Category:

International News

Germany mulls delaying second COVID-19 vaccine shot, Denmark approves delay

Some German health experts have welcomed Britain’s move to delay administering a second dose of the BioNTech/Pfizer shot, which comes as governments try to provide protection against coronavirus to as many people as possible by giving them one shot and delaying a second.

However, BioNTech and Pfizer pointed in a joint statement to a lack of trial data to support delaying the second dose.

read more

Aviation deaths rise worldwide in 2020 even as fatal incidents, flights fall

Large commercial airplanes had 0.27 fatal accidents per million flights in 2020, To70 said, or one fatal crash every 3.7 million flights — up from 0.18 fatal accidents per million flights in 2019.

The decline in crashes came amid a sharp decline in flights due to the coronavirus pandemic. Flightradar24 reported commercial flights it tracked worldwide in 2020 fell 42% to 24.4 million.

More than half of all deaths in the To70 review were the 176 people killed in January 2020 when a Ukrainian plane was shot down in Iranian airspace.

read more

More than 50 countries launch Covid-19 vaccination campaigns

In Asia, Singapore launched its campaign on Wednesday with the same vaccine.

Other countries on the Asian continent however have decided to take their time: India, Japan and Taiwan plan to begin vaccinations in the first quarter of 2021 and the Philippines and Pakistan in the second quarter, while Afghanistan and Thailand plan to start in mid-2021.

read more

SolarWinds hackers accessed Microsoft source code, the company says

The SolarWinds hack is among the most ambitious cyber operations ever disclosed, compromising at least half-a-dozen federal agencies and potentially thousands of companies and other institutions. U.S. and private sector investigators have spent the holidays combing through logs to try to understand whether their data has been stolen or modified.

read more

WHO emergency COVID-19 vaccine listing aims to lift access in poor countries

The United Nations health agency said it will work with regional partners to tell national health authorities about the two-dose shot and its anticipated benefits.

The WHO established its emergency use listing (EUL) process to help poorer countries without their own regulatory resources quickly approve medicines new diseases like COVID-19, which otherwise could lead to delays.

read more