Category: Medical

NAIROBI– Senior Kenyan government officials received a batch of Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine doses from China, as the East African nation ramps up inoculations for high-risk populations against the virus, saying, they would reinvigorate the pandemic fight in the country.

“The vaccines we are receiving today are testament to the cordial relations that exist between our two countries and extend beyond health care, to include trade and other sectors of development,” said Susan Mochache, principal secretary of the Ministry of Health, who was among the officials welcoming the arrival of the vaccine doses donated by China, at the main airport in the capital, Nairobi.

Kenya’s medicine regulatory agency has already approved China’s Sinopharm vaccine, alongside vaccines developed by Moderna, Johnson&Johnson, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, as the country is accelerating its inoculation process.

Mochache said, the arrival of the Sinopharm vaccine marks a significant milestone in Kenya’s quest to contain the pandemic and hasten a return to normalcy.

The two-dose Sinopharm vaccine, which can be administered within a 28-day gap and can be stored in temperatures ranging from 2-8 degrees Celsius, is ideal for Kenya’s cold chain capacity, Mochache said.

Zhang Yijun, minister counsellor at the Chinese Embassy in Kenya, said, the vaccine donation reaffirms the vitality of bilateral cooperation between Nairobi and Beijing.

The vaccines that have arrived and are arriving “are a testament of the comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership between our two countries and the profound traditional friendship between our two peoples,” said Zhang.

China has donated ventilators, face masks and personal protective equipment to Kenya, and shared with the country, knowledge about pandemic control and prevention.

Kenyan health experts earlier expressed confidence in China’s Sinopharm vaccine, saying that, its widespread access will help suppress the coronavirus, relieve pressure on the public health system and boost economic recovery.

Willis Akhwale, chair of the COVID-19 vaccine task force at the Ministry of Health, said, the approval of Sinopharm by his country’s medicine regulatory agency was a vote of confidence in its efficacy.

The Chinese vaccines have also been deployed in Rwanda, which received 200,000 Sinopharm doses on Aug 19, and Zimbabwe, which received a batch of Sinovac vaccine doses purchased from China on July 8.

South Africa’s Health Products Regulatory Authority approved the use of the Sinovac vaccine on July 3, with state officials, labour unions, as well as, political and civil society leaders expressing confidence in its potency.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

World leaders are returning to the United Nations in New York this week with a focus on boosting efforts to fight both climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, which last year forced them to send video statements for the annual gathering.

As the coronavirus still rages amid an inequitable vaccine rollout, about a third of the 193 U.N. states are planning to again send videos, but presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers for the remainder are due to travel to the United States.

The United States tried to dissuade leaders from coming to New York in a bid to stop the U.N. General Assembly from becoming a “super-spreader event,” although President Joe Biden will address the assembly in person, his first U.N. visit since taking office. A so-called U.N. honor system means that anyone entering the assembly hall effectively declares they are vaccinated, but they do not have to show proof.

This system will be broken when the first country speaks — Brazil. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is a vaccine skeptic, who last week declared that he does not need the shot because he is already immune after being infected with COVID-19.

Should he change his mind, New York City has set up a van outside the United Nations for the week to supply free testing and free shots of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told Reuters that the discussions around how many traveling diplomats might have been immunized illustrated “how dramatic the inequality is today in relation to vaccination.” He is pushing for a global plan to vaccinate 70% of the world by the first half of next year.

Out of 5.7 billion doses of coronavirus vaccines administered around the world, only 2% have been in Africa.

Biden will host a virtual meeting from Washington with leaders and chief executives on Wednesday that aims to boost the distribution of vaccines globally.

Demonstrating U.S. COVID-19 concerns about the U.N. gathering, Biden will be in New York only for about 24 hours, meeting with Guterres on Monday and making his first U.N. address on Tuesday, directly after Bolsonaro.

His U.N. envoy, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said Biden would “speak to our top priorities: ending the COVID-19 pandemic; combating climate change … and defending human rights, democracy, and the international rules-based order.”

Due to the pandemic, U.N. delegations are restricted to much smaller numbers and most events on the sidelines will be virtual or a hybrid of virtual and in-person. Among other topics that ministers are expected to discuss during the week are Afghanistan and Iran.

But before the annual speeches begin, Guterres and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will start the week with a summit on Monday to try and save a U.N. summit — that kicks off in Glasgow, Scotland, on Oct. 31 — from failure.

As scientists warn that global warming is dangerously close to spiraling out of control, the U.N. COP26 conference aims to wring much more ambitious climate action and the money to go with it from participants around the globe.

“It’s time to read the alarm bell,” Guterres told Reuters last week. “We are on the verge of the abyss.”

Source: Voice of America

Malawi plans a nationwide rollout of the newest typhoid vaccine after a two-year study, the first in Africa, found it safe and effective in children as young as 9 months. Previously available vaccines were found not effective in children younger than 2 years and even then only provided short-term protection.

Typhoid is an increasing public health threat in Malawi and across sub-Saharan Africa with an estimated 1.2 million cases and 19,000 deaths each year.

Typhoid is a treatable bacterial infection that has become a serious threat in many low- and middle-income countries.

In Malawi, the study on the efficacy of the Typhoid Conjugate Vaccine or TCV involved about 28,000 children aged between 9 months and 15 years from three townships in the commercial capital, Blantyre.

The University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health, the Blantyre Malaria Project, and the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust conducted the study.

Professor Melita Gordon, principal investigator for the study at the Malawi-Liverpool Wellcome Trust, says the results, released this week, show an efficacy rate of more than 80% in protecting children against the disease.

“The previous vaccines were only 50% effective, and they were never even tested very well in the very youngest children. They were never even usable in the youngest children. So, the fact that this new conjugate vaccine works in pre-school children, right down to 9 months is a really big deal and important to be able to tackle typhoid across the board in all the children who suffer with it,” she said.

Gordon also said the vaccine efficacy data provides hope that sub-Saharan Africa can be rid of the multidrug-resistant strain of typhoid that arrived from Asia about a decade ago.

“In Malawi, the incidents are something [around] four or five hundred cases per 100,000 per year. Now anything over 200 is considered high incidence, so we are a very high-incidence country. There have been studies in Burkina Faso, in Ghana, in Kenya; we know that many other African countries have an equivalent burden of the disease,” Gordon said.

Dr. Queen Dube, chief of health services in Malawi’s Health Ministry, says rollout should begin soon.

“The exciting news is that we had applied to GAVI that supports us on the vaccination front to add this to the list of vaccines we are administering in the country and GAVI approved our application. And we are looking at introducing this typhoid vaccine and rolling it out next year,” Dube said.

However, some fear the new typhoid vaccine would face hesitancy and resistance from people, as has been the case with COVID-19 vaccines, and which led to the incineration of about 20,000 expired doses in Malawi in May.

But Dube said this won’t happen with typhoid vaccine because COVID-19 was a new disease.

“We have had typhoid for decades and decades, so people know what typhoid is. Nobody will wake up in the morning saying, oh no, typhoid was manufactured in a laboratory. And so, chances that you will end up with misinformation are on the lower side compared with a new disease which swept across the globe, killing so many people brought a lot of fear and a allowed a lot of false theories,” she said.

Still, Dube said Malawi’s government plans to launch a massive sensitization campaign to teach people about the new typhoid vaccine to a reemergence of the myths and misinformation that engulfed the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

Source: Voice of America

BRAZZAVILLE— Africa faces a 470 million shortfall in Covid-19 vaccine doses this year after the Covax alliance cut its projected shipments, raising the risk of new and deadly variants, the WHO said on Thursday.

Only 17 percent of the continent’s population will now be vaccinated by the end of this year, compared with the 40 percent target set by the World Health Organization, the global agency’s Africa unit said at its weekly briefing in

the Congolese capita of Brazzaville.

“The staggering inequity and severe lag in shipments of vaccines threatens to turn areas in Africa … into breeding grounds for vaccine-resistant variants,” said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s Africa director.

“This could end up sending the whole world back to square one.”

Due to global shortages, the Covax alliance set up to ensure equitable delivery of jabs, will ship about 150 million fewer doses of vaccine to Africa than planned.

Taking into account this shortfall, the 470 million doses of vaccine now expected in Africa will allow only 17 percent of the population to be fully protected, the WHO’s regional office said.

“As long as rich countries lock Covax out of the market, Africa will miss its vaccination goals,” Moetti said.

The reduction in the vaccination target comes as Africa passes the eight million mark in infections this week, the WHO said.

About 95 million doses should have been received in Africa via Covax during September, but despite the resumption of shipments, “Africa has only been able to vaccinate 50 million people, or 3.6 percent of its population,” says WHO Africa.

The Covax international funding mechanism is supposed to allow 92 disadvantaged states and territories to receive free vaccines funded by more prosperous nations.

Last week, it revised its forecasts downwards, explaining the lack of doses “by export bans, the priority given to bilateral agreements between manufacturers and countries, delays in filing applications for approval”, among other reasons.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

NAIROBI— Kenya will next year start manufacturing Covid-19 vaccines locally in collaboration with unnamed pharmaceutical firms in a move aimed at easing supply hitches that have derailed mass innoculation.

Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe revealed in an internal vaccination blue print that the country has started the process of building a filling plant for the Covid-19 vaccines.

A full-fledged vaccine manufacturing plant will be built by 2024, said Kagwe. A fill and finish facility helps third parties put the vaccine from the main manufacturers into vials or syringes, sealing them and packaging them up for distribution.

Many manufacturers use third parties to fill and finish their vaccines and African countries like Senegal, Rwanda and South Africa are in talks with investors to start the production of coronavirus vaccines.

“To improve our vaccine supply security, the government has embarked on the local manufacture of Covid-19 vaccines starting with the establishment of a fill-and finish facility through strategic partnerships and technological transfer,” said Kagwe in the National Covid-19 Vaccine Deployment Plan, 2021.

“We aim to start local production during the first quarter of 2022 and have a fully-fledged human vaccine manufacturing capability by 2024.”

Kagwe said local production will help secure sufficient vaccines to boost countrywide innoculation programmes.

Kenya plans to vaccinate 26 million adult Kenyans by end of June next year and at least 10 million by Christmas this year.

It has been acquiring doses of vaccines from Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson to supplement the Astrazeneca vaccines.

Kenya would need to secure a partnership with a vaccine patent holder to manufacture Covid 19 vaccines.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

MOGADISHU— At least nine people have died in a suspected suicide bombing in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, police, and witnesses said.

The attack on Tuesday has killed and wounded civilians and members of the security forces.

Dadir Hassan, another police officer in Mogadishu, said the death toll stood at 11. He told Anadolu Agency over the phone that the suicide bomber targeted a busy tea shop near a main military base in Mogadishu.

“The preliminary investigations confirmed that the attack was a result of a lone suicide bomber who blew himself at a teashop where security forces and civilians frequented and we can confirm that at least 11 people, including soldiers, were killed and several others wounded,” Hassan said.

The bombing was claimed by the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab armed group, which has been fighting to overthrow Somalia’s federal government.

“I have passed by the area a few minutes after the blast, the whole area was in a mess with abandoned shoes belonging to the victims,” witness Kudow Yusuf said.

Another witness, Adan Hussein, said he had seen several bodies, some of them in uniform, carried into ambulances.

Somali Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble condemned the “indiscriminate” attack.

“This barbaric act shows how al-Shabaab terrorists are thirsty for the indiscriminate bloodshed of the Somali people, forcing us to cooperate in fighting terrorism,” Roble said.

Al-Shabaab controlled the capital until 2011 when it was pushed out by African Union troops, but it still holds territory in the countryside and launches frequent attacks against government and civilian targets in Mogadishu and elsewhere.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

An explosion from suicide bombing has killed at least 11 people Tuesday in the Somali capital, witnesses and officials said.

Witnesses said a suicide bomber walked into a teashop made of corrugated tin and detonated an explosive vest.

The attack occurred near a checkpoint manned by Somali government security forces in Wadajir district, which is next to both Mogadishu’s airport and the headquarters of the Africa Union forces known as AMISOM.

Soldiers as well as civilians are among the dead according to a Somali government official who requested anonymity because he is not allowed to speak to the media.

The al-Shabab militant group claimed responsibility for the attack.

The prime minister of Somalia, Mohamed Hussein Roble, condemned the “barbaric act” by al-Shabab.

“I condemn today’s bombing by al-Shabab terrorists at a teashop in Wadajir district, which resulted in the death and injury of innocent people,” he said in a Twitter post. “May God have mercy on the dead and heal the wounded.”

Roble said the attack shows that al-Shabab are “thirsty for the indiscriminate bloodshed of the Somali people.”

Thousands of Somali civilians have been killed in the fighting involving al-Shabab since 2006. The group is fighting to overthrow the international supported government of Somalia.

Source: Voice of America