Health

A large batch of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine has been put on hold in Indonesia after a 22-year-old died a day after getting the shot. The batch will be run through additional “sterility and toxicity” tests. The move was announced by the Indonesian Health Ministry on Sunday. The suspension follows the …

Bodies of COVID-19 victims have been found dumped in some Indian rivers, a state government letter seen by Reuters says, in the first official acknowledgment of the alarming practice, which it said may stem from poverty and fear of the disease in remote areas. Images of corpses drifting down the …

It is not yet time to start vaccinating children against COVID-19, the World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom said on Friday at a media briefing, instead urging countries who have vaccinated their elderly to donate vaccines to other countries. “I understand why some countries want to vaccinate their children and …

Ireland’s health service has temporarily shut down all of its IT systems due to a “significant ransomware attack,” and one of Europe’s busiest maternity hospitals is badly affected as most appointments have been canceled. The Health Service Executive (HSE) took to Twitter on Friday to announce a “significant ransomware attack” …

Mainland China reported seven new COVID-19 cases on May 13, including its first local transmissions in more than three weeks, the country’s national health authority said on Friday. Two of the new cases were local infections in the eastern province of Anhui, the National Health Commission said in a statement. …

India records 4,000 deaths and 343,144 infections in the last 24 hours amid reports that strain first detected in the country is spreading across the globe. The number of recorded COVID-19 infections in India has climbed above 24 million amid reports on Friday that the highly transmissible coronavirus mutant first …

Findings at this stage of study focus on reactions to the vaccine, not efficacy Mixing the doses of different types of two-dose coronavirus vaccines has been found to be safe but increased the frequency of mild to moderate symptoms, a new UK study has found. The COM-COV study, led by …

The Covid-19 pandemic was a “preventable disaster” made worse by “weak links at every point in the chain of preparedness and response”, an independent review panel has found. The damning report from the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, set up by the World Health Organization (WHO), concludes: “Preparation …

A day after declaring the COVID-19 variant first detected in India as one of global concern, the World Health Organization announced Wednesday that the variant has spread to 49 countries. The U.N. health agency’s new concern about the B.1.617 variant comes as India recorded 4,205 COVID-19 deaths, a new one-day …

U.S. regulators authorized Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for use in children as young as 12 and said they could begin receiving shots as soon as Thursday, widening the country’s inoculation program as vaccination rates have slowed significantly. This is the first COVID-19 vaccine to be authorized in the United …

Genetically modified mosquitoes have been released for the first time in the United States, taking flight in the Florida Keys in a pilot program intended to reduce the spread of deadly diseases such as dengue, yellow fever, and Zika virus. After an odyssey spanning more than a decade to secure …

On Saturday morning, Dr. Akshay Nair, a Mumbai-based eye surgeon, was waiting to operate on a 25-year-old woman who had recovered from a bout of Covid-19 three weeks ago. Inside the surgery, an ear, nose, and throat specialist was already at work on the patient, a diabetic. He had inserted …

The EU has concluded a deal with Pfizer-BioNTech for up to 1.8 billion extra doses of its Covid-19 vaccine, according to European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen. “Happy to announce that the EU Commission has just approved a contract for guaranteed 900 million doses (+900 million options) with Pfizer-BioNTech …

The United Kingdom has branded a coronavirus strain first detected in India as a “variant of concern” as cases more than doubled in a week. According to Sky News, the designation of the B1617.2 COVID-9 variant raises the prospect of surge testing in infection hotspots to curb transmission. The latest …

The World Health Organization on Friday authorized China’s Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use. “This afternoon, WHO gave emergency use listing to Sinopharm Beijing’s Covid-19 vaccine, making it the sixth vaccine to receive WHO validation for safety, efficacy, and quality,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news briefing …

The novel coronavirus is just too new for scientists to figure out how long immunity might last. That’s a key detail that will help with immunization protocols once vaccines are available, as well as public health campaigns for containing outbreaks and reducing infection rates. The longer the immunity lasts, the …

On Sunday, Malaysia’s health ministry announced that D614G, a mutation of SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes Covid-19, has been detected in at least three of the 45 cases in a cluster that started from a restaurant owner returning from India and breached his 14-day home quarantine. The D614G mutation was first …

China’s vaccine specialist CanSino Biologics Inc has won a patent approval from Beijing for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate Ad5-nCOV, state media reported, citing documents from the country’s intellectual property regulator. It is the first COVID-19 vaccine patent granted by China, state-owned newspaper People’s Daily reported on Sunday. The paper cited …

In what could be a major breakthrough for novel coronavirus testing, the Food and Drug Administration has given emergency authorization for a new kind of saliva-based screening method Saturday, aimed at streamlining how samples are processed and cutting both cost and turnaround time. Developed by Yale’s School of Public Health, …

Production of the Russian vaccine for Covid-19 has been launched, the Health Ministry says. It was dubbed ‘Sputnik V’ after the world’s first artificial satellite launched by the USSR but its official name is ‘Gam-COVID-Vak’. The vaccine, which was developed by the Gamaleya National Research Center, has two components that …