• During the Quad Summit – made up of Australia, India, Japan and the US, India’s Prime Minister Narenda Modi announced that the nation will make eight million doses of the J & J coronavirus vaccine by the end of October for delivery to the Indo-Pacific region. Source
• For the first time since March 2020, bars in Rwanda are open. Source
• A pre-print article describes the rise of the Delta variant in South Africa, which researchers estimated as 46 percent more transmissible than the country’s formerly dominant Beta variant. Source
• The Wall Street Journal reports that Columbia University Professor and head of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, Jeffery Sachs, has disbanded a scientific task force investigating the origins of COVID-19, due to a potential conflict of interest. Some task force members are linked with the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based non-profit which has been scrutinized for its collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on bat coronavirus research. Source