Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.
US president Joe Biden came up well short on his goal of delivering 80 million doses of coronavirus vaccine to the rest of the world by the end of June as a host of logistical and regulatory hurdles slowed the pace of US vaccine diplomacy.
Meanwhile Thailand on Thursday reported a daily record of 57 deaths from the coronavirus, the second day in a row of record-high fatalities as the Southeast Asian country struggles to quell a stubborn third wave of Covid-19 infections.
The report came on the same day as Thailand is kicking off a programme to revive tourism on Phuket, which has seen far fewer cases than the mainland after Thailand prioritised vaccinations for the population of the resort island.
Here are the other key recent developments from around the world:
- India’s version of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine is not authorised in the EU due to the possibility of “differences” with the original, Europe’s drug regulator said after the African Union yesterday criticised as “inequitable” a decision not to include Covishield, the Indian-made vaccine used by the global Covax programme, on a list of approved vaccines for a digital certificate for travellers in the bloc.
- The prime minister of Portugal, Antonio Costa, went into isolation despite being fully vaccinated, after one of his aides tested positive amid a high in a new wave of infections blamed on the Delta variant.
- India’s disaster management agency was ordered by the country’s supreme court to establish guidelines for paying compensation to bereaved relatives of those who have died from Covid.
- Bangladesh will deploy soldiers tomorrow to enforce a strict lockdown amid a record spike in coronavirus cases driven by the Delta variant first detected in India, the government said.
- The Australian home affairs minister rejected calls to reduce caps on international arrivals amid outbreaks of the Delta variant, saying “we need to learn to live” with Covid.
- France ended most capacity limits imposed in April on restaurants, cinemas, stores and other public venues, although the measures were extended in parts of the southwest over the spread of the Delta variant as the doctor who heads president Emmanuel Macron’s coronavirus advisory panel said a “fourth wave” of cases was likely this autumn.
- Vladimir Putin said for the first time that he was inoculated with Russia’s own Sputnik V vaccine as he gave a careful endorsement of the country’s floundering campaign while distancing himself from tough new measures designed to pressure more Russians into taking the jabs.
- Switzerland is to give 4m doses of AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine that it has reserved to the vaccine-sharing programme Covax, the government has said with the country’s medical regulator, Swissmedic, yet to approve the shot, on grounds it has not received all necessary data from clinical trials.
- Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, fired a health ministry official who reportedly asked for a bribe in a vaccine deal, the latest graft accusation to rock the government amid investigations of its pandemic response.
- Dozens of Italian prison guards beat unarmed inmates with truncheons and fists in the aftermath of a coronavirus-related protest last year, video footage captured on surveillance shows, with fifty-two people working in the prison network facing arrest or legal action in the case this week
- A UK vaccine advisor made a significant intervention to the debate over whether to inoculate children against Covid, saying “it is not immoral to think that they may be better protected by natural immunity generated through infection than by asking them to take the possible risk of a vaccine.”
- Cases of Covid-19 are declining in North America, but in most of Latin America and the Caribbean an end to the pandemic “remains a distant future”, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) director Carissa Etienne said.
- Members of the US military who were vaccinated against Covid showed higher-than-expected rates of heart inflammation, although the condition was still extremely rare, according to a new study.
