Former US presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton said they were willing to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus on television in order to ease any public skepticism over the safety of new vaccines.
With the imminent arrival of coronavirus vaccines that will need to be stored at ultra-low temperatures, US companies are gearing up for a massive logistical effort to aid their distribution.
Recent progress on Covid 19 vaccines is positive but the World Health Organization (WHO) is concerned this has led to a growing perception that the pandemic has come to an end, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday.
Pfizer plans to ship 800,000 doses to Britain in the coming days from its production plant in Puurs in Belgium. Britain on Wednesday gave emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine, becoming the first Western country to pave the way for mass inoculations against a disease that has killed more than 1.4 million people worldwide.
Uruguay detected 284 new Covid-19 cases on Friday, reaching the record number of 1825 active cases, a few days after the barrier of a thousand cases was overcome and the government of Luis Lacalle Pou announced restrictive mobility measures last Monday.
The Tannat cable system connecting Uruguay and Brazil by sea has now been officially extended to Argentina. The cable is co-owned by Uruguay’s state-run telco Antel and by Google. Active since 2018, the 2,000km system links Maldonado, near Montevideo in Uruguay, to Praia Grande/Santos in Brazil’s São Paulo state.
LATAM Airlines expects to function at 38% normal capacity during the month of December according to a press release from the company. This includes the resumption of some international routes that remained suspended because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Singapore has given regulatory approval for the world’s first “clean meat” that does not come from slaughtered animals. The decision paves the way for San Francisco-based startup Eat Just to sell lab-grown chicken meat.
Brazil’s health regulator Anvisa said on Wednesday it was open to approving COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use and outlined the requirements for companies looking to do so.
The World Health Organization said on Wednesday it had received data from Pfizer and BioNTech on the Covid-19 vaccine and was reviewing it for “possible listing for emergency use”, a benchmark for countries to authorize national use.