Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
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 (...)
WITH OVER 27 million jobs lost in five weeks and the economy crashing, Trump of course wants to “reopen America” to what existed just a couple of months ago. But that economy’s not coming back.
As so much production grinds to a standstill, people are discovering that essential work is less about (...)
COVAX, the global initiative to coordinate the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in an equitable way, is crucial for bringing the pandemic under control.
But COVAX’s aim of delivering 2 billion doses to participating countries by the end of 2021 — including 92 low-income countries that can’t (...)
The ongoing global inequality in people’s access to life-saving Covid-19 vaccines is not just a global public health issue, it also threatens the inclusivity of the COP26 climate negotiations and other important global summits. The already delayed climate talks or COP26 to be held in Glasgow, (...)
At the end of 2020, there was a strong hope that high levels of vaccination would see humanity finally gain the upper hand over SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In an ideal scenario, the virus would then be contained at very low levels without further societal disruption or (...)
We should be wary of simplistic uses of history, but we can learn from the logic of social responses
There is a saying among epidemiologists: “If you’ve seen one pandemic, you’ve seen one pandemic.” Echoing this trade wisdom in an interview two weeks ago, Bruce Aylward, the assistant director of (...)
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