Tag Archives: Vaccine

New York governor expects coronavirus rates to continue rising into winter

By Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Monday he expected the rate of positive tests for the novel coronavirus to continue rising in the state into winter.

Both the state and New York City have seen positive test rates creep above 2% again in recent days in what Cuomo called a “new phase” of the coronavirus’s spread.

“The numbers are undeniable,” he told reporters on a conference call. “The best you can do is manage the increase.” He said cases may continue to rise until a vaccine became widely available.

Earlier on Monday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio warned that the city may soon enter a second wave of infections after grappling with what at the time was the world’s worst outbreak of COVID-19 earlier this year.

He said New Yorkers might see restrictions reintroduced, saying he now thought indoor dining at restaurants, even at restricted capacity, should be reconsidered, though he said that decision ultimately rested with Cuomo.

Stricter rules in nearby New Jersey were announced by Governor Phil Murphy on Monday in response to a rise in COVID-19 cases in the Garden State, and outbreaks among bartenders at several establishments.

New rules ban service while sitting at the bar and end indoor dining – still limited to 25 percent capacity – at 10 p.m., although outdoor dining is permitted to continue.

“As the night wears on people let their hair down and folks are just not social distancing as they should,” Murphy told a press conference.

He also announced the shutdown of interstate indoor youth sports events, up to and including high school age athletes, after seeing transmission increases among young team members, particularly those playing indoor hockey.

Across the Hudson River, New York City officials said they are worried about a new uptick in cases on Staten Island, one of the city’s five boroughs, and said they would spend Tuesday encouraging island residents to get a free test.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama/Mark Heinrich)

‘Great day for humanity’: Pfizer says COVID-19 vaccine over 90% effective

By Michael Erman and Julie Steenhuysen

(Reuters) – Pfizer Inc’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine is more than 90% effective based on initial trial results, the drugmaker said on Monday, a major victory in the war against a virus that has killed over a million people and battered the world’s economy.

Experts welcomed the first successful interim data from a large-scale clinical test as a watershed moment that showed vaccines could help halt the pandemic, although mass roll-outs, which needs regulatory approval, will not happen this year.

Pfizer and German partner BioNTech SE said they had found no serious safety concerns yet and expected to seek U.S. authorization this month for emergency use of the vaccine, raising the chance of a regulatory decision as soon as December.

If granted, the companies estimate they can roll out up to 50 million doses this year, enough to protect 25 million people, and then produce up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.

“Today is a great day for science and humanity,” said Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla.

“We are reaching this critical milestone in our vaccine development program at a time when the world needs it most with infection rates setting new records, hospitals nearing over-capacity and economies struggling to reopen,” he said.

Experts said they still wanted to see the full trial data, which have yet to be peer-reviewed or published in a medical journal, but the preliminary results looked encouraging.

“This news made me smile from ear to ear. It is a relief to see such positive results on this vaccine and bodes well for COVID-19 vaccines in general,” said Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the University of Oxford.

There are still many questions, such as how effective the vaccine is by ethnicity or age, and how long it will provide immunity, with the “new normal” of social distancing and face covering set to remain for the foreseeable future.

Pfizer expects to seek U.S. emergency use authorization for people aged 16 to 85. To do so, it will need two months of safety data from about half the study’s 44,000 participants, which is expected in the third week of November.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said it would take several weeks for U.S. regulators to receive and process data on the vaccine before the government could potentially approve it.

MARKETS SURGE

The prospect of a vaccine electrified world markets with the S&P 500 and Dow hitting record highs as shares of banks, oil companies and travel companies soared. Shares in companies that have thrived during lockdowns, such as conferencing platform Zoom Video and online retailers, tumbled.

Pfizer shares jumped more than 11% to their highest since July last year, while BioNTech’s stock hit a record high.

Shares of other vaccine developers in the final stage of testing also rose with Johnson & Johnson up 4% and Moderna Inc, whose vaccine uses a similar technology as the Pfizer shot, up 8%. Britain’s AstraZeneca, however, fell 2%. Moderna is expected to report results from its large-scale trial later this month.

“The efficacy data are really impressive. This is better than most of us anticipated,” said William Schaffner, infectious diseases expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee. “The study isn’t completed yet, but nonetheless the data look very solid.”

U.S. President Donald Trump welcomed the test results, and the market boost: “STOCK MARKET UP BIG, VACCINE COMING SOON. REPORT 90% EFFECTIVE. SUCH GREAT NEWS!” he tweeted.

President-elect Joe Biden said the news was excellent but did not change the fact that face masks, social distancing and other health measures would be needed well into next year.

The World Health Organization said the results were very positive, but warned there was a funding gap of $4.5 billion that could slow access to tests, medicines and vaccines in low- and middle-income countries.

‘NEAR ECSTATIC’

“I’m near ecstatic,” Bill Gruber, one of Pfizer’s top vaccine scientists, said in an interview. “This is a great day for public health and for the potential to get us all out of the circumstances we’re now in.”

Between 55% and 65% of the population will need to be vaccinated to break the dynamic of the spread of COVID-19, said Germany’s health minister Jens Spahn, adding that he did not expect a shot to be available before the first quarter of 2021.

The European Union said on Monday it would soon sign a contract for up to 300 million doses of the Pfizer and BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

The companies have a $1.95 billion contract with the U.S. government to deliver 100 million vaccine doses beginning this year. They did not receive research funding from the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine program.

The drugmakers have also reached supply agreements with the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan.

Pfizer said the interim analysis, conducted after 94 participants in the trial developed COVID-19, examined how many had received the vaccine versus a placebo.

Pfizer did not break down how many of those who fell ill received the vaccine. Still, over 90% effectiveness implies that no more than 8 of the 94 had been given the vaccine, which was administered in two shots about three weeks apart.

The efficacy rate, which could drop once full results are available, is well above the 50% effectiveness required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a coronavirus vaccine.

Shortly after Pfizer’s announcement, Russia said its Sputnik V vaccine was also more than 90% effective, based on data collated from inoculations of the public. Its preliminary Phase III trial data is due to be published this month.

MORE DATA NEEDED

To confirm the efficacy rate, Pfizer said it would continue its trial until there were 164 COVID-19 cases among volunteers. Bourla told CNBC on Monday that based on rising infection rates, the trial could be completed before the end of November.

Pfizer said its data would be peer reviewed once it has results from the entire trial.

“These are interesting first signals, but again they are only communicated in press releases,” said Marylyn Addo, head of tropical medicine at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany.

Dozens of drugmakers and research groups around the globe have been racing to develop vaccines against COVID-19, which on Sunday exceeded 50 million cases since the new coronavirus first emerged late last year in China.

The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine uses messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, which relies on synthetic genes that can be generated and manufactured in weeks, and produced at scale more rapidly than conventional vaccines. The technology is designed to trigger an immune response without using pathogens, such as actual virus particles.

The Trump administration has said it will have enough vaccine doses for all of the 330 million U.S. residents who want it by the middle of 2021.

(Reporting by Michael Erman and Julie Steenhuysen; Additional reporting by Michele Gershberg in New York, Ludwig Burger and Patricia Weiss in Frankfurt and Kate Kelland in London; Editing by Bill Berkrot, Caroline Humer, Edwina Gibbs and David Clarke)

India sees early vaccine launch as AstraZeneca deliveries run late

By Krishna N. Das

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India raced ahead with work on its coronavirus vaccine while Britain’s AstraZeneca said its deliveries were running “a little bit late” as countries around the world sought to conquer the pandemic and rescue their economies.

A vaccine is seen as the world’s best bet for taming a virus that has infected more than 48 million people, led to more than 1.2 million deaths, roiled economies and disrupted billions of lives since it was first identified in China in December.

Australia is beefing up its prospective arsenal against the pandemic to 135 million doses of various vaccine candidates.

“We aren’t putting all our eggs in one basket,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Thursday.

Some 45 vaccine candidates are in human trials worldwide, with Pfizer Inc saying it could file in late November for U.S. authorization, opening up the possibility of a vaccine being available in the United States by the end of the year.

Moderna and AstraZeneca are close behind the largest U.S. drugmaker and are likely to have early data on their vaccine candidates before the end of the year.

An Indian government-backed vaccine could be launched as early as February – months earlier than expected – as last-stage trials begin this month and studies have so far showed it is safe and effective, a senior government scientist told Reuters.

Bharat Biotech, a private company that is developing COVAXIN with the government-run Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), had earlier hoped to launch it only in the second quarter of next year.

“The vaccine has shown good efficacy,” senior ICMR scientist Rajni Kant, who is also a member of its COVID-19 task force, said at the research body’s New Delhi headquarters.

“It is expected that by the beginning of next year, February or March, something would be available.”

Bharat Biotech could not immediately be contacted.

A launch in February would make COVAXIN the first India-made vaccine to be rolled out.

VACCINE KEPT FROZEN

AstraZeneca has signed multiple deals to supply more than three billion doses of its candidate to countries around the world.

But a summer dip in British coronavirus infections had pushed back test results, leading the drugmaker to delay deliveries of shots to the government.

Britain’s vaccines chief said on Wednesday it would receive just 4 million doses of the potential vaccine this year, against initial estimates for 30 million by Sept. 30.

AstraZeneca said on Thursday it was holding back deliveries while it awaits the data from late-stage clinical trials in order to maximize the shelf-life of supplies.

“We are a little bit late in deliveries, which is why the vaccine has been kept in frozen form,” CEO Pascal Soriot said on a conference call.

AstraZeneca and its partner on the project, the University of Oxford, said that data from late-stage trials should land this year.

The United States leads the world in both the number of COVID deaths and infections and the pandemic was a polarizing issue in Tuesday’s presidential election in which votes were still being counted.

Australia’s Morrison said the government would buy 40 million vaccine doses from Novavax and 10 million from Pfizer and BioNTech.

That adds to the 85 million doses Australia has already committed to buy from AstraZeneca and CSL Ltd should trials prove successful.

Among other vaccine candidates around the world, a growing number of Russians are unwilling to be inoculated once a vaccine becomes widely available, the Levada Centre, Russia’s only major independent pollster, said this week.

Russia, raising eyebrows in the West, is rolling out its “Sputnik V” vaccine for domestic use despite the fact that late-stage trials have not yet finished.

(Reporting by Reuters bureaus; Writing by Nick Macfie; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Pfizer says earliest COVID-19 vaccine application to U.S. regulators would be after election

By Manas Mishra and Michael Erman

(Reuters) – Pfizer Inc said on Friday it may file for U.S. authorization of the COVID-19 vaccine it is developing with German partner BioNTech in late November, making it unlikely a vaccine will be available before the U.S. election as President Donald Trump has promised.

Pfizer said that it may say if the vaccine is effective as soon as this month based on its 40,000 person clinical trial but that it also needs safety data that will not be available until November at the earliest.

The Pfizer news, published in a letter from its chief executive on its website, lifted the U.S. stock market and the company’s shares. Shares were up slightly in rival vaccine maker Moderna Inc, which is close to Pfizer in its vaccine development.

“So let me be clear, assuming positive data, Pfizer will apply for Emergency Authorization Use in the U.S. soon after the safety milestone is achieved in the third week of November,” Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla said.

Trump has said repeatedly that there would be a vaccine available before the election, but health officials and companies had only said that data might be available this month. The possibility of further delays was raised after trials for two rival vaccines were put on hold in the United States this fall.

The president’s rush to a vaccine has also raised concerns that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, acting in haste, might not conduct an adequate review of the vaccine.

U.S. health officials have sought to assuage those concerns out of fear that not enough Americans would take a vaccine early on. Earlier this month, the FDA formalized a requirement that the vaccine makers collect two months of safety data on one-half of trial participants.

Pfizer’s comments on its time line raise the possibility of U.S. authorization of a coronavirus vaccine this year, a key step in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than a million people and ravaged the global economy.

Moderna could also apply for an emergency use authorization (EUA) this year. It has said that it may have interim data on its 30,000 person trial as soon as November.

Both companies are also applying for approval in Europe, where they are racing against AstraZeneca PLC. AstraZeneca’s U.S. trial has been on hold since September.

After the FDA announced the two-month requirement on Oct. 6, which was approved by the White House but undercut the likelihood of a vaccine before voters go to polls on Nov. 3., Trump called the move a ‘political hit job.’

In addition to safety and efficacy, the FDA will also examine Pfizer’s manufacturing operations for the vaccine.

Bourla said the filing depended on several other factors, including initial data on effectiveness that may or may not be available by late October.

He said the company plans to share efficacy data with the public as soon as practical. (https://bit.ly/31bWdpP)

A BioNTech spokeswoman confirmed the time frame for the possible EUA application to the FDA.

Pfizer’s shares rose 2.1% in premarket trading, while BioNTech’s U.S-listed shares were up 4% before the opening bell. Moderna was unchanged and U.S. futures were higher.

(Reporting by Manas Mishra, Manojna Maddipatla in Bengaluru and Michael Erman in New Jersey, Patricia Weiss in Frankfurt; writing by Caroline Humer in New York; Editing by Patrick Graham, Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Steve Orlofsky)

World stocks whipsaw on pandemic worries, gold gains

By Koh Gui Qing and Carolyn Cohn

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. and European shares whipsawed between modest gains and losses on Wednesday as investors tried to brush aside market risks to focus on the positive, but caution prevailed in the gold market with prices jumping more than 1%.

Reports that some European countries have started to close schools and cancel surgeries due to a resurgence in the COVID-19 pandemic weighed on sentiment, though European shares still managed to trim earlier losses.

In the United States, investors looked to positive earnings reports by investment bank Goldman Sachs Group and UnitedHealth Group Inc, the largest U.S. health insurer, and tried to shelve concerns over two stalled trials for COVID-19 treatment and vaccine that rattled markets on Tuesday.

Investors are hoping that a quick development of a treatment or vaccine for COVID-19 would end the pandemic and aid a recovery in the world economy.

“Bulls are looking to get back on track this morning,” Paul Hickey, a co-founder of Bespoke Investment Group LLC, wrote in a note, but added that an upbeat mood may not hold.

Major U.S. stock indices had given up early gains by 1426 GMT. The S&P 500 was largely flat at 3,512.90, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was also little changed at 28,655.36. The Nasdaq Composite fell 30 points, or 0.3%, to 11,832.32.

The pan-European STOXX 600 narrowed losses and was down 0.1%, while markets in Frankfurt and Paris were up 0.1% and flat respectively. London, buffeted in part by Brexit angst, dropped 0.6%. World stocks were little changed but still within sight of an all-time high struck on Sept. 3.

Moving beyond bar and pub closures, the Czech Republic shifted schools to distance learning and hospitals started cutting non-urgent medical procedures to free beds.

Moscow authorities said on Wednesday they would introduce online learning for many students starting on Monday, while Northern Ireland announced schools would close for two weeks.

Asian stocks also had a lackluster showing. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside of Japan had tracked Wall Street’s losses overnight to end a seven-day rally.

The index was last down 0.11%, having toppled from a two-and-a-half-year high of 588.76 touched on Tuesday. Chinese shares closed down 0.7%.

Bolstered by uncertainty around the pandemic, the price of gold, a safe-haven asset, climbed by more than 1% to a high of $1,912.51 an ounce.

Government bonds also benefited from investor caution. German bund yields, which move inversely to prices, hit their lowest since May, while the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield dipped to 0.7173%.

The U.S. dollar softened after pulling its best day in three weeks on Tuesday. Its index against a basket of six major currencies fell 0.3% to 93.25. That helped the euro to firm slightly to $1.1768.

Concerns that fuel demand will continue to falter as rising coronavirus cases across Europe and in the United States, the world’s biggest oil consumer, dragged on oil prices. Brent and U.S. crude pared earlier gains and were at $43.19 and $40.99 a barrel, respectively.

(Reporting by Koh Gui Qing; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

COVID-19 antibodies last at least three months; so do symptoms for many

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

COVID-19 antibodies last at least three months

People infected with COVID-19 develop antibodies targeting the new coronavirus that last for at least three months, according to two reports published on Thursday in Science Immunology. The two studies, together involving nearly 750 patients, both point to immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies, which start showing up well after an infection begins, as the longest-lasting. Researchers found IgG antibodies with two targets – a spike protein on the virus that helps it infect cells, and a part of the spike called the receptor binding domain (RBD) – lasted more than 100 days. While the protective effect of COVID-19 antibodies is not completely clear, Jen Gommerman of the University of Toronto, coauthor of the study, said her team also found levels of so-called neutralizing antibodies, which inactivate the virus, “appeared to be very stable.” The other study, from Harvard Medical School, reported similar findings. This means that a properly designed vaccine “should elicit a durable antibody response that has the potential to neutralize the virus,” Gommerman said. Her group also found that antibodies in saliva correlated with antibodies in blood, but at this point the saliva tests are not sensitive enough to replace blood tests.

COVID-19 symptoms linger for months for many

Three months after becoming ill, many COVID-19 patients still have symptoms, two studies confirm, and the more severe the initial infections, the higher the odds of persistent problems. In Spain, doctors checked back with 108 patients, including 44 who had been severely ill. At 12 weeks after diagnosis, 76% still reported after-effects, with 40% reporting three or more coronavirus-related health issues, doctors said in a paper posted on Thursday on medRxiv ahead of peer review. The most common complaints were shortness of breath, physical weakness, cough, chest pain, palpitations, and psychological and cognitive disorders. In a similar study of 233 U.S. COVID-19 patients – eight of whom had been severely ill – one in four still had symptoms 90 days after first feeling ill. Rates were higher for patients who had been sicker: 59.4% at 30 days and 40.6% at 90 days. “But even for very mild and initially asymptomatic cases, 14.3% have complications persist for 30 days or longer,” the authors reported on Sunday on medRxiv. In the U.S. study, the most common persistent symptoms were impaired smell and taste, difficulty concentrating, shortness of breath, memory loss, confusion, headache, heart palpitations, chest pain, pain with deep breaths, dizziness, and rapid heartbeat.

Remdesivir cut COVID-19 recovery time by 5 days

Final data from a large study of Gilead Sciences Inc’s antiviral drug remdesivir showed the treatment cut COVID-19 recovery time by five days among hospitalized patients, one day faster than preliminary data had indicated, researchers reported on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The 1,062-patient study compared up to up to 10 days of therapy with remdesivir – now sold in some markets as Veklury – to a placebo. The average recovery time was 10 days among those who got the Gilead drug versus 15 days in the placebo group. Among patients requiring oxygen at the start, those taking remdesivir continued to need oxygen for an average of 13 days, compared to 21 days for patients who got a placebo. In a separate analysis looking just at patients who received oxygen, the drug appeared to reduce the risk of death over the next month by 70%. “We now have data suggesting that giving remdesivir to patients on oxygen may significantly reduce their chances of death compared to other subgroups,” Dr. Andre Kalil, an infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and the study’s lead investigator, said in a news release.

Coronavirus rarely travels from mother to newborn

Transmission of the new coronavirus from mothers to newborns is rare, doctors from New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center reported on Monday in JAMA Pediatrics. They studied 101 babies born to 100 mothers with COVID-19, including 10 whose mothers had been severely ill. Almost all of the babies tested negative for the virus, while tests in two newborns had indeterminate results. If these two indeterminate results are considered positive, the overall incidence of transmission was 2.0%. Even with a 2% transmission rate, “none of our babies exhibited clinical symptoms of COVID-19, either during their newborn nursery stay or during … the first few weeks of life,” coauthor Dr. Dani Dumitriu told Reuters Health by email. Roughly 90% of the newborns were breastfed at least partially. “As the country heads into what looks like a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to know that separation of affected mothers from their newborns may not be warranted, and direct breastfeeding appears to be safe,” study coauthor Dr. Melissa Stockwell said.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid, Julie Steenhuysen and Will Boggs; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

U.N. chief: time for national plans to help fund global COVID-19 vaccine effort

By Michelle Nichols and Stephanie Nebehay

NEW YORK/GENEVA (Reuters) – U.N. chief Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday it is time for countries to start using money from their national COVID-19 response to help fund a global vaccine plan as the World Bank warned that “broad, rapid and affordable access” to those doses will be at the core of a resilient global economic recovery.

The Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator and its COVAX facility – led by the World Health Organization and GAVI vaccine alliance – has received $3 billion, but needs another $35 billion. It aims to deliver 2 billion vaccine doses by the end of 2021, 245 million treatments and 500 million tests.

At a high-level virtual U.N. event on the program, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the financing gap was less than 1% of what the world’s 20 largest economies (G20) had committed to domestic stimulus packages and “it’s roughly equivalent to what the world spends on cigarettes every two weeks.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged $100 million to GAVI to help poorer countries gain access to a vaccine and Johnson & Johnson Chief Executive Alex Gorsky committed 500 million vaccine doses for low-income countries with delivery starting in mid-2021.

“Having access to lifesaving COVID diagnostics, therapeutics or vaccines … shouldn’t depend on where you live, whether you’re rich or poor,” said Gorsky, adding that while Johnson & Johnson is “acting at an unprecedented scale and speed, but we are not for a minute cutting corners on safety.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has said that a vaccine against the virus might be ready before the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election, raising questions about whether political pressure might result in the deployment of a vaccine before it is safe.

“We remain 100 percent committed to high ethical and scientific principles,” Gorsky said.

GAVI Chief Executive Seth Berkley said that so far 168 countries, including 76 self-financing states, have joined the COVAX global vaccines facility. Tedros said this represented 70% of the world’s population, adding: “The list is growing every day.”

China, Russia and the United States have not joined the facility, although WHO officials have said they are still holding talks with China about signing up. The United States has reached its own deals with vaccine developers.

‘LONG HAUL’

World Bank President David Malpass said the pandemic could push 150 million people into extreme poverty by 2021 and the “negative impact on human capital will be deep and may last decades.”

“Broad, rapid and affordable access to COVID vaccines will be at the core of a resilient global economic recovery that lifts everyone,” he said.

Guterres said that the ACT-Accelerator was the only safe and certain way to reopen the global economy quickly.

But he warned that the program needed an immediate injection of $15 billion to “avoid losing the window of opportunity” for advance purchase and production, to build stocks in parallel with licensing, boost research, and help countries prepare.

“We cannot allow a lag in access to further widen already vast inequalities,” Guterres said.

“But let’s be clear: We will not get there with donors simply allocating resources only from the Official Development Assistance budget,” he said. “It is time for countries to draw funding from their own response and recovery programs.”

U.N. Secretary-General Guterres called on all countries to step up significantly in the next three months.

Billionaire Bill Gates told the U.N. event that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had signed an agreement with 16 pharmaceutical companies on Wednesday.

“In this agreement the companies commit to, among other things, scaling up manufacturing, at an unprecedented speed, and making sure that approved vaccines reach broad distribution as early as possible,” Gates said.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab – a co-host of the meeting along with Guterres, the WHO and South Africa – urged other countries to join the global effort, saying the ACT-Accelerator is the best hope of bringing the pandemic under control.

Said Merkel: “We’re in for the long haul and we need more support.”

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols and Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Paul Simao and Jonathan Oatis)

COVID-19 death toll could double to two million before vaccine in wide use: WHO

GENEVA/ZURICH (Reuters) – The global death toll from COVID-19 could double to 2 million before a successful vaccine is widely used and could be even higher without concerted action to curb the pandemic, an official at the World Health Organization said on Friday.

“Unless we do it all, (2 million deaths) … is not only imaginable, but sadly very likely,” Mike Ryan, head of the U.N. agency’s emergencies program, told a briefing on Friday.

The number of deaths about nine months since the novel coronavirus was discovered in China is nearing 1 million

“We are not out of the woods anywhere, we are not out of the woods in Africa,” said Ryan.

He said young people should not be blamed for a recent increase in infections despite growing concerns that they are driving its spread after restrictions and lockdowns were eased around the world.

“I really hope we don’t get into finger wagging: it’s all because of the youth,” said Ryan. “The last thing a young person needs is an old person pontificating and wagging the finger.”

Rather, indoor gatherings of people of all ages were driving the epidemic, he said.

The WHO is continuing talks with China about its possible involvement in the COVAX financing scheme designed to guarantee fast and equitable access globally to COVID-19 vaccines, a week after the deadline for committing passed.

“We’re in discussions with China about the role they may play as we go forward,” said Bruce Aylward, WHO senior adviser and head of the ACT-Accelerator program to back vaccines, treatments and diagnostics against COVID-19.

He confirmed that Taiwan has signed up to the scheme, even though it is not a WHO member, bringing the total to 159 participants. Some 34 are still deciding.

Talks with China also include discussion of the world’s second-largest economy potentially supplying vaccines to the scheme, he said.

The UN agency published on Friday draft criteria for the assessment of emergency use of COVID-19 vaccines to help guide drugmakers as vaccine trials reach advanced stages, said WHO assistant director-general, Mariangela Simao.

The document will be available for public comment until Oct. 8, she said.

Earlier on Friday, a Chinese health official said the WHO had given its support for the country to start administering experimental coronavirus vaccines to people even while clinical trials were still underway.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebenay and Emma Farge in Geneva and Michael Shields in Zurich; Writing by Josephine Mason in London; Editing by Hugh Lawson, Timothy Heritage, Kirsten Donovan)

Russia’s Putin wants stronger WHO, proposes conference on coronavirus vaccine

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin told the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday that the World Health Organization should be strengthened to coordinate the global response to the coronavirus pandemic and proposed a high-level conference on vaccine cooperation.

“We are proposing to hold an online high-level conference shortly for countries interested in cooperation in the development of anti-coronavirus vaccines,” Putin said.

“We are ready to share experience and continue cooperating with all states and international entities, including in supplying the Russian vaccine which has proved reliable, safe, and effective, to other countries,” he said.

Russia was the first country to grant regulatory approval for a novel coronavirus vaccine, and did so before large-scale trials were complete, stirring concern among scientists and doctors about the safety and efficacy of the shot.

Several countries are now considering adopting emergency measures that would fast-track approval of a vaccine in a similar way, however.

Putin took a veiled swipe at the United States, saying that removing “illegitimate sanctions” would help the world recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

“In general, freeing the world trade from barriers, bans, restrictions and illegitimate sanctions would be of great help in revitalizing global growth and reducing unemployment,” he said.

Putin also proposed that leading space powers sign a binding agreement that would ban “the placement of weapons in outer space, threat or use of force against outer space objects.”

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols and Andrew Osborne; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Rosalba O’Brien)

At U.N., Trump demands action against China over virus, Xi urges cooperation

By Michelle Nichols and Steve Holland

(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump used the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday to attack China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, saying the world body “must hold China accountable” for its actions related to the outbreak.

By contrast, China’s President Xi Jinping struck a conciliatory tone in his pre-recorded virtual address to the General Assembly, calling for enhanced cooperation over the pandemic and stressing that China had no intention of fighting “either a Cold War or a hot one” with any other country.

The leaders of the world’s two largest economies laid out their competing visions as relations have plunged to their worst level in decades against the backdrop of the pandemic, with coronavirus tensions aggravating trade and technology disputes.

Trump, facing a November re-election battle with the United States dealing with the world’s highest official number of deaths and infections from the coronavirus, focused his speech on attacking China.

Trump accused Beijing of allowing people to leave China in the early stages of the outbreak to infect the world while shutting down domestic travel.

“We must hold accountable the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world, China,” he said in remarks taped on Monday at the White House and delivered remotely to the General Assembly due to the pandemic.

“The Chinese government, and the World Health Organization – which is virtually controlled by China – falsely declared that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission,” he said.

“Later, they falsely said people without symptoms would not spread the disease … The United Nations must hold China accountable for their actions.”

The president promised to distribute a vaccine and said: “We will defeat the virus, and we will end the pandemic.”

In introducing Xi’s remarks, China’s U.N. ambassador Zhang Jun said China “resolutely rejects the baseless accusations against China.”

“The world is at a crossroads. At this moment, the world needs more solidarity and cooperation, but not confrontation,” he said.

‘GET THROUGH THIS TOGETHER’

In his address, in what appeared to be an implicit rebuke to Trump, Xi called for a global response to the coronavirus and giving a leading role to the World Health Organization, which the U.S. president has announced plans to leave.

“Facing the virus, we should enhance solidarity and get through this together,” he said. “We should follow the guidance of science, give full play to the leading role of the World Health Organization and launch a joint international response to beat this pandemic. Any attempt of politicizing the issue, or stigmatization, must be rejected.”

The death toll from the spread of the coronavirus in the United States surpassed 200,000 on Monday, by far the highest official number of any country.

Trump also attacked China’s record on the environment, but leveled no direct criticism at Beijing over human rights.

The president, a frequent critic of the United Nations, said that if it was to be effective, it must focus on “the real problems of the world” like “terrorism, the oppression of women, forced labor, drug trafficking, human and sex trafficking, religious persecution, and the ethnic cleansing of religious minorities.”

Earlier, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the world was “moving in a very dangerous direction” with U.S.-China tensions.

“We must do everything to avoid a new Cold War,” he told the assembly. “Our world cannot afford a future where the two largest economies split the globe in a Great Fracture — each with its own trade and financial rules and internet and artificial intelligence capacities.

“A technological and economic divide risks inevitably turning into a geo-strategic and military divide. We must avoid this at all costs.”

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols, Steve Holland, Arshad Mohammed and David Brunnstrom; Writing by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Mary Milliken and Howard Goller)