Covid-19 vaccine confidence grows

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 yesterday.

Co-led by Imperial College London's Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) and the polling firm YouGov, the survey found trust in Covid-19 vaccines had risen in nine out of 14 countries covered, including France, Japan and Singapore which had previously had low levels of confidence.

The latest update of the survey, which ran from February 8 to February 21, found that people in the UK are the most willing, with 77% saying they would take a vaccine designed to protect against Covid-19 if one was available that week.

This is up from 55% in November, shortly before the first Covid-19 vaccine - co-developed by Pfizer and BioNTech - gained regulatory approval for use in Britain.

People in France, Singapore and Japan remained among the least willing to have a Covid-19 vaccine, at 40%, 48% and 48%, respectively - but all three have seen confidence rising since November when only 25%, 36% and 39% of people were positive.

The survey also found that worries over vaccine side effects have faded in the majority of countries, with fewer than half (45%) of all respondents currently reporting concern.

Again, people in France, Singapore and Japan are currently most worried about side effects, with around 6 in 10 feeling concerned (56%, 59%, 61%), while the UK is the least concerned.

The latest survey involved more than 13,500 people in Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain and Sweden, reports Reuters.

The virus has killed at least 2,569,422 people since it emerged in China in December 2019, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources yesterday.

The World Health Organization has scrapped plans for a team that visited Wuhan, China to probe the origins of the pandemic to issue an interim report, The Wall Street Journal reported late Thursday.

Wuhan is the city where the pandemic is believed to have originated in late 2019.

The WHO team returned recently from its visit there saying it had no clear finding on the genesis of the virus, amid tensions between the US and China on what caused the once-in-a century global health crisis.

The United States responded by saying it had "deep concerns" about what the team learned and it pressed China for more information.

WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had said February 12 that a preliminary report with a summary of the team's findings would be issued soon thereafter, and a full report in a matter of weeks.

But now the plan is to scrap the interim report, the Journal said, quoting Peter Ben Embarek, the scientist who led the team.

Instead, the team will publish the full and final report, with a summary of its findings, the newspaper said, quoting a WHO spokesman.

This broader report "will be published in coming weeks and will include key findings," it quoted this spokesman as saying.

"By definition a summary report does not have all the details," Ben Embarek was quoted as saying.

"So since there (is) so much interest in this report, a summary only would not satisfy the curiosity of the readers," he added.

Meanwhile, WHO chief has said the international investigation into Covid origins in China will publish its report in the week of March 15.

US State Department spokesman Ned Price called on China Thursday to share what it knows from the earliest days of the pandemic.

The United States recorded fewer than 40,000 new daily cases of Covid-19 for the first time in five months on Thursday, a piece of promising news as countries across the globe struggle to hold off another infection surge before inoculations become widespread.

Europe is facing heavy criticism over delays in its inoculation campaign.

Moldova became the first European country to receive vaccines from the global COVAX scheme, Moldovan President Maia Sandu said yesterday.

The first batch of 14,400 doses arrived in Moldova last night, Sandu said on Twitter.

Australia has asked the European Commission to review its decision to block a shipment of AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine, as countries importing EU-made shots fear a potential impact on supplies.

Japan extended a virus state of emergency in the Tokyo area by two weeks yesterday, less than five months before the pandemic-postponed Tokyo Olympics.

France's Covid-19 situation could improve over the next four to six weeks, as more of the country's population gets vaccinated, which could lead to a gradual return to normal life, French Health Minister Olivier Veran reaffirmed yesterday.

After two straight days of record Covid-19 deaths in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday told Brazilians to stop "whining" and move on, in his latest remarks attacking distancing measures and downplaying the gravity of the pandemic.