• In Brazil, only 31 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated – and roll-out might be delayed. Anvisa, the national health agency, has suspended 12.1 million doses of Sinovac’s coronavirus vaccine for 90 days because they were manufactured at an uninspected site. An additional 17 batches (comprising nine million doses) which were bottled at an uninspected site are also being held. Source
• Japan is planning to purchase 150 million doses of TAK-019, Novavax’s coronavirus vaccine, which is currently in clinical trials. Novavax will license the vaccine and transfer technology to Takeda, who will produce it; no financial details were disclosed. Source
• In the US, where 47 percent of residents are not fully vaccinated, coronavirus cases have surpassed 40 million. Source
• The Climate Action Network releases a statement calling for postponement of the COP 26 UN climate talks in November because surging caseloads, vaccine inequity and travel restrictions would prevent representatives from low-income countries attending, noting “… an inherent power imbalance between rich and poor nations within the U.N. climate talks and this is now compounded by the health crisis.” Source
• In Viet Nam, a man who disregarded instructions to report his travel history and to quarantine for 21 days is sentenced to a five-year prison term and fined $880 for spreading COVID-19 to eight people. Source
• The New York Times reports that as vaccination rates in some Western European countries have reached 80 percent, in countries Eastern Europe are lagging. Romania has fully vaccinated only 32 percent of its population and Bulgaria only 20 percent. Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania have some of the EU’s lowest vaccination rates – and the highest rates of excess mortality rates (which is one way that COVID-19 deaths are measured. A report cowritten by Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev for the European Council on Foreign Relations noted that “Europe’s Covid-19 experience has been a tale of two pandemics — and the differences in each story could haunt the continent for many years to come.” Source
• The UAE has approved a clinical trial of an experimental, recombinant protein-based preventive and therapeutic COVID-19 vaccine from China’s YishengBio. The vaccine, which is currently in phase I, will be studied in people with mild-to-moderate COVID-19. w New Zealand’s regulators have also approved a phase I trial for preventive use of the vaccine. Source
• NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins posts a blog entry with data from a preprint article in Nature, which estimated that over 100 million people in the US were infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020. Source