Urgent steps needed on how to use jabs that exist today: WHO

Palestinian ministry of health nurses administer a dose of the Comirnaty Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in the village of Dura near Hebron in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday. Pic/AFP

The World Health Organization (WHO) said that only 1 per cent of the 100 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine administered last week went in the lowest-income countries.

Close to "99 million doses of vaccines last week went into high- and upper-middle-income and some low- and middle-income countries, but only one per cent of that went to the lowest-income countries", Bruce Aylward, Senior Advisor to the WHO Director-General on Organizational Change said at a press conference on Monday.

Asked whether more vaccines should be produced, Aylward said that "we need to be careful thinking that we can simply build additional capacity", because "that capacity is still going to the wrong places", reports Xinhua news agency.

The world body said that it is working with manufacturers to help increase vaccine capacity for the COVAX Facility, a WHO-led initiative to distribute vaccines for low- and middle-income countries.

Aylward said it will "take weeks and months" to increase vaccine supplies and "in the meantime, we've got to take some urgent and important decisions about how we are going to use the vaccines that exist today".

Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist of the WHO, explained at the same press conference that the "immediate need" of COVAX is to increase vaccine supplies by working with manufacturers and suppliers on suppressing "roadblocks and obstacles", as well as ensuring that export bans "don't interfere with the process of vaccine manufacturing".

Back from Kumbh, former Nepal king tests positive

Nepal's former king, Gyanendra Shah, who returned from India after participating in the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar, has tested positive for COVID-19, sources in the Health Ministry said. Accompanied by his wife Komal Shah, the former king returned to Nepal on Sunday after which they underwent a mandatory testing for COVID-19.

Greece lifts quarantine for EU travellers

Greece has lifted the self-quarantine requirement for travellers arriving in the country from the European Union (EU), the UK, the US, the United Arab Emirates, Serbia and Israel, Greece's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said on Monday. The exemption also applies to travellers from four non-EU member states in the so-called Schengen zone: Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Xinhua news agency reported.

No clarity on lifting raw materials ban

United States President Joe Biden's spokesperson Jen Psaki has refused to say if the US will allow the export of COVID-19 vaccine raw materials to India, a shortage that could impact global supply or set a timeline for dealing with the requests for relaxing the vaccine patent rights. At her briefing in Washington on Monday, she sidestepped a question about reports that at a virtual meeting Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, the US had indicated that it was considering the request for lifting the raw materials ban.

4,90,593
No. of new cases reported globally in the past 24 hours

14,24,25,353
Total no. of cases worldwide

30,33,145
Total no. of deaths worldwide

Source: WHO/Johns Hopkins

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