Turkey signs deal for 50M Sputnik V vaccines – latest updates

Wednesday, April 28:

Turkey signs deal for 50 million Sputnik V vaccines

Turkey has signed a deal for 50 million doses of Sputnik V vaccine that will start arriving next month from Russia and should help address a short-term fall in supply, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said.

Vaccines will be scarce in the upcoming two months, Koca said, but the shortfall should in time be overcome with the new procurements and ultimately by production in Turkey.

Turkey has until now been using vaccines developed by Sinovac Biotech Ltd and by Pfizer and BioNTech. 

It has carried out 22 million inoculations, with 13.55 million people having received a first dose.

A total of 40,444 cases, including 2,728 symptomatic patients, were confirmed across the country, according to latest Health Ministry data.

Turkey's overall tally is now over 4.75 million, while the nationwide death toll rose by 341 over the past day to reach 39,398.

French patient numbers down again

The number of patients in France has fallen again with the total number of patients down by 370 and below 30,000 for the first time since early April.

The French Health Ministry also reported that the number of patients in intensive care had fallen by 64 to 5,879. 

It recorded 315 new deaths in hospitals, down from 325 on Tuesday. 

Italy reports over 13,000 new cases

Italy has reported an additional 344 deaths against 373 the day before, the Health Ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections rose to 13,385 from 10,404.

Italy has registered 120,256 deaths since its outbreak emerged in February last year, the second-highest toll in Europe after Britain and the seventh-highest in the world. 

The country has reported 3.99 million cases to date.

UK reports over 2,000 new cases

UK has reported 2,166 new cases, down from 2,685 on Tuesday, while the number who had received the first dose of a vaccine rose to 33,959,908, according to government data.

Britain also reported 29 deaths within 28 days of a positive test, up from 17 a day earlier.

BioNTech says its vaccine works against Indian variant

BioNTech co-founder Ugur Sahin has voiced confidence that the vaccine that his company jointly developed with Pfizer works against the Indian variant of the virus.

"We are still testing the Indian variant, but the Indian variant has mutations that we have already tested for and which our vaccine works against, so I am confident," said Sahin.

"The vaccine is cleverly built and I'm convinced the bulwark will hold. And if we have to strengthen the bulwark again, then we will do it, that I'm not worried about," he added.

Japan planning vaccine passports to restart travel

Japan's government has been planning to introduce vaccine passports to help restart international travel, the Kyodo news agency reported.

The passports would take the form of scannable smartphone apps that carry inoculation information, Kyodo said, citing government sources. 

UK official: Hopeful signs vaccine protection will be sustained

Plans for booster shots against infection in Britain will likely be driven by emerging new variants, as high protection offered by current vaccines against existing variants might wane less quickly than expected, a health official has said.

"There are very high levels of protection. So in fact waning may not be happening as quickly as we might have predicted," Mary Ramsay, head of immunisation at Public Health England, told lawmakers on Wednesday.

"The issue is probably going to more come down to variants, and the protection against variants, in terms of when we do (boosters), rather than the expectation that we're going to see a rapid decline in protection."

BioNTech: Waivers for vaccine production 'not a solution'

The granting of intellectual property waivers is not the right way to increase output of vaccines, the founder of German vaccine maker BioNTech, has said, advocating instead the award of production licences.

Such waivers are among the options being considered by the Biden administration for maximising the production and supply of vaccines, though no decision has been made, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Tuesday.

"This is not a solution," BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin said.

BioNTech, which makes and markets its messenger RNA-based shot in partnership with U.S. drugmaker Pfizer, considers close cooperation with selected production partners to be the right approach because its vaccine is hard to make.

UK regulator sees no heart inflammation concerns from Pfizer

There are no new safety concerns around the Pfizer vaccine and heart inflammation based on the rollout of the shot in Britain, the UK MHRA medicine regulator has said, after cases of the condition in Israel.

"The MHRA is as aware of the reports of myocarditis under investigation in Israel. Based on our experience and safety monitoring in the UK, there is currently no new safety concerns raised regarding myocarditis," a MHRA spokeswoman said.

The comment echoed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which said it had not seen a link between the shot and heart inflammation. 

India's total deaths pass 200,000 mark

India has reported a record rise in deaths from Covid-19 over the last 24 hours, taking its total fatalities past the 200,000 mark, while overall daily cases rose by a record 360,960.

With 3,293 new deaths, India's total number of fatalities now stands at 201,187, and the overall number of cases is now nearly 18 million, according to health ministry data.

EU legal case against AstraZeneca begins in Brussels court

The European Commission's lawsuit against drugmaker AstraZeneca over vaccine supplies has begun at a Brussels court, where the bloc's lawyers pressed for immediate deliveries from all factories, including from Britain.

The case in the Brussels court is the latest twist in an often bad-humoured EU dispute with the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker, and at times with Britain. The bloc accuses the company of failing to respect its contract.

With the pandemic still raging across the continent, the AstraZeneca vaccine was seen as a central part of Europe's immunisation campaign and a way to send coronavirus jabs to poorer countries because of its easier storage requirements.

Russia reports 7,848 new cases, 387 deaths

Russia has reported 7,848 new cases in the last 24 hours, including 1,840 in Moscow, taking the national tally to 4,787,273.

The government coronavirus task force also reported 387 deaths, pushing its death toll to 109,367. 

The federal statistics agency has kept a separate count and reported a toll of more than 225,000 from April 2020 to February. 

Covid-19 brings tourism, science to a halt on Galapagos Islands

When the coronavirus pandemic reached South America human activity on the Galapagos Islands, in the Pacific west of Ecuador, ground almost to a halt, leaving giant tortoises, iguanas, and other endemic species to themselves.

A four-month lockdown starting in February 2020 after Covid-19 was first detected in the region resulted in a total halt of tourism and a near-complete shutdown of scientific research.

Since July, the archipelago of 234 islands has partially reopened to tourism, but that has been limited to just 6,000 visitors a month, compared to an average of 23,000 before the pandemic.

The tourism sector lost out on $850 million from March 2020 to March 2021, the local tourism chamber estimates.

Some 85 percent of the local economy is dependent on tourism.

Indian Covid variant found in at least 17 countries: WHO

The World Health Organization has said that a variant of Covid-19 feared to be contributing to a surge in coronavirus cases in India has been found in over a dozen countries.

The UN health agency said the B.1.617 variant of Covid-19 first found in India had as of Tuesday been detected in over 1,200 sequences uploaded to the GISAID open-access database "from at least 17 countries".

"Most sequences were uploaded from India, the United Kingdom, USA, and Singapore," the WHO said in its weekly epidemiological update on the pandemic.

The WHO recently listed B.1.617, which counts several sub-lineages with slightly different mutations and characteristics, as a "variant of interest".

Pakistan sees record deaths, considering stricter lockdowns

Pakistan has recorded more than two hundred deaths in a day for the first time since the start of the pandemic, as the government said it was considering stricter lockdowns.

A total of 201 new deaths were recorded on Tuesday, bringing the country's overall death toll from the virus to 17,530, according to the National Command Operation Center (NCOC), which oversees the government's pandemic response. The previous highest daily death count was 157 recorded on April 23.

A total of 5,292 new cases were reported, bringing the total number of cases to 810,231 in the country of more than 220 million people.

UK plans to use health service app as vaccine proof for travel

Britain is working on using the existing National Health Service (NHS) app to show that people have received their vaccine for international travel, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said.

He told Sky News he would be chairing a meeting of G7 transport ministers from the G7 next week to discuss the plan further.

Britain has earmarked May 17 as being the earliest date when international travel would be allowed for non-essential reasons following a winter lockdown, with a "traffic light system" based on individual countries' Covid risk levels.

Poland to open shopping centres from May 4, hotels from May 8

Poland will reopen shopping centres on May 4, while hotels will be allowed to open and restaurants will be able to serve food outdoors from May 8, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said, as he presented plans to lift restrictions.

Poles should not have to wear masks outdoors from May 15 if they keep a safe distance from others, Health Minister Adam Niedzielski said.

Niedzielski added that this measure would only be implemented if the number of coronavirus cases per 100,000people was lower than 15.

Over 3,000 daily deaths reported in Brazil

Brazil registered 3,086 deaths and more than 72,000 cases in the past 24 hours. 

The country's death toll from the virus rose to 395,022. 

The Health Ministry confirmed 72,140 new infections, taking the overall count to more than 14.44 million. 

Nearly 13 million patients have recovered in Brazil, which has been the epicenter of the pandemic in Latin America. 

Brazil's health regulator rejects Sputnik V vaccine

Brazil's health regulator cited safety concerns while rejecting several states' requests to import almost 30 million doses of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine, prompting criticism from the Russian government.

The five-person board of the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency unanimously decided that consistent and trustworthy data required was lacking for approval of the requests from 10 states, according to a statement. Another four states and two cities have also sought authorisation to import the vaccine.

The agency, known as Anvisa, said there were faults in all clinical studies of the vaccine’s development, as well as absent or insufficient data.

White House considering intellectual property waiver for vaccines

The White House is considering options for maximising global production and supply of vaccines at the lowest cost, including backing a proposed waiver of intellectual property rights, but no decision has been made, press secretary Jen Psaki said.

"There are a lot of different ways to do that. Right now, that's one of the ways, but we have to assess what makes the most sense," Psaki said, adding that US officials were studying whether it would be more effective to boost existing manufacturing of the vaccines in the United States.

US lawmakers and nonprofit groups are heaping pressure on the Biden administration to back the temporary patent waiver to help poor countries contain the pandemic as India and other countries battle a massive surge in cases.

US CDC: No link between heart inflammation and vaccines

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not found a link between heart inflammation and vaccines, the agency's Director Rochelle Walensky said.

"We have not seen a signal and we've actually looked intentionally for the signal in the over 200 million doses we've given," Walensky said in a press briefing.

She said the CDC is in touch with the US Department of Defense over its investigation of 14 cases of heart inflammation or myocarditis among people who were vaccinated through the military's health services.

Canada reports first death from AstraZeneca vaccine

Canada's Quebec reported the country's first death of a patient from a rare blood clot condition after receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Canada has reported at least five cases of blood clots following immunisation with the vaccine, but public health officials maintain the benefits of the AstraZeneca shot outweigh the potential risks.

Quebec Public Health Director Horacio Arruda told reporters the death of the patient due to thrombosis will not change the province's vaccination strategy.