Johnson & Johnson said on April 20 the company will resume rolling out its Covid-19 vaccine in Europe after the region’s medical regulator said the benefits of the shot outweigh the risk of very rare, potentially lethal blood clots.
The COVAX vaccine facility delivered nearly 38.4 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines to 102 countries and economies across six continents six weeks after it began to roll out supplies, according to a statement on April 8.
EU leaders voiced frustration on March 25 over a massive shortfall in contracted deliveries of AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines, as a third wave of infections surged across Europe.
Several U.S. states on March 25 announced broad expansions of their Covid-19 vaccine rollouts, with California opening immunizations to all adults aged 50 and older starting April 1 and Florida making anyone 40 and up eligible from March 22.
Sanofi and Translate Bio said on March 12 they had started a human trial of their mRNA Covid-19 vaccine candidate, the French drugmaker’s second vaccine project, which follows a protein-based shot hit by a delay during 2020.
Johnson & Johnson told the European Union the company is facing supply issues that may complicate plans to deliver 55 million doses of J&J’s Covid-19 vaccine to the bloc in the second quarter of 2021, an EU official told Reuters.
Confidence in Covid-19 vaccines is growing, with people’s willingness to have the shots increasing as they are rolled out across the world and concerns about possible side effects are fading, a 14-country survey showed on March 5.
The gout medication colchicine will be tested in a large UK study looking into potential early-stage Covid-19 treatments and enrollment criteria was widened for the latest arm of the trial, University of Oxford researchers said on March 3.
U.S. President Joe Biden secured a commitment from Pfizer Inc. to double the Covid-19 vaccine the company churns out in the coming weeks, putting his goal to fill the country’s inoculation stockpile by summer in sight.
The head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Feb. 14 it is “absolutely” too soon to lift mask mandates, citing daily Covid-19 case numbers that despite recent declines remain more than double the levels seen the summer of 2020.
