2-24 | The COVAX Facility today announced the delivery of its first COVID-19 vaccine doses to Ghana. This first delivery from the COVAX Facility comes over two months after the first people started receiving COVID-19 vaccines in wealthy countries. As World Health Organization head Dr. Tedros Adhanom recently pointed out, 10 countries have currently administered 75 percent of all vaccinations worldwide, while 130 countries hadn’t yet received a single dose.
2-4 | Ahead of the next round of talks at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to discuss a proposal by South Africa and India to waive monopolies on COVID-19 medical tools during the pandemic, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) called on the wealthy countries opposing the proposal not to block it and ruin its lifesaving potential for billions of people in the rest of the world. As cases of COVID-19 continue to rise across the globe, there is no more time to waste and governments need to take leadership to make this waiver a reality.
2-3 | As a highly infectious new strain of COVID-19 spreads through Southern Africa, health workers in Mozambique, Eswatini and Malawi are struggling to treat escalating numbers of patients with little prospect of a vaccine to protect them from the virus. International medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) calls for COVID-19 vaccines to be distributed equitably, prioritising and protecting frontline health workers and people at highest risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19 in all countries, including in Africa.
12-8 | As the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) starts meeting today and later this month to discuss emergency use authorisation of both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine candidates, Médec
12-4 | Twenty years ago antiretroviral medicines to treat HIV were a rare luxury in South Africa. The rich could buy them for tens of thousands of rands in the private sector. Most had no access to treatment at all. At the time, president Thabo Mbeki and his infamous minister of health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang were fiercely opposed to providing antiretroviral treatment in the public sector. Those were terrible days.