Let’s make one thing perfectly clear — nothing short of people’s lives are at stake at the Tokyo Olympics. No amount of money can justify a single preventable death.
The strong disapproval of the South African government’s handling of the pandemic is a warning that crafting persuasive pro-vaccine messages is not enough.
Allen Rodrigo, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
There are several earlier examples of people studying infectious pathogens being infected in the laboratory, even while working under strict biosafety conditions.
Cecília Tomori, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing
Around the globe, 823,000 child deaths could be prevented annually with appropriate breastfeeding. Formula makers continue to defy a 40-year-old international code on marketing their product.
The inefficient vaccine allocation rules currently in place must be replaced by new cooperative institutional structures and more concrete steps by the Group of Twenty (G20) countries.
The Gambia’s success in eliminating trachoma means that resources previously allocated to combating the disease can now be reallocated to other public health conditions
The first few months of 2020 were critical to the World Health Organization’s response to COVID-19. But the latest report into what happened wasn’t all damning.
It’s not clear whether the TRIPS agreement is what’s getting in the way of vaccine supply, and waiving intellectual property rights may stifle future innovation.
COVAX, the global vaccine distribution initiative, is well behind its goal of delivering 2 billion doses this year due to under-investment, vaccine nationalism and export restrictions.
We need to re-analyse data from China and look further afield if we are to have a more complete picture of what happened in 2019. Just keep the politics out of it.
Sheena G. Sullivan, WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza and Kanta Subbarao, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity
Decades of experience with influenza offers insights into how we should handle new SARS-CoV-2 variants, and the threat they pose to vaccine effectiveness.
Director of Koi Tū, the Centre for Informed Futures; former Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau