Renewed interest in a lab-leak hypothesis prompted a few questions about the coronavirus’s origins at a House Appropriations subcommittee meeting Tuesday, amid discussion of the National Institutes of Health budget.
Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) held up a copy of the Wall Street Journal, referring to its recent story about workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China who became sick in November 2019. Harris asked Francis S. Collins, who directs NIH, whether it was correct that $600,000 of $3.7 million in NIH funding, given to the research group EcoHealth Alliance, was directed to the Wuhan facility. That was accurate, Collins said.
BRUSSELS -- EU leaders agreed Tuesday to donate at least 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to poorer nations by the end of the year as supplies steadily rise across Europe.
GENEVA — Deaths from Covid-19 and Covid-related causes are likely to be two to three times the number that countries have recorded in their official data, the World Health Organization said on Friday.
Some six to eight million people may have now died from Covid-19 or its effects since the start of the pandemic, compared with 3.4 million deaths recorded in countries’ official reporting, Dr. Samira Asma, assistant director of the W.H.O.’s data division, told reporters.
The W.H.O. also estimates that at least three million people may have died from Covid-19 in 2020, compared with 1.8 million recorded in official data, the W.H.O. reported in annual statistics released on Friday.
Europe has recorded a 60 percent drop in new coronavirus infections over the past month, the World Health Organization said Thursday, encouraging news that comes as the continent plans to reopen its borders. Still, “this progress is fragile,” a top agency official cautioned.
(New York Times) If all goes according to plan, the United States will soon send 80 million doses of Covid vaccines to help countries beleaguered by the coronavirus, President Biden said on Monday.
But world leaders, experts and advocates warn much more is needed to stop the virus from running rampant in much of the world, which gives it time to mutate and possibly evolve until it can evade vaccines.
Activists, too, have joined the cohort of voices calling on the Biden administration to move boldly. “Donating 80 million doses of vaccines without a plan to scale up production worldwide is like putting a Band-Aid on a machete wound,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a longtime AIDS activist.
In delivering vaccines, pharmaceutical companies aided by monumental government investments have given humanity a miraculous shot at liberation from the worst pandemic in a century.
But wealthy countries have captured an overwhelming share of the benefit. Only 0.3 percent of the vaccine doses administered globally have been given in the 29 poorest countries, home to about 9 percent of the world’s population.
