British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday he would get the AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 shot very soon, voicing his confidence in a vaccine that has been suspended in some other European countries after reports of blood clots
Several European Union countries have suspended their rollout of the shot, developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, but Britain’s regulator has said that there is no evidence of a causal link between reports of thrombo-embolic events and the vaccine.
Asked if European countries had disregarded scientific evidence, Johnson said: “The best thing I can say about the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine program is that I finally got news that I’m going to have my own jab … very, very shortly.”
“It will certainly be Oxford-AstraZeneca that I will be having,” Johnson told Parliament.
In France, one of the countries that has suspended AstraZeneca jabs while it waits for the European Medicines Agency, the prime minister said he wants to boost confidence in the AstraZeneca vaccine by getting an injection as soon as his government authorizes its use again.
At age 55 and with no known underlying health problems, French Prime Minister Jean Castex isn’t, strictly speaking, among the groups yet eligible for vaccination in France, which has prioritized injections for the most vulnerable.
But speaking to broadcaster BFM-TV, Castex said Tuesday that he wants to get an AstraZeneca injection to set an example.
“Given what is happening, what has just happened, with AstraZeneca, I told myself, in effect, that it would be wise that I get vaccinated very quickly, as soon as the suspension is, I hope, lifted,” he said.
Castex said that he wants to demonstrate to his fellow citizens “that vaccination is the exit door from this crisis.”
Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza says European countries, including his, are hoping that the EMA on Thursday will deliver “the clarifications and reassurances necessary” to be able to resume administering the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine.
Italy was one of several nations that in recent days halted the AstraZeneca jabs over reports of dangerous blood clots in some recipients, though the company and international regulators say there is no evidence the shot is to blame.
Speranza told a parliamentary Social Affairs Commission on Wednesday that it is Italy’s hope “to have by tomorrow answers from EMA that will enable the relaunching without hesitation of the vaccine campaign,” using AstraZeneca doses.
WATCH | Millions of Italians are back under lockdown restrictions, as the country is hit with a third wave of COVID-19:
Millions of Italians are back under lockdown restrictions, as the country is hit with a third wave of COVID-19. Deaths and intensive care admissions are also on the rise, while the halt on AstraZeneca is slowing down Italy’s overall vaccination effort. 2:01
He said the Italian government “has utmost trust in EMA,” as well as in Italy’s medicine agency, noting: “We insist on the utmost safety and we are paying the utmost attention to what has happened.”
So far, just under 10 per cent of Italy’s population has received at least one dose of a vaccine. Speranza told lawmakers that some 50 million doses of vaccines, including for the first time in Italy the Johnson & Johnson one-dose injection, were expected to arrive through June, while some 80 million doses are due to arrive between July and September.
Spanish health officials, meanwhile, said they are investigating two more cases of adverse reactions among people who received a shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Spain’s Health Ministry said Wednesday that one person died of a brain stroke that resulted in internal bleeding and a second person who died suffered an abdominal blood clot. Both had been vaccinated in the previous 16 days.
Including the two deaths, the country’s medicines agency has recorded three suspicious cases so far among 975,661 AstraZeneca doses administered.
Brazilian and Australian regulators maintained their recommendations to continue rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine despite many European nations pausing its use, while global health experts came under increasing pressure to clear up questions over its safety.
AstraZeneca said on Sunday a review of safety data had shown no evidence of an increased risk of blood clots.
–From Reuters and Associated Press, last updated at 9 a.m. ET
What’s happening across Canada
WATCH | Updated guidance on AstraZeneca vaccine sparks further confusion:
Canada’s vaccine advisory committee changed its guidance on the AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, recommending it be given to those over the age of 65. But it has sparked more confusion by saying if given the choice, Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s were still preferable for seniors. 2:14
As of early Wednesday morning, Canada had reported 916,143 cases of COVID-19, with 31,800 cases considered active. A CBC News tally of deaths stood at 22,519.
Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam said Tuesday the warning bells are sounding that a third wave of COVID-19 infections is hitting Canada.
“We’re watching, of course, that epidemic curve really carefully, because there is this upswing we’re seeing now,” she said.
3,777 cases of the B117 variant first reported in the United Kingdom.
238 cases of the B1351 variant first reported in South Africa.
71 cases of the P1 variant originally linked to travellers from Brazil.
In Atlantic Canada, health officials reported nine new cases of COVID-19 on Monday — five in New Brunwsick, two in Nova Scotia and one in both Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.
In Quebec, Premier François Legault announced that the curfew in the province’s so-called red zones will be bumped back from 8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
“We can take an evening walk but indoor gatherings are still forbidden,” the premier said Tuesday, after health officials reported 561 new cases of COVID-19 and eight additional deaths.
In Ontario, the COVID-19 Science Advisory Table said that more transmissible virus variants of concern account for almost half of new cases and are driving growth. Health officials in the province reported 1,074 new cases of COVID-19 and 11 additional deaths on Tuesday.
WATCH | COVID-19 variants taking over as Ontario starts 3rd wave:
Scientists advising the Ontario government say the province is in a third wave. With variants becoming dominant, case rates rising and ICU beds filling up, officials are warning people to keep up with public health measures. 1:44
In the Prairie provinces, Manitoba reported 111 new cases of COVID-19 and no additional deaths on Tuesday. Health officials are also reporting 14 confirmed cases of variants of concern, all in the Winnipeg health region.
In neighbouring Saskatchewan, health officials reported 156 new cases of COVID-19 and two additional deaths on Tuesday. Chief Medical Health Officer Dr. Saqib Shahab said the province will monitor how the variants are spreading.
“So the fact that B117 is more transmissible is becoming very evident,” Shahab said. “All of us need to be a bit more cautious, especially in Regina.”
Alberta health officials reported 355 new cases of COVID-19 and three additional deaths. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Deena Hinshaw said 11 per cent of the province’s active cases involve virus variants believed to be more transmissible.
In British Columbia, health officials reported 556 new cases of COVID-19 and no new deaths. A statement from health officials said there have been 116 new confirmed cases of variants of concern found, for a total of 996, most of them involving the strain originally found in the United Kingdom.
Across the North, there were no new cases reported in Yukon, the Northwest Territories or Nunavut.
-From CBC News and The Canadian Press, last updated at 7 a.m. ET
What’s happening around the world
Health-care workers inoculate people with the CoronaVac vaccine at the Bang Khae Market on Thursday in Bangkok, Thailand. (Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images)
As of early Wednesday morning, more than 120.7 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, with 68.4 million of those cases listed as recovered on the John Hopkins University COVID-19 tracking tool. The global death toll stood at more than 2.6 million.
In the Asia-Pacific region, India needs to take quick and decisive steps soon to stop an emerging second “peak” of COVID-19 infections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday.
“If we don’t stop the growing pandemic right here, then a situation of a nationwide outbreak can get created,” Modi told a virtual conference of leaders of Indian states.
The Philippine government has decided to temporarily ban the entry of foreigners and limit the entry of returning Filipinos at Manila’s international airport to 1,500 daily as it struggles to contain an alarming surge in coronavirus infections.
A government body dealing with the pandemic said the month-long travel restrictions would start Saturday and aim to prevent the spread into the country of coronavirus strains that are believed to be more contagious. Among those to be allowed limited entry are homebound Filipino workers.
Philippine Airlines said it would announce some flight cancellations to comply with the temporary restriction.
Manila and other cities in the capital region reimposed seven-hour night curfews for two weeks starting Monday and locked down dozens of villages amid the surge in infections, which some officials attributed to public complacency and critics blamed on the failure of the government’s response to the pandemic.
A city employee, left, disinfects homes in Manila on Tuesday as the number of new daily cases of COVID-19 surges. (Ted Aljibe/AFP/Getty Images)
The Philippines has reported more than 631,300 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 12,848 deaths, the second-highest totals in Southeast Asia after Indonesia.
In the Americas, President Joe Biden warned that the United States may not meet his goal of relaxed COVID-19 restrictions by the summer’s Independence Day holiday if people do not continue to take precautions, noting vaccinations will still be underway.
“I won’t even be able to meet the July 4 deadline unless people listen, wear masks, wash their hands and social distance because not everyone by July 4 will have been vaccinated,” he told ABC News’ Good Morning America program in an interview that aired on Wednesday.
In Africa, Morocco is further ahead with its vaccination program than any other African country, but undocumented migrants are not part of its plans.
In Europe, Britain is reviewing the idea of vaccine certificates to allow access to travel, hospitality and entertainment and discussing the best way to proceed in terms of fairness, business minister Kwarsi Kwarteng said.
Hungary announced a record number of COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday as a powerful surge of the pandemic put an unprecedented strain on the country’s health care.
Health officials announced 195 deaths in the last 24 hours, breaking the previous peak of 193 in early December. The number of patients being treated for the disease rose to nearly 10,300, also a record, and nearly three times the number of those hospitalized in early February when the latest surge began.
Officials have sought to mitigate the surge with new restrictions and a vaccination program that has made Hungary one of the most-vaccinated countries in Europe.
A new shipment of 100,000 doses of the Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccine, which among European Union countries is only being used in Hungary, is expected to arrive on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto wrote on his Facebook page.
With more than 50,000 jabs on Tuesday, nearly 1.4 million people have received at least one shot, the second-highest rate in the EU.
In the Middle East, the Palestinian Authority said it will receive 62,000 coronavirus vaccine doses through a World Health Organization COVAX partnership. Health Ministry spokesperson Kamal al-Shakhra said authorities would receive 38,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 24,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine on Wednesday and Thursday. He said the AstraZeneca vaccine will be kept in storage until the World Health Organization addresses recent safety concerns.
-From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 7:55 a.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
