Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Monkeypox has been spreading in humans since as early as 1970. While most monkeypox infections are mild, some can be fatal.
On May 18, 2022, Massachusetts health officials and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed a single case of monkeypox in a patient who had recently (...)
WASHINGTON, DC — According to Politico EU, a supposed “compromise” has emerged from the “quad” negotiations among the United States, European Union and waiver sponsors India and South Africa around the waiver of World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property rights for COVID-19 products. (...)
In 1993, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared tuberculosis (TB) a global public health emergency. It urged nations to coordinate efforts to avert millions of deaths.
In January 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19, another airborne infectious disease, a public health emergency of (...)
The emergence of omicron, COVID-19’s latest variant, has changed the pandemic landscape. As Paul Hunter explains, it’s made reinfections much more common – and there’s good reason to believe they’re being undercounted. While the general view is that reinfections should be milder, evidence shows that (...)
The pandemic has saved the reputation of some pharmaceutical giants whose track records should not be whitewashed
‘The Covid pandemic has, in some senses, been big pharma’s redemption. But the question of trust isn’t going away.’ A protest for pharmaceutical companies to suspend Covid vaccine (...)
The emergence of the new variant of Covid-19 called Omicron should serve as a wakeup call to rich countries that unless the whole world is given access to vaccines the pandemic is doomed to continue. Instead, the new variant was given as the reason why a key meeting at the World Trade (...)
Bodies in 28 countries file appeal for waiver of intellectual property agreement and end to ‘grossly unjust’ distribution of jabs
Nursing unions in 28 countries have filed a formal appeal with the United Nations over the refusal of the UK, EU and others to temporarily waive patents for Covid (...)
The world should help southern Africa, not by blocking borders, but by lifting patents to vaccinate its population as soon as possible and prevent the global spread of the new variant.
Within hours, the news spread. A new Sars cov2 variant was sequenced, first in Botswana with three cases, (...)
What’s the science behind the search?
Hunting for variants requires a concerted effort. South Africa and the UK were the first big countries to implement nationwide genomic surveillance efforts for SARS-CoV-2 as early as April 2020.
Variant hunting, as exciting as that sounds, is performed (...)
The organisation of our economies has driven two of the biggest global crises the world faces: pandemics, of which Covid-19 will not be the last, and the climate and ecological breakdown. On top of actual infections and deaths experienced by families, Covid-19 is also affecting every person and (...)
The multilateral trading system anchored by the WTO is not confined to cross-border trade in physical goods. It was also designed to protect corporate knowledge monopolies. Developing countries were told that strict adherence to the rules of ‘free trade’, codified and enforced by the WTO, would (...)
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the term vaccine efficacy into the public eye. But what do the efficacy numbers mean?
For example, at first glance, a vaccine efficacy of 70 per cent might suggest that in 30 per cent of cases, people are not protected by the vaccine and could get sick. But this (...)
In Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Professor Challenger takes a party of adventurers to South America, where they discover a plateau filled with dinosaurs. The book’s lesser-known sequel, The Poison Belt, isn’t quite so thrilling, and not only because of the disappointing lack of dinosaurs. (...)
The antibodies we create after we’re infected with a virus or vaccinated against it can be very powerful. A virus typically spreads within our bodies by entering a cell and using it as a factory to create copies of itself, which then burst out and find new cells to infect. Our antibodies work by (...)
Nature examines arguments that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab in China, and the science behind them.
[Photo: The Wuhan Institute of Virology building in Wuhan, China. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has carried out research on coronaviruses for years because these pathogens are (...)
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently called for an accelerated global effort to distribute vaccines to end the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a welcome step because past official statements by world leaders have fallen short of delivering specific policies to reach desperate populations, (...)
Thanks to a huge scientific effort based on international collaboration and historic amounts of public money, humanity has been able to develop several effective vaccines against COVID-19 in less than a year.
However, this great achievement could be totally overshadowed by the greed of the (...)
Just as the UK is beginning to reopen, another variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, appears to be taking hold in the UK. The variant, which was first identified in India, is particularly prevalent in London and the north-west, leading to calls for targeted responses in certain (...)
“A first barrier has fallen with Biden’s decision to supportthe temporary lifting of intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines. In May, a new round of negotiations will begin at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Unanimity will be needed to lift the patents. And our (...)
Independent panel castigates global leaders and calls for major changes to ensure it cannot happen again
The Covid pandemic was a preventable disaster that need not have cost millions of lives if the world had reacted more quickly, according to an independent high-level panel, which castigates (...)
Twitter
Facebook