Madrid, Catalonia, La Rioja and Navarre

As infections have picked up, Spanish regional authorities started imposing fresh restrictions.

While daily deaths have been hovering around 100 – a far cry from the peak of nearly 900 registered in late March – nationwide hospital admissions have jumped 20 percent in two weeks and 70 percent in the north-eastern region of Catalonia. That may potentially force some Barcelona hospitals to suspend non-urgent procedures

Madrid and several satellite cities have since early October been under a partial lockdown, while Catalonia has imposed a 15-day shutdown of all bars and restaurants.

The tiny wine-producing region of La Rioja joined nearby Navarre in announcing a blanket ban for all non-essential travel to and from the area.

Angela Hernandez Puente, a doctor and the deputy secretary of Madrid’s Amtys medical association, said the situation was very worrying, but not comparable with the overwhelming pressure the health system came under in March when intensive care units were full and staff lacked personal protective equipment.

‘Tired and angry health staff’

But she said the gains of Spain’s tough lockdown were wasted due a lack of preparation for a second wave of infections, citing as an example the failure to hire more doctors for public primary care centres, the first line of defence against the virus as they handle testing and tracing potential cases as well as treating the sick.

“It’s as if they thought that since infections lowered over the summer, ‘That’s it, it’s over’, when in fact it was the moment to prepare,” Hernandez Puente told AFP.

“Health care staff are tired and angry, many doctors feel that more should have been done in June, July and August to not let the public health system become overburdened as it is now,” she added.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP & REUTERS)

Residents of major cities in Cameroon have not been serious with social distancing measures and wearing of face masks.

Despite efforts by the government to prevent Covid-19 hugging, handshaking and the belief that the disease has not yet arrived Cameroon is the main talk on the streets.

The non respect of social distancing can be observed in markets; streets and parks.

“There are a bunch of Cameroonians from the start of this who thought that corona was a hoax. And many of them have never won a mask even for once. And till date they say that naturally an African is built to kill viruses. So they believe that their systems can even kill the viruses if it exists”, Wain George Muam, a concerned Cameroonian, told Africanews.

The Cameroon government has been conducting mobile Covid-19 screening in various cities across the country. The virus keeps circulating despite the high rate of healing in Cameroon.

Track, Test and Treat

Mobile screening is part of the governments’ (Track, Test and Treat) strategy. Few months back rapid test kits were made available making it possible to carry out more tests.

Cameroon’s Public Health Emergency Research Centre is aware of the negligence among the population.

“The community has realized that we have a high rate of healing as you mentioned. We have a very small number of people dying. And therefore they are relaxed because they no longer fear as it was the case when we were in early March” alerts Prof Yap Boum, the deputy head of the centre.

Daily Press briefings are organised by the Covid-19 coordination centre to keep Cameroonians updated on the evolution of the disease and the need to respect barrier measures.

“But what we are doing is actually trying to understand what is happening, and to achieve that we do what we call a cap survey. So we go to the field, we talk to the community and we try to understand what is their real understanding of the disease and where they are getting their information. And then that helps us now to go back and to reinforce the sensitization”, Prof Yap Boum added.

With a recovery rate of 94.9% and a fatality rate of around 2% public health officials in Cameroon satisfied with the results so far, keep calling for extra vigilance.

It is not yet clear why the healing rate remains high among those suffering from the Covid-19 in Cameroon. Scientists are investigating if this is linked to a boosted immunity, numerous tropical diseases or the youthful nature of the population.

Source: Africa News

The French cities of Lyon, Lille, Grenoble and Saint-Étienne will go on maximum coronavirus alert from Saturday, French Health Minister Olivier Véran said on Thursday.

Paris, Marseille and the overseas territory of Guadeloupe have also been put on maximum alert in recent weeks, leading to the closure of local bars and cafés.

Véran added that the situation in Toulouse and Montpellier was worrying and that those cities could also be moved to the maximum Covid-19 alert level starting early next week.

“The health situation in France, alas, is continuing to worsen,” he said. “Every day in France, more and more people are being infected, more and more are falling ill, and more and more are suffering serious effects that require hospitalisation.”

Véran’s announcement came shortly after officials reported 18,129 new Covid-19 infections on Thursday, with the daily tally staying above 18,000 for the second day running after Wednesday’s all-time high of 18,746.

The health minister urged the public to help fight the virus by wearing face masks and keeping a safe distance from others, even at home where there has been a concerning increase in the number of young people infecting older, more vulnerable family members.

Meanwhile, hospitals in the Paris region moved into emergency mode on Thursday, cancelling staff holidays and postponing non-essential operations, as coronavirus patients made up close to half of all patients in intensive care units (ICUs).

The number of people in hospital for Covid-19 stood at a three-month high of 7,624 on a national level, an increase of 88 over 24 hours. That total is still lower than an April 14 peak of 32,292 but up versus an August 29 low of 4,530.

There were 11 more patients in ICUs for the disease, making a tally of 1,427, almost four times higher than a July 31 low of 371.

The number of people in France who have died from Covid-19 rose by 76, a figure higher than the seven-day moving average of 73, and now stands at 32,521.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP, REUTERS)

As many as 115 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty this year due to the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the World Bank warned Wednesday.

That is a devastating reversal after decades of progress, and higher than the bank previously estimated, even as recently as August, when the worst case was put at 100 million.

And the bank’s new report estimates that by 2021, 150 million could be living below the extreme poverty threshold of less than $1.90 a day.

“The pandemic and global recession may cause over 1.4 percent of the world’s population to fall into extreme poverty,” World Bank President David Malpass said in a statement.

If the pandemic had not struck, the global extreme poverty rate was expected to fall to 7.9 percent, but now could climb as high as 9.4 percent, the bank said in its flagship report.

World Bank economists say the dire estimates for new victims of poverty this year, which range from 88 million to 115 million, depend on the outlook for the global economy, which the Washington-based crisis lender estimates range from a contraction of five percent to eight percent in the worst case scenario.

That would erode years of success in reducing extreme poverty, and the authors warn create “poverty hotspots” in areas that face a double-hit from economic crisis and conflict: more than 40 percent of the poor live in conflict-affected areas.

The research also finds a rising share of those living in extreme poverty are in urban areas, which threatens to overwhelm existing support programs that are designed for rural populations.

A distant goal

Instead of achieving the goal of eradicating poverty by 2030, the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic with the pressures of conflict and climate change will put the goal “beyond reach without swift, significant and substantial policy action,” the World Bank said, warning that the global poverty rate could be about seven percent in the next decade.

“In order to reverse this serious setback to development progress and poverty reduction, countries will need to prepare for a different economy post-COVID, by allowing capital, labor, skills, and innovation to move into new businesses and sectors,” Malpass said.

The bank said the policy response must be commensurate with the severity of the crisis, including modernizing education and online learning and deploying new technology to expand the reach of social protection programs.

“Failure to act comprehensively and urgently will create even bigger challenges in the future,” the authors warned.

Looking at a broader definition of poverty, the report found that close to a quarter of the world’s population lives below the $3.20 line and more than 40 percent — almost 3.3 billion people — live below the $5.50 line.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the epicenter of the problem, and could see an additional 40 million people fall into extreme poverty this year, and move closer to 500 million next year, according to the report.

And climate change will drive 68 million to 135 million into poverty by 2030, with Sub-Saharan Africa again the most vulnerable.

Latin America could see an increase of five million in the worst case scenario, and East Asia an additional nine million. The report does not include estimates for South Asia given the lack of data from India.

(Source: Agencies)

Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and Briton Michael Houghton won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the Hepatitis C virus, the Nobel Committee announced Monday.

The three were honoured for their “decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis, a major global health problem that causes cirrhosis and liver cancer in people around the world,” the jury said.

“The discovery of Hepatitis C virus revealed the cause of the remaining cases of chronic hepatitis and made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives”, it added.

Thanks to their discovery, highly sensitive blood tests for the virus are now available and these have “essentially eliminated post-transfusion hepatitis in many parts of the world, greatly improving global health”, the Nobel Committee said.

Their discovery also allowed the rapid development of antiviral drugs directed at Hepatitis C.

“For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating Hepatitis C virus from the world population,” the jury said.

“Prior to their work, the discovery of the Hepatitis A and B viruses had been critical steps forward,” the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said in a statement.

The award for work on a virus comes as the world battles the new coronavirus pandemic.

The trio will share the Nobel Prize sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million or €950,000).

Celebrations overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic

While the Nobel awards will go ahead as planned this year, celebrations have been overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Nobel Foundation has cancelled the traditional banquet, which forms the centre-piece of the celebrations in December, replaced with a televised ceremony showing the laureates receiving their awards in their home countries.

They would normally receive their prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.

This year’s winners will be invited to celebrate alongside the 2021 laureates, assuming the pandemic has eased by then.

Last year, the honour went to US researchers William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza and Britain’s Peter Ratcliffe on for discoveries on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.

The winners of this year’s physics prize will be revealed on Tuesday, followed by the chemistry Prize on Wednesday. The literature prize will be announced on Thursday and the peace prize on Friday. The economics prize will wrap up the Nobel Prize season on Monday, October 12.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP & Reuters)

Coronavirus tests that deliver results in 15-30 minutes are to be rolled out across the United States and in scores of poorer countries, as health authorities worldwide try to get a handle on a disease that has now killed more than a million people.

US President Donald Trump announced 150 million tests would be distributed in America, while the World Health Organization said 120 million more would be available for the developing world at $5 each as long as funding was secured.

The testing push comes as the virus shows no sign of receding, with infection numbers climbing rapidly in Europe again and governments there clamping down on movement in an attempt to curb the surge.

Paris, London and Madrid have all been forced to introduce controls to slow infections, and on Monday Dutch authorities became the latest to tighten curbs, while the Czech Republic and Slovakia said they were preparing to declare a state of emergency.

The WHO said its $600 million scheme to roll out the quick diagnosis kits across 133 countries in the next six months would enable low- and middle-income nations to close the gap in testing with the rich world.

The kits are far faster, cheaper and easier to administer than regular standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) swab tests but are less sensitive and more likely to return false negatives.

“This will enable the expansion of testing, particularly in hard-to-reach areas that do not have lab facilities or enough trained health workers to carry out PCR tests,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual press conference.

Experts have for months been calling for widespread adoption of this low-cost technology so that people can test themselves several times a week.

Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina said the testing drive “is terrific and is a great start”.

But the amount being distributed by the US government was “simply not sufficient” and production should be multiplied ten- or twentyfold, he added.

– ‘Whatever is necessary’ –

The tests are part of a limited toolkit available to governments as they seek ways to get the wheels turning on economies that have been crippled in recent months by lockdowns and other restrictions on people’s lives.

A million Madrid residents are under partial lockdown, with the city and the surrounding region at the centre of Spain’s second wave.

The national government on Monday warned the local authorities of drastic measures if the region failed to move decisively to slow the uncontrolled spread.

“There is no doubt that (the central government) is prepared to do whatever is necessary,” Justice Minister Juan Carlos Campo told Spain’s RNE public radio.

– ‘Made peace with it’ –

Worldwide the virus has now infected more than 33 million people and killed over a million, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources.

On Monday the number of cases in India surpassed six million, with the country on course to overtake the United States in the coming weeks as the nation with the most infections.

Locals in Delhi said while they remained cautious, their fears had lessened since the pandemic began earlier this year.

Himanshu Kainthola, 61, who recovered from the virus last month, said his family’s worries had “reduced substantially”.

“We take the necessary precautions and invest in increasing our immunity rather than being anxious or scared of it,” he said. “We have made peace with it.”

Source: AFP