In the UK, 30,838 people have tested positive for Covid in the last 24 hours.
A further 174 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus, according to the latest update to the government’s coronavirus dashboard on Tuesday.
Official figures showed another 46,401 people had their first dose of a Covid vaccine, with 131,283 getting their second jab.
The latest figures came amid a warning in Scotland about a sharp rise in new infections.
And there is concern among scientists that case rates will jump when millions of pupils return to school next week.
The US could have the Covid pandemic under control and achieve a return to “normality” by next spring, Dr Anthony Fauci said, if the “overwhelming majority” of the population is vaccinated.
The chief White House medical adviser was speaking to CNN on Monday night, after the federal Food and Drug Administration gave full approval to the Pfizer vaccine.
More than 400,000 people have been vaccinated in the US each day in August, with 171.1 million now fully protected.
- US president Joe Biden is set to be briefed on an intelligence investigation into how Covid-19 began after he ordered a report on the competing origin theories. People familiar with intelligence reporting reportedly said there has been little corroboration over recent months that the virus had spread widely and naturally among wild animals, thus raising the spectre of a lab leak.
- Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon warned some Covid controls could be reimposed in the country after it recorded a record rise in new cases, which have doubled in the past week. Vaccinations had greatly lessened the effects of the virus but even so, she said, some controls could be needed again.
- Montana’s governor maintained vaccine mandates remain illegal in the state after yesterday’s Food and Drug Administration full approval of the Pfizer vaccine. A spokesperson said it did not invalidate Montana’s law, which also prohibits discrimination based on whether a person has been inoculated.
- Australian prime minister Scott Morrison rejected modelling that warned the country could face 25,000 deaths and 270,000 cases of long Covid if lockdowns and public health restrictions end once 80% of the adult population is vaccinated.
- Greece announced it would end free testing for unvaccinated people in an attempt to to boost inoculation rates. The new measures to coax people into getting vaccinated will also oblige unvaccinated people to test either once or twice a week, depending on their profession.
- Iran reported a record daily 709 Covid-related deaths as infections continue to rise in the country. The health ministry said there were also 40,623 new infections over the past 24 hours.
Brunei has reported two coronavirus deaths today, the first fatalities from Covid-19 in the south-east Asian nation in more than a year as it battles a fresh outbreak.
AFP reports that an 85-year-old woman and a 69-year-old man, both Bruneians, died after contracting lung infections following their admission to a quarantine centre this month, the health ministry said.
It brings the total virus deaths in the sultanate on Borneo island to five since the start of the pandemic. The country, home to about 450,000 people, reported its last Covid-19 death in June last year.
Brunei introduced fresh curbs in August after seeing its first local infections for 15 months. Authorities have closed cinemas and places of worship, banned dining in at restaurants and barred people from leaving their homes except for essential reasons.
Another 110 new virus cases were recorded Tuesday, taking total infections to 1,983 since the beginning of the pandemic, AFP reports.
Fewer children in the UK are being immunised against deadly diseases because of “vaccination fatigue” due to the Covid jabs drive and GPs being busy, government advisers have warned.
The number of teenagers in England getting vaccinated against some cancers, meningitis, septicaemia and other fatal conditions fell by 20% after the first lockdown last year.
The New York Times interviews Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute in Massachusetts, who was caught in the crossfire over the row about Covid’s origins.
In May last year, she hypothesised in an unpublished paper that: “By the time the SARS-CoV-2 virus was detected in Wuhan in late 2019, it looked like it had already picked up the mutations it needed to be very good at spreading among humans.”
The article (paywall) goes on:
Dr. Chan’s story is a reflection of how deeply polarizing questions about the origins of the virus have become. The vast majority of scientists think it originated in bats, and was transmitted to humans through an intermediate host animal, though none has been identified.
Some of them believe that a lab accident, specifically at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, cannot be discounted and has not been adequately investigated. And a few think that the institute’s research, which involved harvesting bats and bat coronaviruses from the wild, may have played a role.
Scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology said in early 2020 that they had found a virus in their database whose genome sequence was 96.2 percent similar to that of Sars-CoV-2, the new coronavirus.
But it was internet sleuths and scientists who discovered that the virus matched one harvested in a cave linked to a pneumonia outbreak in 2012 that killed three miners — and that the Wuhan lab’s genomic database of bat coronaviruses was taken offline in late 2019.
Alina Chan (@Ayjchan)
I’m happy @nytimes @NYTScience credited scientists, analysts and sleuths with uncovering the story of SARS2’s closest relatives @TheSeeker268 @Rossana38510044 @MonaRahalkar @franciscodeasis @babarlelephant and the WIV’s missing virus database @C_Small_ https://t.co/4FoyLD4rjw
The director of the US national institutes of health (NIH) has said Covid “does not have the earmarks of being created intentionally by humans”, but did not rule out a Wuhan lab leak.
Dr Francis Collins’ remarks yesterday came as before US president Joe Biden is set to be briefed on an intelligence investigation into how Covid-19 began after he ordered a report on the competing origin theories.
Reuters reports that people familiar with intelligence reporting have said that there has been little corroboration over recent months that the virus had spread widely and naturally amongst wild animals, thus raising further the spectre of a lab leak after the World Health Organization mission chief to Wuhan said a person collecting bat coronavirus samples from the field could have been patient zero.
Collins told CNBC:
The vast evidence from other perspectives says no, this was a naturally occurring virus. Not to say that it could not have been under study secretly at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and got out of there, we don’t know about that. But the virus itself does not have the earmarks of having been created intentionally by human work.
I think China basically refused to consider another WHO investigation and just said ‘nope not interested’. Wouldn’t it be good if they’d actually open up their lab books and let us know what they were actually doing there and find out more about those cases of people who got sick in November of 2019 about which we really don’t know enough.
Collins also commented on the increasingly acrimonious row between the medical advisor to the US president, Dr Anthony Fauci, and Republican senator Rand Paul who has highlighted that through a grant to non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, the NIH funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to study how bat viruses could infect humans.
The kind of gain-of-function research that’s under very careful scrutiny is when you take a pathogen for humans, and you do something with it that would enhance its virulence or its transmissibility. They were not studying a pathogen that was a pathogen for humans, these are bat viruses.
So by the strict definition, and this was look at exquisitely carefully by all the reviewers of that research in anticipation that this might come up, was that this did not meet the official description of what’s called gain-of-function research that requires oversight.
His remarks come after Fauci last month suggested it would have been “negligent” for NIH not to fund bat coronavirus research at the WIV and declined to commit not to collaborate with Chinese government scientists in the future, insisting that “we have always been careful” – despite leaked cables revealing serious concerns over conditions in the lab.
Fauci said it had been important to try to understand where Sars-CoV-1 originated, years before the current Sars-CoV-2 pandemic.
If you go back to when this research really started and look at the scientific rationale for it, it was a peer-reviewed proposal that was peer-reviewed and given a very high rating for the importance of why it should be done to be able to go and do a survey of what was going on among the bat population because everyone in the world was trying to figure out what the original source of the original Sars CoV-1 was — and in that context, the research was done.
It was very regulated. It was reviewed. It was given progress reports. It was published in the open literature. So, I think if you — if you look at the ultimate back rationale, why that was started, it was almost as if you didn’t pursue that research, you would be negligent because we were trying to find out how to prevent this from happening again.
As the number of recorded coronavirus infections in the UK rises again, we spoke to three people about their experiences of catching Covid despite having been fully vaccinated, and how it affected their daily lives.
France’s Haute Autorite de Sante (HAS) health watchdog has said it recommended a Covid-19 vaccine booster shot for those aged 65 and over and for those with existing medical conditions that could put at them serious harm from Covid.
Reuters reports that these Covid vaccine booster shots should be rolled out from the end of October onwards, it added
In China, booster shots should become available after the country vaccinates more people in an attempt to provide broader protection, a senior executive at a Sinopharm unit responsible for developing Covid-19 vaccines told state media.
While the World Health Organization has said current data does not indicate booster shots are needed, several countries have approved them amid growing evidence of waning vaccine protection over time, Reuters reports.
Zhang Yuntao, vice president at Sinopharm unit China National Biotec Group (CNBG), said that it is proper to make booster shots available in China after “all people who should be vaccinated are vaccinated,” according to an interview with the Global Times.
He said the priority for booster shots should be given to people older than 60 who showed weaker immune responses to vaccines compared with younger people in clinical trials.
Employees at restaurants and those working in aviation and delivery industries should also be prioritised, he said.
China has fully vaccinated around 55% of its population as of 12 August, using several locally developed shots including two-dose vaccines from Sinopharm and Sinovac Biotech.
Iran has reported a record daily 709 Covid-related deaths as infections continue to rise in the country. The health ministry said there were also 40,623 new infections over the past 24 hours.
Authorities have imposed a two-week road travel ban between cities in the Islamic republic until 27 August, except for essential vehicles. Non-essential businesses and public offices were allowed to reopen on Sunday after a week of mandatory shutdown.
Reuters reports that observers have pointed to how only about 6.5m of the 83m population are fully inoculated, while officials have blamed US sanctions and delays in importing vaccines.
US measures, which target sectors including oil and financial activities, have deterred some foreign banks from processing financial transactions with Iran. Tehran says this has frequently disrupted efforts to import essential medicines and other humanitarian items.
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