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Israel’s health minister said on Thursday that people over 40 and teachers would be eligible for a third dose of Pfizer/BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine, expanding its booster campaign to fend off the coronavirus Delta variant.
In the UK, the House of Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, is facing calls to urge MPs to wear masks in the chamber, after cabinet ministers and many Tory backbenchers shunned the advice during a packed eight-hour debate on Afghanistan.
Brazil has now registered 20,494,212 cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 572,641, according to ministry data, in the world’s third worst outbreak outside the US and India and its second-deadliest after the US.
Police in Kenya used teargas and fired shots in the air to break up protests in Nairobi after a man was allegedly killed by officers for violating the country’s Covid curfew. Shops were looted as unrest grew after John Kiiru’s death, which came just two days after six police officers appeared in court over the death of two brothers this month after they also allegedly broke the curfew.
A plan to start offering Covid booster vaccinations in the UK from early September is extremely unlikely to happen, it is understood, given the concerns of the government’s vaccines watchdog about the clinical benefits and potential wider risks to vaccine confidence. Immunologist Prof Peter Openshaw also said that the results of ongoing studies to determine their effectiveness “should not be prejudged”.
The mass rollout of Covid-19 booster vaccines in Britain to residents over 50 this autumn could be shelved, with government scientists considering limiting third doses only to the most vulnerable, The Telegraph reported on Thursday.
An online open-source intelligence group last year identified that a virus studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology taken from an abandoned copper mine in Yunnan province was the closest known relative to Sars-CoV-2, the Economist reports in a piece which also considers the case for a zoonotic origin to Covid.
A Spanish court has lifted a coronavirus curfew imposed on most of Catalonia, including the capital Barcelona, leaving it in place in just a fraction of the northeastern region. The high court of justice of Catalonia said the measure was “not justified” because infection rates had improved.
Joe Biden said he and his wife, Jill, would receive a third dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to boost their immunity, as his administration announced booster shots would be offered to Americans in September. He also announced that nursing home staff would need to be vaccinated against Covid-19 as a condition for those facilities to continue receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funding.
Hospitalisations of people under the age of 50 with Covid-19 are now at the highest levels seen in the US since the start of the pandemic, the latest government data shows. The largest increases in hospitalisations was among those in their 30s and the under-18s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The hoarding of Covid jabs by rich countries which are also rolling out booster shots “makes a mockery of vaccine equity” pledges, the Africa director for the World Health Organization said. But she noted that cases across Africa are levelling off and more vaccine doses are finally arriving on the continent
The French scientist who promoted the discredited hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19 backed by Donald Trump faces being pushed out of the infectious diseases institute he founded amid concerns from key members over its role in feeding conspiracy theories and an investigation by regulators into its clinical studies.
Thanks so much for joining me this evening. I’m now handing over to my colleagues in Australia.
Brazil has had 36,315 new cases of the novel coronavirus reported in the past 24 hours, and 979 deaths from Covid-19, the health ministry said on Thursday.
The South American country has now registered 20,494,212 cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 572,641, according to ministry data, in the world’s third worst outbreak outside the US and India and its second-deadliest after the US.
As vaccination advances, the rolling 7-day average of Covid deaths has fallen to less that one third of the toll of almost 3,000 a day at the peak of the pandemic in April.
The mass rollout of Covid-19 booster vaccines in Britain to residents over 50 this autumn could be shelved, with government scientists considering limiting third doses only to the most vulnerable, The Telegraph reported on Thursday.
Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) had drawn up plans to roll out a booster programme from September, based on interim advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, the newspaper said.
However, sources close to the committee told The Telegraph there is limited evidence to support such an approach and a “far more restricted” group, focused on those most in need, may be targeted, PA news reports.
A government spokesman was quoted as saying by the newspaper:
Any booster programme will be based on the final advice of the independent Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.
Until we receive the independent JCVI advice, no decisions can be made on wider requirements for those who receive booster jabs.
Oxford vaccine chief Andrew Pollard said earlier this month that booster shots for Covid-19 vaccines were not currently needed by Britain and the doses should be given to other countries.
Britain had been planning for a Covid-19 vaccine booster programme, and health secretary Sajid Javid said he expected the programme to begin in early September, pending final advice from officials.
A total of 47.41 million people in the country had received a first dose of a vaccine against coronavirus through August 17 and 40.99 million people had received a second dose.
US officials thought their British counterparts “were out of their minds” in aiming for herd immunity as part of Boris Johnson’s initial policy on dealing with the coronavirus, according to a new book about the global response to the pandemic.
As the scale of the threat became increasingly clear in January and February 2020, officials in Donald Trump’s administration were trying to convince him to take the threat seriously, despite personal reassurances he had been given by Chinese president, Xi Jinping, that it was under control.
But they were even more shocked by the approach being taken in the UK. In a book to be published next Tuesday, Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order, British health experts at the time are described as being “oddly pessimistic about their capacity to defeat the virus”, rejecting measures such as a ban on mass gatherings.
“We thought they were out of their minds. We told them it would be an absolutely devastating approach to deal with the pandemic,” one US official told the authors, Thomas Wright, a foreign affairs expert at the Brookings Institution, and Colin Kahl, who is now under secretary of defence for policy. “We thought they were nuts and they thought we were nuts. It turns out, in the end, we were a little more right than they were.”
It was Trump who was persuaded to change course first, reluctantly agreeing to a three-week shutdown on 11 March, at a time when 150,000 people were attending the Cheltenham horse races in Britain.
But Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, were to shape America’s international response around the desire to see China punished, rather than building an international coalition to contain the spread of the virus.
Trump felt he had been betrayed by Xi. “These guys have fucked us and they fucked me personally,” he told his staff, according to the authors. He started insisting the disease be referred to as “the China virus”.
The book also describes the breakdown in attempts to build a concerted G7 response to the outbreak. France, which was handing over the rotating group presidency to the US, sought guidance from Washington on the administration’s intentions but it came as a shock to French officials “that the White House had no ideas of its own”.
Paris asked the administration for a call among G7 leaders. The White House agreed, but only on condition the French organise it. Then, when G7 foreign ministers convened by videoconference on 26 March, they were unable even to agree on a joint statement due to Pompeo’s insistence that references to the Covid-19 be replaced by the “Wuhan virus”.
The French scientist who promoted the discredited hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19 backed by Donald Trump faces being pushed out of the infectious diseases institute he founded, amid concerns from key members over its role in feeding conspiracy theories and an investigation by regulators into its clinical studies.
Didier Raoult has built a worldwide following throughout the pandemic for his support of the malaria drug despite its failure in randomised control trials. Multiple studies, including by the Recovery trial and the World Health Organisation, have found hydroxychloroquine to be ineffective in treating Covid-19.
University professors must retire at the age of 68 in France. Raoult turned 69 in March, and so from 31 August will no longer be eligible to continue his post as a researcher and medical practitioner at the University of Aix-Marseille and Marseille University Hospitals.
His age does not disqualify him from continuing as director of the Marseille-based infectious diseases institute he founded, IHU Méditerranée Infection, but François Crémieux, the director of Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Marseille (AP-HM), one of the founding member institutions of the IHU, told Le Monde it is not reasonable for Raoult to continue there after he ceases to practise medicine and conduct university research.
Crémieux and Eric Berton, president of the University of Aix-Marseille, another founding member, told the paper they will propose a search for a new director in September. Berton said they would “put the process on the table and see how the other founding members position themselves”.
Jean-Luc Jouve, the president of the AP-HM’s medical commission, told the French newspaper that Raoult had requested to continue in his position at the hospital on a part-time basis, but that his proposal would not be accepted. “There are more than enough teams at the IHU to make up for his departure,” Jouve said.
French scientist who pushed unproven Covid drug may be forced from post
The Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, is facing calls to urge MPs to wear masks in the chamber, after cabinet ministers and many Tory backbenchers shunned the advice during a packed eight-hour debate on Afghanistan.
Although face coverings stopped being mandatory in most settings on 19 July, government guidance that face coverings should be work in “crowded and enclosed spaces” remains in place, and rules set down by the parliamentary authorities say they should be worn in the main debating space.
Four trade unions representing parliamentary staffers wrote to Hoyle on Thursday raising concerns that the scenes of unmasked politicians sitting shoulder to shoulder on the green benches represented “the starkest example yet of the unwillingness of a significant number of MPs to take the most basic of precautionary measures to help protect staff”.
They said the “dismissiveness” was insulting and also claimed there was confusion about who was responsible for “ensuring a safe working environment in parliament”, after Boris Johnson’s spokesperson said questions about the rules on masks in the Commons and Lords were “a matter for the parliamentary authorities”.
The Guardian can reveal there has been an “uptick” in Covid cases among security workers around the estate in the previous two weeks. As a result, new guidance was issued the day after parliament returned for its one-day recall, telling security staff they must get tested by Saturday at the latest.
They have also been told to wear a face covering at all times unless exempt and to maintain social distancing, despite the legal 2-metre requirement also being dropped last month.
Israel’s health minister said on Thursday that people over 40 and teachers would be eligible for a third dose of Pfizer/BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine, expanding its booster campaign to fend off the coronavirus Delta variant.
Israel began administering third doses to people over 60 in July, later dropping the minimum age of eligibility to 50 and offering boosters to health workers and others, Reuters reports.
A summary of today’s developments
Police in Kenya used teargas and fired shots in the air to break up protests in Nairobi after a man was allegedly killed by officers for violating the country’s Covid curfew. Shops were looted as unrest grew after John Kiiru’s death, which came just two days after six police officers appeared in court over the death of two brothers this month after they also allegedly broke the curfew.
A plan to start offering Covid booster vaccinations in the UK from early September is extremely unlikely to happen, it is understood, given the concerns of the government’s vaccines watchdog about the clinical benefits and potential wider risks to vaccine confidence. Immunologist Prof Peter Openshaw also said that the results of ongoing studies to determine their effectiveness “should not be prejudged”.
An online open-source intelligence group last year identified that a virus studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology taken from an abandoned copper mine in Yunnan province was the closest known relative to Sars-CoV-2, the Economist reports in a piece which also considers the case for a zoonotic origin to Covid.
A Spanish court has lifted a coronavirus curfew imposed on most of Catalonia, including the capital Barcelona, leaving it in place in just a fraction of the northeastern region. The high court of justice of Catalonia said the measure was “not justified” because infection rates had improved.
Joe Biden said he and his wife, Jill, would receive a third dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to boost their immunity, as his administration announced booster shots would be offered to Americans in September. He also announced that nursing home staff would need to be vaccinated against Covid-19 as a condition for those facilities to continue receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funding.
Hospitalisations of people under the age of 50 with Covid-19 are now at the highest levels seen in the US since the start of the pandemic, the latest government data shows. The largest increases in hospitalisations was among those in their 30s and the under-18s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The hoarding of Covid jabs by rich countries which are also rolling out booster shots “makes a mockery of vaccine equity” pledges, the Africa director for the World Health Organization said. But she noted that cases across Africa are levelling off and more vaccine doses are finally arriving on the continent
The French scientist who promoted the discredited hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19 backed by Donald Trump faces being pushed out of the infectious diseases institute he founded amid concerns from key members over its role in feeding conspiracy theories and an investigation by regulators into its clinical studies.
Meanwhile, a new book detailing the relationship between the US, China and the WHO during the pandemic shows how Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cautiously praised China in public while pressuring it in private, the Washington Post reports.
Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order, written by Thomas Wright and Colin Kahl and due to be published on Tuesday, reveals how Tedros lost patience with China: When a WHO scientist on a coronavirus origins probe announced in February that the idea that the virus leaked from a lab was ‘extremely unlikely’ and unworthy of further investigation, senior WHO staff in Geneva were shocked. ‘We fell off our chairs,’ one member told the authors.
The team in Wuhan appeared to have given in to Chinese pressure to dismiss the idea without a real investigation. Later, when the WHO-China team released a report that again dismissed that scenario, Tedros pushed back, saying that the research was not ‘extensive enough’ and that there had not been ‘timely and comprehensive data-sharing’.
Since then, relations between the WHO and China have nosedived. Chinese officials said in July that they would not accept any further investigation into the origin of the coronavirus in China and accused the US of pressuring scientists. The WHO last week released a statement that resisted the idea that ‘the origins study has been politicised, or that WHO has acted due to political pressure’.
Wright and Kahl report that WHO leadership in Geneva were ‘stunned’ by their colleague’s statement. They did not believe the team that went to Wuhan had the access or data to rule out the lab-leak theory. Tedros told the investigative team this, the book reports, but the team was ‘defensive’, describing pressure from Chinese officials that led to a compromise.
At a media briefing yesterday, WHO emergencies chief Mike Ryan said the organization was working behind the scenes to increase confidence in an investigation, and “we are making headway on that, but I have to admit, that has not been easy.”
The Economist reports an online open-source intelligence group calling itself Drastic last year identified that a virus studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology taken from an abandoned copper mine in Yunnan province is the closest known relative to Sars-CoV-2.
The report sees importance in the removal, on 12 September 2019, of a database containing details of sequences and samples from the WIV. This is read as the beginning of a cover-up, and thus as the point when the authorities first knew something had gone amiss, arguing for a leak in late August or early September. The WIV says it was a response to cyber-attacks.
A leak is not the only research-related possibility. The first person infected could have been someone employed by the WIV or another lab to collect bats and samples – the prospect to which [the World Health Organization’s] Dr Ben Embarek pointed in his television interview. And it is important to remember that some other form of spillover outside the lab, either directly from a bat or by way of some other species, may well be to blame.
China clearly does not want lab-leaks investigated; but that does not mean it knows one happened. It is also being misleading about Huanan market, denying access to early-case data and obfuscating in various other non-lab-leak-specific ways. The most obvious explanation is that it does not really want any definitive answer to the question. An unsanitary market, a reckless bat-catcher or a hapless spelunker would not be as bad in terms of blame as a source in a government laboratory. But any definite answer to the origin question probably leaves China looking bad, unless it can find a way to blame someone else. To that end China has called for an investigation of Fort Detrick in Maryland, historically the home of American bioweapons research; state media regularly publish speculations about its involvement.
The lengthy, sober piece, subtitled “Origins and obfuscation”, also raises the possibility of other potential origins of Covid – after WHO mission chief to Wuhan Embarek’s stunning I-turn last week in which he suggested patient zero could have been a lab worker after all.
A Scientific Reports paper found that 18 species of mammal had been for sale in Wuhan between May 2017 and November 2019; gunshot wounds and trapping injuries suggested that almost a third of them were taken from the wild. Although the paper was published only recently, it was submitted to the journal in October 2020. Chinese law requires that all Covid-19 research be reviewed by the government before it is sent to a journal. Some Chinese authorities would have known of its contents before the team arrived.
The market is not the only way for animals and the pathogens they carry to get into Wuhan. The horseshoe bats in which the closest wild relatives to Sars-CoV-2 have been found do not live anywhere near the city, but the two laboratories there that were known to have engaged in coronavirus research received samples from bat caves around the country. The joint-study team was not allowed to investigate the procedures around, or documentation of, this research; when it visited the laboratories the team was shown presentations on safety procedures but no more.
The US is urging the more than 150 countries planning to send their leader or a government minister to New York to speak in person at the UN general assembly next month to consider giving a video address instead.
A note from the US mission sent to the 192 other UN member nations also called for all other UN-hosted meetings and side events to be virtual, saying these parallel meetings that draw travellers to New York “needlessly increase risk [from Covid] to our community, New Yorkers and the other travellers.”
The Associated Press reports that the note said the Biden administration is particularly concerned about secretary-general Antonio Guterres and the incoming general assembly president Abdulla Shahid hosting high-level in-person events.
“The US is willing to make every effort to make these important events on shared priorities successful in a virtual format,” the note said.
The UN decided in late July to let world leaders attend their annual gathering, known as the general debate, from 21-27 September in person — or to deliver prerecorded speeches if Covid-19 restrictions prevented them from travelling.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said that the UN had already put in place a number of measures to deal with the delta variant, including mandatory mask-wearing at the headquarters and reporting of vaccination status and positive Covid-19 tests.
It also has mandatory vaccination requirements for some personnel, including those servicing intergovernmental meetings prior to the high-level week, he said.
“We are obviously in continuous discussion with member states, who will have to make decisions, and the host country,” Dujarric said. “The secretary-general will continue to focus on keeping everyone in the UN community safe.”
Trade unions representing parliamentary staff have urged the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, to take action to ensure MPs wear face masks in the chamber.
MPs were sitting shoulder to shoulder in the Commons yesterday, with some wearing face coverings but many – including prime minister Boris Johnson and health secretary Sajid Javid – were not.
Mike Clancy, general secretary of Prospect, said all MPs should take the “basic step” of wearing face masks to protect staff.
Unions will not stand by while staff are put at risk by reckless politicians and following this shameful episode we are once again asking the speaker to take a tougher line with MPs when Parliament returns next month.
It comes as a government public health adviser has warned that the image of maskless Conservative MPs sitting across from a majority of opposition politicians wearing face coverings in a packed parliament “illustrates very starkly” how the issue has become politicised.
Prof Peter Openshaw, a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) which advises the government, told Times Radio:
There seems to be an increasing political polarisation. From the scenes in the Commons, with the Conservatives not wearing masks and, on the Labour benches, everyone wearing masks, I think that just illustrates very starkly the politicisation of this issue, which really should not be a political topic.
I think what was evident in those crowded conditions in the House of Commons, clearly fell into the guidance which is being given by the government, which is that you should wear masks in crowded spaces.
I think also the government is getting different messages from different quarters. The message that is coming through from the scientists, I hope, is one of continued caution, but of course they’re under a lot of pressure from many who represent vital businesses that, actually, we’ve got to get on and return to normal life, and I don’t envy the government having to balance these very, very loud voices from different sides.
The prime minister’s official spokesman said yesterday the situation in the Commons was a matter for the parliamentary authorities, but added that the advice “still remains” that face coverings should be worn in crowded indoor spaces.
One rule for them and another for us …
