World Coronavirus Dispatch: New vaccines less effective against SA variant

EU reverses course on allowing vaccines into UK, Biden team scrambles to find 20 mn vaccine doses Trump failed to track, Why Paris must be reimagined and other pandemic news across the globe

Grey sadness in Paris, the city of lights 

Once the city of noise and light, Paris's streets remain silenced and dimmed now. Once bustling restaurants are now subject to frequent shutdowns. This report in the New York Times talks about how a grey sadness has settled over the city like fog. The museums, the tourist-filled riverboats, the Seine, the sidewalk terraces offering their pleasures at dusk, the movie theaters, the casual delights of wandering and the raucous banter have all vanished. Life is monotonous. There’s really nowhere to go... Paris is not the only city enduring such crisis, but each city changes in its own way and how Paris did so evokes a sense of sadness. Read here
 

Let's look at the global statistics

Global infections: 102,632,290

Global deaths: 2,221,202

Nations with most cases: US (26,074,881), India (10,746,174), Brazil (9,176,975), Russia (3,808,348), United Kingdom (3,806,993).

Source: John Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center.

EU makes a sudden and embarrassing U-turn on vaccines

The European Union's vaccination programme is consistently under fire for many reasons, since it approved the shots--first, for its slow roll-out of vaccines in the member nations. The latest is its decision to block the export of vaccine shipments across the Irish border into Britain. The bloc had come under harsh criticism from Britain, Ireland and the World Health Organization when it announced plans to use emergency measures under the Brexit deal to block Covid-19 vaccines. Read here

Biden team scrambles to find 20 million vaccine doses Trump failed to track

The Biden administration has spent its first week in office trying to find 20 million vaccine doses in the pipeline between federal distribution and administration at clinic sites, when a dose finally reaches a patient’s arm. The Trump administration’s strategy pushed the response to the coronavirus pandemic to individual states and omitted pipeline tracking information between distribution and when the shot is actually administered, Biden administration officials told Politico. The lack of data has now forced federal health department officials to spend hours on the phone tracking down vaccine shipments, the news website reported. Read here

Two new vaccines have less efficacy against South African variant

Two new coronavirus vaccine reportedly are less effective against South African variant, early clinical trials suggested. The are vaccines from Novavax and Johnson & Johnson. Novavax vaccine had reported 50 per cent efficacy in preventing coronavirus among South African's while the UK trials showed it had as much as 89 per cent efficacy. Johnson & Johnson's single shot vaccine had 66 per cent efficacy in a large-scale trial that was done in three continents. In the US, which recorded its first cases of the South African variant this week, the vaccine’s efficacy was 72 per cent, but it was just 57 per cent in South Africa, where the new variants constituted 95 per cent of the cases in the trial. Read here