As more vaccine supplies finally become available to the world’s low-and middle-income countries (LMICs), the latent challenges that should have been addressed long before have emerged. Those include vaccine hesitancy and the ability of weak health systems to mount mass vaccination campaigns amidst other pressing health needs. Global policymakers need to shift their attention from […] Continue reading ->
Long months of pandemic lockdown have only exacerbated the harms due to alcohol  experienced by billions of people worldwide.  Now, WHO is in the process of developing a new alcohol action plan, in an effort to re-energize a stagnant process and overcome a “lost decade” of little progress on alcohol policies.  Can it make a […] Continue reading ->
In the coming months, 600 million doses of single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccines, manufactured in Hyderabad, are likely to be exported to Europe or the United States, at a time when India grapples with vaccinating its own citizens. Civil-society organisations are concerned that millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine may end up in the […] Continue reading ->
A new appeal about the course of the SARS-CoV2 virus hunt, penned by an international group of scientists, urges WHO member states to seize the moment of the upcoming World Health Assembly to adopt a much tougher mandate, with more rigorous scientific measures, to get to the truth of whether the SARS-CoV2 virus first infected […] Continue reading ->
In an unusually bold step for the cautious global health agency, the World Health Organization has called upon countries to suspend the sale of captured live wild mammals in food markets as an emergency measure. The appeal follows on the publication of a report by a WHO-convened international team examining the origins of the SARS-CoV2 […] Continue reading ->
ISLAMABAD – Pakistan authorities are threatening to fire healthcare workers who refuse to be vaccinated with the Chinese-donated SinoPharm COVID-19 vaccine.  In a harshly worded letter, , the Directorate of Health Services in Sindh warns frontline health care workers that reluctance to get the jab will result in “strict disciplinary action” including suspension or dismissal […] Continue reading ->
Two competing approaches to promote access to medicines were born during the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the year 2000. Today, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, these same approaches are once more on a collision course.  On the one side is the ‘international’ COVID response, led in name by WHO, but in fact by what […] Continue reading ->