Health

ISLAMABAD: The spokesperson of the Pakistan Polio Eradication Program (PPEP) has refuted the news about any extension in the ongoing anti-polio drive in the country on Friday. “Such news of extension in anti-polio drive are baseless”, the spokesperson said and added that the drive will continue till July 25. The drive is underway in the selected districts of the country …

Regulators that normally work within their own countries or regions will likely harmonize efforts on potential COVID-19 vaccines to speed up their approvals once they become available, WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said on Friday. Swaminathan, answering questions on social media platforms, also said testing vaccines for safety and efficacy – usually a years-long process – could be accelerated to …

The US government has set a benchmark for COVID-19 vaccine pricing in a $2 billion deal announced on Wednesday with Pfizer and German biotech BioNTech that will likely pressure other manufacturers to set similar prices, industry analysts told Reuters. The deal, which is contingent on an approvable product, secures enough vaccine to inoculate 50 million Americans for about $40 a …

BEIJING: A coronavirus vaccine candidate developed by China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm) could be ready for public use by the end of this year, state media reported on Wednesday, ahead of a previous expectation it may become available in 2021. Sinopharm Chairman Liu Jingzhen told state broadcaster CCTV the company expects to finish late-stage human testing within about three months. …

GENEVA/ZURICH: Researchers are making “good progress” in developing vaccines against COVID-19, with a handful in late-stage trials, but their first use cannot be expected until early 2021, a World Health Organization (WHO) expert said on Wednesday. WHO is working to ensure fair vaccine distribution, but in the meantime it is key to suppress the virus’s spread, said Mike Ryan, head …

WASHINGTON: Scien­tists have known for several months the new coronavirus can become suspended in microdroplets expelled by patients when they speak and breathe, but until now there was no proof that these tiny particles are infectious. A new study by scientists at the University of Nebraska that was uploaded to a medical preprint site this week has shown for the …

KARACHI: The novel coronavirus has claimed 19 more lives and infected as many as 1,109 people during the past 24 hours in Sindh. In a statement on the daily COVID-19 situation, CM Murad Ali Shah said that 19 more people died from the coronavirus in past 24 hours, taking the death toll from the disease to 2060. He maintained that …

TOKYO: Japan’s health ministry has approved dexamethasone, a cheap and widely used steroid, as a second treatment of COVID-19 after a trial in Britain showed the drug reduced death rates in hospitalised patients. The ministry included dexamethasone as an option for treatment along with Gilead Sciences Inc’s antiviral drug remdesivir in a recent revision to its handbook. The revision was …

Two studies offered new hope of a potential vaccine for the novel coronavirus on Monday, as the World Health Organization warned about a possible acceleration of the disease in Africa.  Seven months after COVID-19 was first identified in China and has since killed more than 600,000 people worldwide and battered economies, there is growing alarm over fresh outbreaks of the …

Russia claimed on Tuesday that the Covid-19 vaccine developed with the Russian Defense Ministry has completed Phase 2 trials and ready for use. “Russia’s first vaccine against the novel coronavirus infection, which was created by military specialists and scientists of the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology, is ready, said First Deputy Defense Minister Ruslan Tsalikov. According to …