BEIJING, Nov 28,2022:China posted another record high COVID-19 infections on Monday, after an extraordinary weekend of protests across the country over restrictive coronavirus curbs, in scenes unprecedented since President Xi Jinping assumed power a decade ago.
In Shanghai, demonstrators and police clashed on Sunday, with police taking away a busload of protesters, with the BBC saying that police assaulted and detained one of its journalists covering the events before releasing him after several hours.
During the weekend, protesters in cities including Wuhan and Lanzhou overturned COVID testing facilities, while students gathered on campuses across China in actions that were sparked by anger over an apartment fire late last week in the far western city of Urumqi that killed 10 people.
The deadly fire fuelled speculation that COVID curbs in the city, parts of which had been under lockdown for 100 days, had hindered rescue and escape, which city officials denied. Crowds in Urumqi took to the street on Friday evening, chanting “End the lockdown!”, according to unverified videos on social media.
In Beijing, large crowds were gathered past midnight on Sunday along the capital’s 3rd Ring Road during peaceful but often impassioned scenes.
Aug 27,2022:Moderna has sued Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech for patent infringement in the development of the first COVID-19 vaccine approved in the United States, alleging they copied technology that Moderna developed years before the pandemic.
The lawsuit, which seeks undetermined monetary damages, was filed in the US District Court in Massachusetts. In a news release on Friday, Moderna said the lawsuit would be filed also in the Regional Court of Duesseldorf in Germany.
Moderna said its lawsuit was not meant to stop people from getting vaccines.
Moderna Inc, on its own, and the partnership of Pfizer Inc and BioNTech were two of the first groups to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.
In an emailed statement, a Pfizer spokesperson said: “Pfizer/BioNTech has not yet fully reviewed the complaint but we are surprised by the litigation given the COVID-19 vaccine was based on BioNTech’s proprietary mRNA technology and developed by both BioNTech and Pfizer.”
“We remain confident in our intellectual property supporting the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and will vigorously defend against the allegations of the lawsuit,” the spokesperson said.
BioNTech did not immediately reply to separate requests for comment.
Just a decade old, Moderna, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had been an innovator in the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine technology that enabled the unprecedented speed in developing the COVID-19 vaccine.
Aug04,2022:United States President Joe Biden has signed an executive order that lays the groundwork for Medicaid to help women seeking abortions to travel between states to obtain access to the procedure.
The details of the new order, signed on Wednesday, are still being worked out, and the administration faces a challenging legal landscape because it is illegal to use federal funding to pay for abortions unless the woman’s life is in danger or the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
However, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Department of Health and Human Services would invite states where abortion remains legal to apply for permission to use Medicaid funds to “provide reproductive healthcare to women who live in states where abortion is banned”.
Like Biden’s first order signed in July, it is meant to address the recent Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade which opened the door for new restrictions on abortion at the state level.
July 23,2022:The World Health Organization on Saturday declared monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern, a designation reserved for the most serious global disease outbreaks.
That puts monkeypox on the same list as six other outbreaks with the same WHO label since 2007: Covid-19, Zika, H1N1 flu, polio and Ebola, which has been designated an emergency twice.
The WHO decision came after an emergency committee convened on Thursday to assess the spread of monkeypox and determine the severity of its threat.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made the decision to issue the declaration despite a lack of consensus among experts serving on the U.N. health agency’s emergency committee. It was the first time the chief of the U.N. health agency has taken such an action.
“We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission about which we understand too little and which meets the criteria in the international health regulations,” Tedros said.
“I know this has not been an easy or straightforward process and that there are divergent views among the members” of the committee, he added.
The world has seen more than 16,500 monkeypox cases so far this year in 68 countries where the disease is not endemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. alone has recorded more than 2,500 cases since May, though that’s almost certainly an undercount.
For a disease outbreak to qualify as an international public health emergency, it must be an “extraordinary event” that poses a health risk to more than one country and may require an immediate, coordinated international response, according to the WHO.
The same emergency committee decided last month that monkeypox didn’t yet meet those standards, though Tedros said a few committee members “expressed differing views.” At the time, more than 4,000 monkeypox cases had been reported globally across 47 countries and territories.
Vaccines could help curb transmission
Monkeypox spreads through close physical contact, including kissing or sexual contact, as well as through respiratory droplets and contaminated items like clothing or bedding.
Anyone who has been in close contact with a monkeypox patient can get infected, but since the start of the outbreak, cases have been largely concentrated among men who have sex with men.
“Although I am declaring a public health emergency of international concern for the moment, this is an outbreak that is concentrated among men who have sex with men, especially those with multiple sexual partners,” Tedros said. “That means that this is an outbreak that can be stopped with the right strategies in the right groups.”
Most people with monkeypox develop a rash, according to WHO. For some, the rash may be hard to spot — just one or two lesions — while others can develop widespread lesions. In this outbreak so far, the rashes have often been found around the genital and anal region, on the face, or on the palms of hands and soles of feet. Some people may also get lesions inside the mouth, throat, vagina and anus.
Symptoms like fever, swollen lymph nodes, headaches, muscle aches, back pain and fatigue sometimes follow a rash.
In Europe and the U.S., health authorities are relying on increased vaccination and testing to reduce transmission and prevent monkeypox from becoming endemic.
As of last week, the U.S. had distributed 156,000 doses of the Jynneos vaccine to states and ramped up testing capacity to 70,000 tests per week. Many cities and states are offering vaccine doses to people with known or presumed exposure to the virus, including men who have sex with men and transgender, gender nonconforming or nonbinary residents with multiple sexual partners.
The European Commission’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response department said Monday that it had delivered 25,000 vaccine doses to six member states. The U.K.’s National Health Service is also offering doses to close contacts of monkeypox patients with a high risk of exposure, on a case by case basis.
Research suggests that the Jynneos vaccine might prevent monkeypox if given within four days of exposure, meaning it could keep cases from climbing if more people get access to shots.
London,June 02,2022: Britain is seeing daily infections of the rare monkeypox virus that are unconnected to any travel to West Africa, where the disease is endemic, a health official said on Sunday.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said new figures would be released on Monday, after it registered 20 cases on Friday.
Asked if community transmission was now the norm in Britain, UKHSA chief medical adviser Susan Hopkins said “absolutely”.
“We are finding cases that have no identified contact with an individual from West Africa, which is what we’ve seen previously in this country,” she told BBC television.
“We are detecting more cases on a daily basis.”
Hopkins declined to confirm reports that one individual was in intensive care, but said the outbreak was concentrated in urban areas, among gay or bisexual men.
“The risk of the general population remains extremely low at the moment, and I think people need to be alert to it,” she said, adding that for most adults, symptoms would be “relatively mild”.
The first UK case was announced on May 7, in a patient who had recently travelled to Nigeria. The disease is also spreading in Europe and North America.
Monkeypox can be transmitted through contact with skin lesions and droplets of a contaminated person, as well as shared items such as bedding and towels.
Symptoms include fever, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, chills, exhaustion and a chickenpox-like rash on the hands and face. They usually clear up after two to four weeks.
There is no specific treatment but vaccination against smallpox has been found to be about 85 percent effective in preventing monkeypox.
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said the UK government had already started buying up stocks of smallpox vaccine.
“We’re taking it very, very seriously,” he told the BBC.
May 21,2022:In wake of a spurt in monkeypox cases in some foreign countries, a health expert on Saturday insisted on observing the evolution of the disease while also advising not to panic.
The Centre on Friday issued an alert to the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and asked them to keep a close watch on the situation evolving in relation to the monkeypox cases abroad. “Everything should be taken seriously. And we should keep a guard but at the same time, there is no need to get panic. We need to study how it is evolving, and how many people are getting affected. Fortunately, it is not that severe as smallpox,” said Dr Ishwar Gilada, infectious diseases expert and consultant for HIV/STDs, while speaking to ANI.
Explaining the type of virus and the availability of their treatment, the expert said, “basically, what we are currently worried is a lot of new infections will be viral infections. Usually, there are four types of infections bacterial, fungal, parasitic, and virals.” “We have very effective antibiotics to take care of the bacteria, very effective antifungus to protect from fungus and very potent anti-parasitic. Now new infections, what we are seeing in the last 40 years are all viral because there are no potent antivirals and viruses are very much different like RNA virus, DNA virus, they are versatile, they change their shape, they have different clades they have different variants, sub-variants, so it becomes very difficult to find antiviral,” Dr Gilada said.
Meanwhile, the WHO has confirmed 80 cases of monkeypox in 11 countries and said they are working to better understand the extent and cause of the outbreak. In a statement issued on Friday, the WHO said the virus is endemic in some animal populations in a number of countries, leading to occasional outbreaks among local people and travellers.
Monkeypox is a viral zoonosis (a virus transmitted to humans from animals) with symptoms very similar to those seen in the past in smallpox patients, although it is clinically less severe. According to WHO, Monkeypox typically presents clinically with fever, rash and swollen lymph nodes and may lead to a range of medical complications. Monkeypox is usually a self-limited disease with symptoms lasting from 2 to 4 weeks.
Washington [US]Feb 28,2023:The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday (local time) confirmed that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a lab incident in Wuhan, China.
“FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed that the Bureau has assessed that the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated from a lab incident in Wuhan, China,” tweeted the FBI.
This development comes after new intelligence had prompted the Energy Department to conclude that an accidental laboratory leak in China most likely caused the novel coronavirus pandemic, reported The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan… I will just make the observation that the Chinese government… has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our US government and close foreign partners are doing,” said FBI chief.
The update, which is less than five pages, wasn’t requested by the Congress. But lawmakers, particularly House and Senate Republicans, have been pursuing their own investigations into the origins of the pandemic and are pressing the Biden administration and the intelligence community for more information.
The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory, reported WSJ.
The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of US national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.
The Energy Department’s insights come from its network of national laboratories, some of which conduct biological research, rather than more traditional forms of intelligence like spy networks or communications intercepts.
The novel coronavirus first circulated in Wuhan, China, no later than November 2019, according to the US 2021 intelligence report. The pandemic’s origin has been the subject of vigorous debate among academics, intelligence experts and lawmakers.
The emergence of the pandemic heightened tensions between the US and China, which US officials alleged was withholding information about the outbreak. It also led to a spirited and at times partisan debate in the US about its origin.
China, which has placed limits on investigations by the World Health Organisation (WHO), has disputed that the virus could have leaked from one of its labs and has suggested it emerged outside China.
The Chinese government didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether there has been any change in its views on the origins of Covid-19.
However, the fact that Wuhan is the center of China’s extensive coronavirus research, has led some scientists and US officials to argue that a lab leak is the best explanation for the pandemic’s origin.
Wuhan is home to an array of laboratories, many of which were built or expanded as a result of China’s traumatic experience with the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, epidemic beginning in 2002.
They include campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, which produces vaccines.