COVID-19 - The African Mirror

Apr

17

2021

Concerns mount over rival vaccines

COVID-19

CARL O’DONNELL WEALTHY governments are looking to COVID-19 shots from Pfizer Inc and Moderna Inc to keep their vaccination programs on track, as safety concerns and production problems sideline vaccines from AstraZeneca Plc and Johnson & Johnson, public health experts and industry analysts say. Countries in Europe and Asia, as well as South Africa, are limiting or halting use of AstraZeneca's shot over safety concerns. Rollout of J&J's one-shot vaccine was paused in the United States and Europe this week over a handful of cases of very rare but dangerous blood clots in the brain, much like AstraZeneca's safety issue.…

Jun

29

2021

By The African Mirror

SA businesses, people gripped in fear

COVID-19

DESERTED streets, empty restaurants and shut liquor stores greeted the first day of South Africa's move back to a harder lockdown, as a third wave of COVID-19 infections courses through a population less than 4% of whom have yet been partly vaccinated. Africa's most advanced economy recorded on Saturday 18,000 new infections, just 3,000 shy of its second wave peak seen in January. Government data shows that one in every four people being tested are showing a positive result. (Graphic on global cases and deaths) https://tmsnrt.rs/34pvUyi A slow vaccination drive, brought about by a combination of bad luck, failure to…

Jun

29

2021

By The African Mirror

Nigeria adds SA to its COVID-19 ‘red list’

COVID-19

NIGERIA is adding South Africa to its "red list" of countries for which there are stringent restrictions for arriving passengers, officials said during a briefing. Nigeria is introducing the restrictions due to the spread of the Delta variant in South Africa, Chikwe Ihekweazu, the head of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, said. The country joins India, Brazil and Turkey on the list. "In Nigeria, we haven't found the Delta variant yet," Ihekweazu said during the briefing. Non-Nigerian passport holders and non-residents who visited the countries on the list within 14 days are barred entry from Nigeria, while passport holders…

Jun

29

2021

By The African Mirror

Tanzania to spend $470 million on vaccines

COVID-19

TANZANIA will spend $470 million buying vaccines and supporting economic sectors hit hard by the coronavirus, President Samia Suluhu Hassan said has announced. Since Hassan took office after the death of then-president John Magufuli in March, the government has changed tack from playing down the pandemic to calling for social distancing and emphasising mask wearing in public. Issuing the first data on infections since May 2020, Hassan said there were more than 100 COVID-19 patients in Tanzania as of last Saturday, with 70 of them being provided oxygen. Half of the cash will be spent on vaccines, protective gear and…

Apr

16

2021

By The African Mirror

Africa CDC cannot predict date for 2nd shots

COVID-19

MANY Africans who have received their first COVID-19 vaccine do not know when they will get a second shot because deliveries are delayed, the continent's top public health official has said. "We cannot predict when the second doses will come and that is not good for our vaccination programme," John Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), told reporters. Africa lags behind most other regions in COVID-19 vaccinations, with just less than 14 million doses having been administered on the continent of 1.3 billion, according to the Africa CDC. Ghana, for example, has…

Apr

16

2021

By The African Mirror

“Shocking vaccine disparity”

COVID-19

THERE is still a "shocking disparity" in the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said. Tedros, addressing an event of the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, said that some low and middle-income countries in the COVAX facility still had not received any vaccines, while others had not received their second round allocation. "We need an urgent scale-up in financing COVAX," he said. Felix Tshisekedi, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and chair of the African Union, said he hoped that people on the African continent would have the same…

Apr

16

2021

By The African Mirror

WTO chief lays out global action to increase vaccine access

COVID-19

THE head of the World Trade Organization laid out a series of actions yesterday for countries and drug makers to increase production of coronavirus vaccines and share them more widely and fairly. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who became WTO director-general in March, called a closed-door meeting of producers, governments and others over inequitable access, with low-income countries administering just 0.2% of 700 million global doses. In her concluding remarks, Okonjo-Iweala said that concerns over cross-border supply chains, including export curbs and shortages of skilled personnel, had reinforced her view that the WTO must play a central role in the response to the…

Jun

28

2021

By The African Mirror

Egypt to receive 1.9 million doses

COVID-19

EGYPT expects to receive 1.9-million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from the COVAX facility next month, its health ministry said in a statement. The country has also procured 210,000 doses of the Sputnik V vaccine, and aims to procure 20 million doses by the end of the year, the statement said.

Apr

15

2021

By The African Mirror

DRC to start vaccination campaign

COVID-19

THE Democratic Republic of Congo will start its COVID-19 vaccination campaign on April 19 with 1.7 million AstraZeneca doses it received from the COVAX global vaccines sharing scheme after delaying the rollout for more than a month. Congo received the vaccines on March 2 and was expected to begin the inoculation campaign almost immediately but delayed rollout after several European countries suspended use of the shots. A government statement late yesterday said a task force had determined that the AstraZeneca vaccines already available in the country presented no risks to the population. Congo has reported 28,542 infections and 745 coronavirus-related…

Apr

15

2021

By The African Mirror

‘Vaccine down payments terms among onerous’

COVID-19

WENDELL ROELF and ALEXANDER WINNING SOUTH Africa agreed to onerous conditions like non-refundable down payments to secure COVID-19 vaccines from Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and Pfizer, its health minister said on Wednesday, describing terms vaccine manufacturers had demanded as "difficult and sometimes unreasonable". The country worst-hit by the pandemic on the African continent in terms of coronavirus infections and deaths is counting on the single-dose J&J and double-shot Pfizer vaccines to ramp up immunisations after a slow start. It has signed deals with the two firms for a combined 61 million doses, enough to vaccinate 46 million people out of…