Germany is looking to ramp up the use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine after authorities last week gave the green light for it to be administered to people 65 and over.
Hundreds of thousands of doses have been gathering dust in recent weeks due to the restrictions on who could get the vaccine and misgivings among some who were eligible.
According to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, Germany has received 2.1 million doses of the AstraZeneca shot so far but administered just 721,000.
Berlin is opening a sixth vaccine centre Monday at the former Tempelhof airport in the centre of the city that will administer only the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Finance Minister Olaf Scholz told public broadcaster ZDF that he expects Germany to be able to administer up to 10 million shots a week by the end of the month.
LISTEN | Are all COVID-19 vaccines created equal?
Front Burner21:55Are all COVID-19 vaccines created equal?
How solid is the science behind delaying second COVID-19 vaccine doses? Are the shots from AstraZeneca-Oxford and Johnson & Johnson effective enough? Infectious disease specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch answers our most pressing questions about the latest vaccine news. 21:55
In Italy, the health ministry has now officially approved using the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine for healthy people over age 65, citing limited vaccine supplies and the need to vaccinate people who might be vulnerable to complications.
The order was signed Monday. The European Medicines Agency had approved AstraZeneca for all age groups, but some nations like Italy and Germany initially limited it to under 65s due to what they called limited data.
Those limitations are one of the reasons why the 27-nation European Union has lagged so far behind Britain and the United States in vaccinating its people. Millions of doses of AstraZeneca have piled up across Europe, waiting to be given out.
Speeding up Italy’s vaccination campaign will enable the country to overcome the coronavirus crisis, Prime Minister Mario Draghi said on Monday, noting that his government would do whatever was necessary to protect lives.
“The pandemic is not yet over, but with the acceleration of the vaccine plan, a way out is not far off,” Draghi said in a speech to mark International Women’s Day, his first such public address since taking office last month.
Italy is approaching 100,000 COVID-19-related deaths and health officials have warned that the country faces a third wave of cases as a more contagious variant of the disease gains ground.
-From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 10:55 a.m. ET
What’s happening in Canada
WATCH | The community volunteers helping B.C. seniors get COVID-19 vaccines:
Several community and religious groups in British Columbia are armed with computers and phones, ready to help local seniors sign up for COVID-19 vaccinations. 2:03
As of 10:50 a.m. ET on Monday, Canada had reported 887,910 cases of COVID-19, with 30,594 cases considered active. A CBC News tally of deaths stood at 22,249.
Across the North, Nunavut reported no new cases on Monday but added two additional recoveries, bringing the number of active cases in the territory to 23. Health officials in Yukon and the Northwest Territories had not yet provided updated figures on Monday.
Ontario reported 1,631 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday and 10 additional deaths. Hospitalizations in the province stood at 626, with 282 COVID-19 patients in intensive care units.
A stay-at-home order in Toronto, Peel Region and North Bay is lifting Monday as the province loosens pandemic restrictions. The three regions were the last ones still under the order, and are transitioning back to the government’s colour-coded pandemic response framework.
Toronto and Peel will enter the “grey lockdown” category, something local public health officials asked for in both regions.
In an interview with CBC’s chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton, P.E.I. Premier Dennis King said the province has a “very robust” public health nursing system and is ready to go for the broader vaccine rollout. But the premier also noted that he is open to conversations about sharing some of the province’s allocated vaccine supply with provinces dealing with higher caseloads.
King also said Sunday that he believes the so-called Atlantic bubble will be back in action by early spring.
In Quebec, people in many parts of the province will be able to eat in restaurants and work out in gyms starting Monday as five regions are downgraded from red to orange on the province’s colour-coded pandemic alert level system.
The province on Sunday reported 707 new cases of COVID-19 and seven additional deaths. Hospitalizations stood at 592, with 107 COVID-19 patients in intensive care.
In the Prairie provinces, Manitoba reported 56 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday and two additional deaths. Saskatchewan health officials, meanwhile, reported 116 new cases of the illness caused by the novel coronavirus and two additional deaths. In Alberta, there wasn’t a formal update from health officials over the weekend because of a system upgrade.
In British Columbia, health officials will provide updated figures that cover the weekend later Monday.
WATCH | Vaccines won’t be the end of masks, physical distancing, Tam says:
Dr. Theresa Tam says that a year into the pandemic, with COVID-19 vaccines helping Canada gain an upper hand, masks, physical distancing and travel restrictions won’t disappear immediately because vigilance is needed to beat the evolving virus. 1:53
–From CBC News and The Canadian Press, last updated at 10:50 a.m. ET
What’s happening around the world
People in need wait to take a bag with free food at a non-profit association called ‘Pane Quotidiano’ in Milan, Italy, on Monday. The number of people in need has increased after the start of the pandemic. (Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images)
As of early Monday morning, more than 116.9 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, with more than 66.1 million listed on the Johns Hopkins University tracking database as recovered. The global death toll was approaching 2.6 million.
In the Asia-Pacific region, Vietnam administered its first COVID-19 doses Monday to the front-line workers who made the nation’s relative success in controlling the pandemic possible — health workers, contact tracers and security forces who handled quarantine duties.
The Southeast Asian nation of 96 million people has a goal to inoculate at least half of the population by the end of the year. Thousands of doctors, nurses and technicians working at hospitals designated to treat COVID-19 patients lined up in the morning and received the first jabs of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
“I have been waiting for this day for a long time,” nurse Nguyen Thi Huyen said after she got her injection. Huyen has been caring for COVID-19 patients at a tropical disease hospital in Hanoi the past year. Health protocols have limited her time with family, among other challenges.
A health worker prepares a dose of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Hanoi on Monday. Vietnam has started the vaccination campaign with a hope to inoculate half of the population against COVID-19 by the end of the year. (Hau Dinh/The Associated Press)
The first batch of over 100,000 AstraZeneca doses in a 30 million order arrived two weeks ago. Separately, Vietnam expects to secure another 30 million doses of the same vaccine through the UN-backed COVAX program for vaccine equality.
The UN children’s agency said Afghanistan has received nearly half a million coronavirus vaccine doses via the global COVAX initiative. War-torn Afghanistan received 468,000 AstraZeneca vaccines on Monday, the first shipment through COVAX, UNICEF said in a statement.
The vaccines were made by the Serum Institute of India, and arrived in the capital of Kabul aboard an Emirates flight, UNICEF said. More vaccines will arrive in the coming weeks and months. India previously donated 500,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines to Afghanistan.
Thailand will reduce mandatory quarantine from 14 to seven days starting in April for foreigners arriving in the country who have been vaccinated.
In the Americas, Dr. Anthony Fauci is projecting that U.S. high school students will be able to get vaccinated early in the next school year and that elementary school students should be in line for vaccinations in early 2022.
Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical officer and director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CBS News’ Face the Nation that vaccines for teens will be available “maybe not the first day but certainly in the early part of the fall.”
Currently, three vaccines are approved for use in the United States. The single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine and the two-shot Moderna vaccine are approved for individuals 18 and older. Pfizer’s vaccine is approved for 16 and up.
Trials are underway to determine the safety of vaccines on younger people. Teenagers contract the coronavirus almost twice as often as younger children, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
Ecuador and Paraguay have both received some 20,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccine from Chile.
In the Middle East, Syrian President Bashar Assad and his wife have tested positive for the coronavirus, the president’s office said Monday, with both having only mild symptoms of the illness.
In a statement, Assad’s office said the couple did PCR tests after they experienced minor symptoms consistent with the COVID-19 illness. It said that Assad, 55, and his wife Asma, who is 10 years younger, will continue to work from home, where they will isolate for between two and three weeks.
Both were in “good health and in stable condition,” the statement said.
Syria, which marks 10 years of war next week, has recorded nearly 16,000 virus cases in government-held parts of the country, including 1,063 deaths. But the numbers are believed to be much higher with limited amounts of PCR tests being done, particularly in areas of northern Syria outside government control.
The pandemic, which has severely tested even developed countries, has been a major challenge for Syria’s health-care sector, already depleted by years of conflict. A decade of fighting has resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions.
Syria began a vaccination campaign last week, but no details have been given about the process, nor have local journalists been allowed to witness the rollout. The health minister said the government procured the vaccines from a friendly country, which he declined to name.
After delays, Israel started vaccinating Palestinians who work inside the country and its West Bank settlements on Monday, more than two months after launching an immunization blitz of its own population.
Palestinian labourers who crossed into Israel at several West Bank checkpoints received their first doses of the Moderna vaccine from Magen David Adom paramedics. The vaccination drive orchestrated by COGAT, Israel’s military agency co-ordinating government operations in the West Bank, had been beset by postponements.
Some 100,000 Palestinian labourers from the West Bank work in Israel and its settlements, which are widely seen internationally as illegal and an obstacle to peace.
Maj. Gen. Kamil Abu Rukun, the head of COGAT, said in a statement in Arabic that Israelis and Palestinians, “live in the same epidemiological space” and that it was a shared interest to vaccinate Palestinians.
Israel has administered over 8.7 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine to its population of 9.3 million. Over 3.7 million Israelis — more than 40 per cent — have received two doses of the vaccine. But until Monday, Israel had provided few vaccines for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a move that has underscored global disparities and drawn international criticism.
Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza in 2005, but still maintains control over airspace, the seafront and a large amount of the movement in and out of the area.
Human rights groups and many Palestinians say that as an occupying power, Israel is responsible for providing vaccines to the Palestinians. Israel says that under interim peace accords reached in the 1990s, it does not have any such obligation.
Israeli officials have said the priority is vaccinating Israel’s own population first, while the Palestinian Authority has said it will obtain its own vaccines through a World Health Organization partnership with humanitarian organizations known as COVAX.
To date, the PA has acquired enough vaccine doses for only 6,000 people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which are home to nearly five million Palestinians. It received 2,000 doses from Israel and acquired another 10,000 doses of a Russian-made vaccine. Each is given in two doses.
Israel had also announced plans to share surplus vaccines with far-flung allies in Africa, Europe and Latin America, but the decision was frozen by legal questions. On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with leaders of Denmark and Austria and said the three nations would join forces in the fight against COVID-19 with an investment in research and rollout of vaccines.
In Europe, British children returned to school on Monday after a two-month closure, part of what Prime Minister Boris Johnson said was a plan to get the country to “start moving closer to a sense of normality.”
As part of the plan, millions of high school and college students coming back to U.K. classrooms will be tested for the first few weeks. Authorities want to quickly detect and isolate asymptomatic cases in order to avoid sending entire schools home.
“We are being cautious in our approach so that we do not undo the progress we have made so far,” Johnson said as he urged people to get vaccinated. High schools and colleges can reopen in phases to allow for testing.
France could approve Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine by the end of this week, in line with the timetable for its broader European Union approval, the president of the country’s health regulator said.
Hungarians on Monday awoke to a new round of strict lockdown measures aimed at slowing a record-breaking wave of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths powered by virus variants.
In Africa, Ethiopian Airlines is set to take a lead role in ferrying COVID-19 vaccines around the world and expects demand for the service to last for up to three years.
The deputy chief executive of South African bank ABSA died on Sunday due to COVID-19 complications, his family said.
–From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 9:55 a.m. ET
Have questions about this story? We’re answering as many as we can in the comments.
HAMILTON – It remains faint but Bo Levi Mitchell and the Hamilton Tiger-Cats still have a playoff pulse.
Mitchell threw two touchdown passes as Hamilton defeated the Ottawa Redblacks 37-21 in the CFL’s annual Hall of Fame game Saturday afternoon. The Ticats (4-9) earned a second straight win to move to within six points of the third-place Toronto Argonauts (7-6) in the East Division.
Hamilton visits Toronto on Friday night.
“Obviously they’re (wins) huge now,” Mitchell said. “We didn’t do ourselves any favours by getting into this position and not being able to really control our own destiny.
“But right now, we need certain people to win at certain times. Our job is to go out there and try to win the next five, then the next three after that.”
Mitchell finished 20-of-27 passing for 299 yards and an interception. He entered weekend action leading the CFL in passing yards (3,383) and TD strikes (21).
Greg Bell’s 15-yard TD run at 11:30 of the fourth and two-point convert put Hamilton up 36-21 after backup Jeremiah Masoli led Ottawa on two scoring drives. Following a 13-yard TD strike to Andre Miller at 2:53, Masoli found Dominique Rhymes on a 10-yard touchdown pass at 7:43 before Khalan Laborn’s two-point convert cut Hamilton’s lead to 29-21.
“When you’re scoring from (15) yards out on a run play, that makes offence easy,” Mitchell said. “It’s one of those things when you get down there as a quarterback, it takes you sometimes five, eight, 10 plays and now it’s ‘OK, now we have to create some stuff and find something.’
“When you hand the ball off and you’re scoring from (15) yards, it makes the offence really easy.”
Ottawa (8-4-1) would have clinched a playoff spot with a victory.
Ottawa committed six turnovers (three interceptions, two fumbles, once on downs) before an announced Tim Hortons Field gathering of 22,119. Lawrence Woods III also returned a punt 83 yards for a touchdown at 11:51 of the first quarter that put Hamilton ahead 10-3.
“You’ve got to bring your best every single week and this wasn’t our best, all of us, from coaches to the players,” said Ottawa head coach Bob Dyce. “If you don’t play great for four quarters, I don’t care who you’re playing you’re not going to have a successful day.
“We should’ve made the tackle (on Woods), we had him wrapped up it’s that simple. Even though we didn’t make the play on that, there should’ve been extra bodies there to clean it up when he did break the tackle.”
Hamilton also tied the season series with Ottawa 1-1. The teams meet again at TD Place on Oct. 25.
“If we didn’t turn it over today I would’ve said we played really well offensively and that to me is what the biggest difference is,” said Hamilton head coach Scott Milanovich. “Even the turnovers today (interception, fumble), at least they were in their end and we weren’t giving them a short field.
“The biggest play of the game was Woodsie’s return. It got us jump-started, gave us the lead and we were kind of off after that.”
Ottawa starter Dru Brown was 17-of-27 passing for 164 yards and an interception. Masoli entered late in the third and finished 13-of-19 passing for 183 yards with two TDs and two interceptions, but Dyce said Brown will start next weekend against Montreal (10-2-1), which earned a 19-19 tie Saturday night with Calgary (4-8-1).
The Canadian Football Hall of Fame’s ’24 class of S.J. Green, Chad Owens, Weston Dressler, Vince Goldsmith and Vince Coleman, along with builders Ray Jauch and Ed Laverty (posthumously), was honoured at halftime. All were enshrined Friday night.
Steven Dunbar Jr. and Ante Litre had Hamilton’s other touchdowns. Marc Liegghio kicked two field goals, three converts and two singles.
Ottawa’s Lewis Ward booted two field goals and a convert.
Mitchell culminated a five-play, 96-yard march with a 20-yard TD pass to Litre at 13:34 of the third. It followed Jonathan Moxey’s interception.
Liegghio’s single at 7:05 of the third put Hamilton up 22-6.
Mitchell’s 54-yard TD strike to Dunbar at 14:18 of the second staked Hamilton to its 21-6 halftime lead. The advantage was well-deserved as the Ticats had more first downs (12-six), net offensive yards (260-144) and scored on both offence and special teams.
Mitchell was 14-of-20 passing for 210 yards and a TD, but his interception cost Hamilton at least a field-goal attempt. Dunbar had five receptions for 113 yards and the touchdown.
Brown completed 13-of-21 passes for 127 yards.
Liegghio’s missed 47-yard attempt went for the single at 12:45 to put Hamilton ahead 14-6. It followed a Kiondre Smith catch that was ruled incomplete and at the very least cost the Ticats a first down that would’ve kept the drive alive.
Ward’s 30-yard kick at 9:15 had pulled Ottawa to within 13-6.
Liegghio’s 19-yard field goal at 5:13 pushed Hamilton’s lead to 13-3. It followed the defence stopping Ottawa’s Dustin Crum on third-and-one, giving the Ticats possession at the Redblacks 40.
Liegghio’s 47-yard field goal opened the scoring at 2:42 before Ward tied in with a 24-yard boot at 8:44.
UP NEXT
Redblacks: Host the Montreal Alouettes (10-2-1) next Saturday, Sept. 21.
Tiger-Cats: Visit the Toronto Argonauts (7-6) on Friday.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 14, 2024.
TORONTO – Needing three points to keep their playoff push alive, Toronto FC’s Jonathan Osorio and Deandre Kerr stepped up with first-half goals against Austin FC on Saturday with goalkeeper Sean Johnson doing his bit at the other end.
A 76th-minute goal by Austin’s Owen Wolff made for a nervy ending but TFC hung on for a 2-1 win.
While Toronto (11-15-3) remains on the Major League Soccer playoff bubble in eighth place in the Eastern Conference (the eighth- and ninth-place teams in each conference square off in a wild-card playoff with the winner facing the top seed in the conference), other results went their way.
Seventh-place Charlotte, 10th-place Atlanta and 11th-place Philadelphia all lost while ninth-place D.C. United tied.
Toronto midfielder Alonso Coello called it “a game we had to win.”
“It’s a big win … To see that fight tonight was important,” added coach John Herdman.
Austin (9-12-7) came into the game in 11th place in the West, two points below ninth-place Minnesota. The Texas side has won just one of its last six league games (1-4-1).
Austin outshot Toronto 7-6 (6-2 edge in shots on target) in the first half but found itself trailing 2-0 at the break as Toronto took advantage of its chances and the visitors didn’t in their first-ever visit to BMO Field, before an announced crowd of 25,538.
Toronto had a dream start, catching Austin on the counterattack in the seventh minute. A sliding Austin player dispossessed an onrushing Kerr, who had been set free by a long ball from Coello, but the ball bounced to Osorio, who beat goalkeeper Brad Stuver with a rising shot.
It was the Toronto captain’s second goal of the season in league play and his 65th for TFC in all competitions. Only Sebastian Giovinco (83) and Jozy Altidore (79) scored more in Toronto colours.
TFC went ahead on another counterattack in the 30th minute after an Austin giveaway. Osorio found Richie Laryea outpacing his marker and the wingback unselfishly sent a perfect low cross across goal for Kerr to knock home for his third of the season.
Wolff, the son of Austin head coach Josh Wolff, made it interesting with his late strike. The 19-year-old U.S. youth international, controlling a long ball, beat defender Raoul Petretta and then waited out Johnson before slotting it home for his first of the season.
Toronto survived a nervy six minutes of stoppage time as Austin pressed for the equalizer. Austin outshot Toronto 14-9 (8-3 in shots on target) and had 52.5 per cent possession.
The win evened Toronto’s home record at 7-7-0, while Austin slipped to 3-8-3 on the road.
It was a costly evening for Austin with defender Brendan Hines-Ike, midfielder Jhojan Valencia and star attacker Sebastian Driussi allpicking up cautions to miss Wednesday’s game with Los Angeles FC due to yellow-card accumulation.
Toronto defender Shane O’Neill will miss Wednesday’s game against visiting Columbus for the same reason. Toronto could be short mid-week, too. The hope is veteran centre back Kevin Long, who missed Saturday’s game after tweaking his hamstring in training, will be good to go.
Toronto has five games remaining, including three more at home as it looks to return to the post-season for the first time since 2020 when it lost to Nashville after extra time at the first hurdle.
It is a challenging road.
TFC hosts Columbus, the New York Red Bulls and Inter Miami while playing away at the Colorado Rapids and Chicago Fire. All but Chicago are in playoff positions.
The only previous meeting between Toronto and Austin was in May 2023, when Zardes scored a 91st-minute winner to give Austin a 1-0 win over visiting Toronto, which was then mired at the bottom of the Eastern Conference. That loss prompted a post-game outburst from Italian star Federico Bernardeschi about TFC’s drab play.
Then-coach Bob Bradley benched Bernardeschi for the next game.
Current coach John Herdman made four changes to his starting 11 with Bernardeschi and Osorio returning from suspension and Coello and Kerr also slotting in. Coello, who had missed the last eight league games with a hamstring injury, was impressive in his 59-minute return.
Both Toronto and Austin suffered home losses last time out going into the international break. Toronto was beaten 3-1 by D.C. United while Austin lost 1-0 to Vancouver.
—
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This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 14, 2024.
MONTREAL – CF Montreal is back in the win column after securing a 2-1 Major League Soccer win over Charlotte FC on Saturday night at Stade Saputo.
Montreal’s form had suffered of late, with just one win in MLS since July, but Laurent Courtois’ squad showed a level of poise and control over the tempo of the game that had not been seen since the beginning of the season.
“What we’ve changed in the last few weeks or months in terms of our methodology or coaching, is nothing. We did the exact thing, We had the exact same words, and we expressed them the exact same way,” said Courtois. “Today, everything just clicked.”
Caden Clark scored for the first time as a Montreal (7-12-9) player in the 23rd minute, in addition to Bryce Duke’s goal three minutes later that ended up being the winner, while Tim Ream found the back of the net for Charlotte (10-10-8).
Montreal had the first major scoring chance of the match after 15 minutes of play. With a free kick roughly 25 metres away from goal, Gabriele Corbo sent a near-perfect shot smashing off the crossbar.
Montreal would continue to dictate the tempo in the opening phase, finding first blood just seven minutes later.
Following a phenomenal triple-save from Charlotte goalkeeper Kristijan Kahlina, the ball fell to Clark who volleyed the ball into the wide-open net, picking up his first goal for the club.
“I think you don’t lose the feeling (of scoring), everything happens for a reason, you just can’t lose yourself in the chaos,” said Clark, who had missed a full season due to injury and was briefly without a club, but was grateful for Courtois’ confidence in him.
“(To have a coach’s confidence) is huge and is something I’ve had both ends of so you just can’t take advantage of that in the wrong way. I’m going to keep my discipline with the game plan and keep my head right.”
With momentum completely on their side, the home side doubled the lead just three minutes later. Montreal continued to build up play on the left flank and found a streaking Raheem Edwards in behind the defence who cut the ball back to Duke, sending the Stade Saputo crowd into a frenzy.
Just after the half-hour mark, Charlotte pulled one back through a set piece — something Montreal has struggled defending all season — as Ream rose above everyone at the back post to score his first with his new club.
The second half began in a similar fashion to the end of the first, with Charlotte pressing high up the pitch and forcing several turnovers in dangerous areas. After surviving the pressure, Montreal began to regain control of the game near the hour mark, enjoying the lion’s share of the possession while Charlotte looked to hit back on the counterattack.
“I think when we conceded that goal we were like ‘here we go again.’ 2-1 is a tough lead before halftime … and at the beginning of the half we kind of shot ourselves in the foot and they pressed a bit more, they moved a bit more forward and that opened some gaps,” said captain Samuel Piette.
“I was happy with that, it shows character. At the end of the day, we just wanted the three points and that’s what we got.”
As the game progressed, Charlotte pushed harder to find an equalizer but to no avail. With only one shot on target conceded, the second-worst defence in the league put up an impressive front and confidently rebuffed every single Charlotte attack.
“I’m a big fan of the back five’s performance in their discipline, competitiveness, and synchronization with balls in behind,” said Courtois.
“We can’t explain sometimes in a game it’s not there, they’re capable and today they showed it. Let’s see tomorrow.”
UP NEXT
Both teams are back in action on Sept. 18 away from home as Montreal will look to avenge a 5-0 rout against the New England Revolution while Charlotte visits Orlando City SC.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 14, 2024.
