China has granted approval to five COVID-19 antigen kits made by local companies to be used for self-testing, state broadcaster CCTV said on Saturday, as it tweaks its testing regime that has been pressured by Omicron. China’s National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) published a notice on Friday saying Beijing Huaketai Biotechnology had been allowed to […]
Covid-19
Sherlock Biosciences said on Tuesday it had raised $80 million in new funding to help bolster sales of its CRISPR-based COVID-19 test and develop new diagnostics based on the breakthrough gene editing technology. The latest round for Sherlock, which was the first to gain authorization for a CRISPR-based COVID-19 test in 2020, was led by […]
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the six African countries would obtain technology to tool them with the needed means to produce their own COVID-19 vaccines. In an effort to minimize global reliance on vaccine manufacturing from companies outside the continent, the WHO added Egypt, Tunisia, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa would have […]
Moderna Inc on Thursday projected higher vaccine sales for the second half of the year as it sees COVID-19 becoming a flu-like endemic illness, prompting people to take regular shots. The company expects $19 billion in sales of its vaccine this year from $18.5 billion previously and said talks were ongoing for vaccine orders in […]
China is giving COVID-19 booster vaccines using technologies different from the initial injections, in an effort to improve immunisation strategies amid concerns that its most-used jabs appeared to be weaker against variants such as Omicron. Boosting population immunity could be crucial to preparing China to eventually reopen its borders and pivot from its “dynamic zero” […]
A study from an Oxford University lab published on Thursday revealed that a three-dose course of AstraZeneca booster shot is efficient in controlling the fast spread of the Omicron variant. The Pharmaceutical company said in its statement that the results – while they have yet to be released in a peer-reviewed medical journal – are […]
The European Union’s drugs regulator gave the green light Monday to a fifth COVID-19 vaccine for use in the 27-nation bloc, granting conditional marketing authorization to the two-dose vaccine made by U.S. biotech company Novavax. The European Medicines Agency decision to recommend granting conditional marketing authorization for the vaccine for people aged 18 and over, […]
France has opened 400 investigations into networks providing fake COVID-19 health passes, the interior minister said Sunday, as virus-related hospitalizations rise sharply across the country. The case of a woman with the virus who died in a Paris regional hospital after showing a false vaccine certificate has drawn attention in French media in recent days. […]
Tech tools like digital contact tracing apps and artificial intelligence that European governments rolled out to combat COVID-19 failed to play a key role in solving the pandemic and now threaten to make such monitoring widely accepted, a new report shows. The health surveillance technologies that many European countries deployed after the coronavirus pandemic erupted […]
U.S. health authorities again expanded the nation’s booster campaign Thursday, opening extra doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to several million 16- and 17-year-olds. The U.S. and many other nations already were urging adults to get booster shots to pump up immunity that can wane months after vaccination, calls that intensified with the discovery of the […]