The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said on March 18 that countries should provide free COVID-19 testing for refugees from Ukraine to avoid outbreaks as more than three million people flee their war-stricken homeland.
Moderna Inc. said on Sept. 3 the company had asked the EU drugs regulator for conditional approval of a booster shot of its Covid-19 vaccine at a 50 microgram dose.
The European Commission said on Aug. 31 that 70 percent of the European Union’s adult population was fully vaccinated against Covid-19, hitting a target the EC set at the beginning of 2021.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Pfizer’s tick-borne encephalitis vaccine TICOVAC to prevent TBE in people aged 1 year and older.
The continued spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has spawned a Greek alphabet of variants – a naming system used by the World Health Organization to track concerning new mutations of the virus that causes Covid-19. Some have equipped the virus with better ways of infecting humans or evading vaccine protection.
Governments and officials are voicing hopes that Covid-19 vaccines could bring “herd immunity”, with some calculating that immunizing just two-thirds of a population could halt the pandemic disease and help protect whole communities or nations.
The number of people newly diagnosed with HIV in Europe reached its highest level in 2016 since records began, showing the region’s epidemic growing “at an alarming pace,” health officials said.