
Reuters – Under tight control by its Chinese hosts, the World Health Organization-led team investigating the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan province, visited a hospital on Saturday that treated early patients.

The government of the Falkland Islands and officials from Mount Pleasant Complex held on Sunday an extraordinary meeting and decided that access to the Complex will remain restricted for the next fourteen days given the sanitary situation at MPC.

The United Nations mission in Bolivia celebrated the fact that this country will be one of the first to receive vaccines from the multilateral Covax system, promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO) to guarantee access to these drugs in the world's poorest countries.

The World Medical Association called for cooperation to fight egotisms and nationalism in the fight against Covid-19. Speaking at a ceremony this Sunday in Vienna, where the WMA was presented with an award honoring physicians around the world for their fight against the pandemic, Dr. Otmar Kloiber, Secretary-General of the WMA, stressed the need for international co-operation.

The European Commission will monitor and in some cases block coronavirus vaccine exports out of the bloc since it installed a new mechanism on Friday. The move comes amid a row with the British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca over vaccine deliveries.

The Swiss drugmaker Novartis has signed an initial agreement to provide manufacturing capacity for Pfizer and Biontech's COVID-19 vaccine, a move aimed at helping boost production as supplies fall shy of demand.

More than 300 large companies pledged this week to work together to help hundreds of thousands of merchant sailors trapped on ships for many months due to Covid-19. About 90% of world trade is transported by sea, and coronavirus restrictions in many countries are affecting global supply chains.

The Falkland Islands Government confirmed on Thursday that a military medic involved in quarantine surveillance swabbing has tested positive for Covid-19 as a result of displaying symptoms.

More than one million people have died from COVID-19 in North and South America, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) reported. Last week two million more cases were reported in the Americas, with the United States the main driver of the outbreak.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is traveling on Thursday to Scotland to confront growing support for another independence referendum. Ahead of his visit, Johnson said that Scotland, as a part of the UK, gained access to a coronavirus vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, and they are being administered by their shared armed forces, who are creating 80 new vaccine centers in Scotland.