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AstraZeneca gets partial immunity in low-cost EU vaccine deal

Drugmakers have called on EU regulators to set up a Europe-wide compensation scheme, while patients’ organizations are calling for an EU-wide fund financed by pharmaceutical firms that would compensate for unexpected side-effects.

The EU legal regime is among the least favorable to drugmakers on compensation claims, although plaintiffs have rarely managed to win as the law requires them to prove the link between an illness and a vaccine that may have caused it.

The United States has granted immunity from liability for COVID-19 vaccines that receive regulatory approval. Meanwhile, Russia has said it would shoulder some of the legal liability should anything go wrong with the vaccine developed by Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute.

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World Bank seeks board approval for $12 billion coronavirus vaccine financing plan

Malpass said the World Bank plan aimed to put poor and middle-income countries, where the virus is spreading most rapidly, on the same footing as richer countries by ensuring they have financing to secure supplies and a system for distribution, which will encourage drugmakers to meet their demand.

Without early doses that can bring outbreaks under control, many of these countries risk economic collapse that will push hundreds of millions of people back into poverty.

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Poorer countries to get 120 million $5 coronavirus tests, WHO says

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the manufacturers Abbott and SD Biosensor had agreed with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to “make 120 million of these new, highly portable and easy-to-use rapid COVID-19 diagnostic tests available over a period of six months”.

“This will enable the expansion of testing, particularly in hard-to-reach areas that do not have laboratory facilities or enough trained health workers to carry out tests,” Tedros said.

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 Health ministry launches web portal for updates on COVID-19 vaccine development

“The data will serve as an invaluable tool for formulating appropriate patient management strategies, predicting disease severity, patient outcomes etc,” the ICMR said in a statement.
Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, said, “The portal provides useful and important information related to vaccine development, ongoing clinical trials and progress made in this area locally and globally at regular intervals. Today, in the times of coronavirus pandemic, vaccine development is watched very closely. Thus, it becomes important to showcase the status of vaccine development in the country.”

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Travellers from Dubai, UK mainly behind Covid importation into India: Study

The study has also found that infected cases from Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh played less role in spreading the disease outside their communities. Whereas infected people in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Kerala, Jammu and Kashmir, and Karnataka played a significant role in the local transmission, and some of them caused interstate transfer too.

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