Political polarization and online misinformation are threatening vaccination programs worldwide, with public trust volatile and varying widely between countries, according to a global vaccine confidence study.

AstraZeneca should still know by year-end whether the company’s experimental vaccine protects people against coronavirus, as long as AZD1222 is cleared to resume trials soon, the drugmaker’s chief executive said amid doubts over the potential vaccine’s rollout.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) asked state public health officials to prepare to distribute a potential coronavirus vaccine to high-risk groups as soon as late October, documents published by the agency showed.

Treating critically ill Covid-19 patients with corticosteroid drugs reduces the risk of death by 20 percent, an analysis of seven international trials found, prompting the World Health Organization to update its advice on treatment.

AstraZeneca Plc has begun enrolling adults for a U.S.-funded, 30,000-subject late-stage study of the company’s high-profile Covid-19 vaccine candidate.

Children and young people are far less likely than adults to get severe cases of Covid-19 infection, and death from the pandemic disease among children is exceptionally rare, according to published UK research.

Global coronavirus cases pushed past 20 million, according to a Reuters tally, with the United States, Brazil and India accounting for more than half of all known infections.

An experimental coronavirus vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford was safe and produced an immune response in early-stage clinical trials, data showed, keeping alive the hope AZD1222 could be in use by the end of 2020.

British scientists analyzing data from a widely used Covid-19 symptom-tracking app have found there are six distinct types of the disease, each distinguished by a cluster of symptoms.

Hackers backed by the Russian state are trying to steal Covid-19 vaccine and treatment research from academic and pharmaceutical institutions around the world, Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said.