Category: pandemic

Portugal Is the World’s Most Vaccinated Country Because Its Population Trusts Its Free Health Care System

Portugal has the world’s highest COVID-19 vaccination rate, with 85 percent of the population fully vaccinated. Its success drew on a strong public information campaign — but it couldn’t have done it without a free national health care system that has won massive popular trust.

Source: Portugal Is the World’s Most Vaccinated Country Because Its Population Trusts Its Free Health Care System

‘How Many More People Must Die?’ 

Negotiations over the proposed patent waiver—introduced by India and South Africa and backed by more than 100 WTO members—have dragged on for more than a year, a period during which roughly 3.8 million people worldwide died of Covid-19. Poor countries across the globe, including dozens of African nations, still lack sufficient access to coronavirus vaccines, and campaigners argue a patent waiver is necessary to remove legal barriers and ramp up manufacturing in struggling regions.The Biden administration endorsed the patent waiver in May, but leading E.U. countries and the U.K.—facing heavy lobbying from the pharmaceutical industry—remain opposed to a temporary suspension of intellectual property (IP) rules, which give profit-seeking drug companies near-total control over vaccine manufacturing.

Source: ‘How Many More People Must Die?’ EU, UK Under Fire for Tanking Patent Waiver Talks

The Preventable Horrors of the Pandemic and the Short Case for Open Research 

In general, and in a global health emergency in particular we should be looking to share technology as widely as possible, not locking it up behind patent monopolies and other protections. A worldwide pandemic should have been an occasion for the world’s scientists, including those from China and Russia, to work collectively to confront a common problem.The cost has not just been borne by the developing world. By allowing the pandemic to spread largely unchecked in the developing world, we gave it the opportunity to mutate into more vaccine resistant forms that will continue to reverberate in the months and years to come. The Delta variant developed in India last December

Source: The Preventable Horrors of the Pandemic and the Short Case for Open Research – CounterPunch.org

The World Health Organization has estimated that in order to vaccinate at least 70% of the global population by next year, 11 billion doses—equitably distributed—will be necessary.Doctors Without Borders—known internationally as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)—said Monday that “even while factoring in third-dose boosters for high-risk groups, high-income countries are hoarding an estimated 870 million excess doses,” including the nearly 500 million in the U.S. alone.”The rapid redistribution of these doses to low- and middle-income countries could save nearly one million lives by mid-2022,” the group said.

Source: ‘Reckless’: Doctors Without Borders Slams US for Hoarding 500 Million Vaccine Doses

U.S. Covid death toll hits 700,000: A massacre by the capitalist system | MR Online

The United States marked a grim milestone Oct. 1 as the 700,000th death from COVID-19 was officially registered. Since January of 2020 the United States has also counted over 43 million cases, the most of any country on the planet for both deaths and infections.

Source: U.S. Covid death toll hits 700,000: A massacre by the capitalist system | MR Online

Moderna, Africa, Vaccines

Link: 

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/10/07/critics-warn-moderna-plan-covid-vaccine-factory-africa-pr-gimmick