Covid-19 global updates: Moderna says vaccine works against delta variant, as WHO warns of global spread - The Washington Post

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The coronavirus vaccine developed by U.S. biotech firm Moderna is effective against the highly contagious delta variant, the company said in a release Tuesday, offering some hope even as the World Health Organization warned that the variant has spread to at least 96 countries.

Moderna said blood samples from fully vaccinated individuals produced antibodies against multiple variants and researchers measured only a “modest reduction in neutralizing titers” against the particularly virulent delta, first identified in India.

“As we seek to defeat the pandemic, it is imperative that we are proactive as the virus evolves,” Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel said in a statement. “These new data are encouraging and reinforce our belief that the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine should remain protective against newly detected variants.”

The company, whose vaccine uses messenger RNA technology and requires two doses, submitted the data to the bioRxiv preprint server ahead of peer review. Moderna last month also signed an agreement to provide the United Nations-backed Covax initiative, which seeks the equitable distribution of coronavirus vaccines worldwide, with 500 million doses beginning later this year.

Here are some significant developments:

• The British government was heavily criticized on Tuesday for allowing some senior business leaders in England to temporarily leave quarantine for work. The exemption applies to executives who can demonstrate that their work “has a greater than 50% chance of creating or preserving at least 500 UK-based jobs.”
• Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike has been discharged from a hospital, Japanese media reported. She had been off work for about a week to recuperate from fatigue. Infections are rising in the capital, and officials are considering extending strict distancing curbs through at least part of the Tokyo 2020 Games.
• North Korea’s Kim Jong Un warned of a “grave incident” that caused a “huge crisis” in Pyongyang’s battle against covid, state media reported, without providing further detail.
• Thailand reported a record 53 covid-linked deaths on Wednesday amid a recent pandemic wave and plans to reopen its Phuket resort island, without quarantine, to fully inoculated travelers on July 1.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin took to national television Wednesday to encourage citizens to get the jab, even revealing details about his own secretive vaccination.

As much of the world still awaits coronavirus vaccine supply, the delta variant is tearing through unvaccinated populations everywhere from Britain to the United States to South Africa.

It has reached 96 countries, the WHO said in a weekly epidemiological update Tuesday, a number it warned was probably an underestimate as most nations lack the genome-sequencing capacity needed to identify virus variants.

According to the WHO, delta is 55 percent more transmissible than the virulent alpha variant first identified in Britain last year, a version that spurred infection waves in multiple countries. Now, the delta variant “is expected to rapidly outcompete other variants and become the dominant variant over the coming months,” the WHO said.

Though it is just one of many variants to have arisen during the pandemic, the delta variant is considered one of the most alarming. (The Washington Post)

On Wednesday, France’s leading government scientific adviser said in a radio interview that the country was likely to suffer a fourth wave of infections caused by the delta variant, which accounts for at least 20 percent of new cases there.

But “it will be much more moderate than the previous three waves because the level of vaccinations is different compared to before,” Jean-François Delfraissy told French public radio, according to a Reuters translation of his remarks.

More than 63 percent of adults in France have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, the French Health Ministry says, with 41 percent fully inoculated.

Some countries with similarly high vaccination rates, including Britain and Israel, are grappling with new outbreaks of the delta variant but say widespread immunization has helped mitigate some of the pathogen’s worst effects.

In places such as Africa, however, where about 1 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, the variant is helping give rise to new infections and deaths. According to the WHO, new coronavirus cases in the African region increased by 33 percent over the past week, with covid-19 deaths jumping 42 percent.

In Russia, where vaccine uptake remains stubbornly low, authorities on Wednesday reported a record number of covid-related deaths for the second straight day, following an unprecedented surge in new cases that officials have blamed on the delta variant.

“The Delta variant will continue to complicate timelines for reaching a less disruptive new normal in countries with high vaccination rates as well as those with low rates,” said Scott Rosenstein, special global health adviser at the New York-based political risk firm Eurasia Group.

For lower-income nations with sluggish inoculation campaigns, Rosenstein said in a briefing note, “the risks of overwhelmed healthcare systems are the highest they have been since the beginning of the pandemic.”

Katerina Ang in Singapore contributed to this report.

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