RSS Items

UN health agency chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged all countries on Monday to support a pandemic preparedness treaty, warning that it would be a “monumental error” to think the danger of COVID-19 has passed.

The global death toll due to COVID-19 officially passed four million late on Wednesday, marking yet another “grim milestone” and underlining the urgent need for the world to put a Global Vaccine Plan in place to get the pandemic under control, said

One year since COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic, the UN’s reproductive health agency said on Thursday that an estimated 12 million women have experienced disruptions to their family planning services.

As the school year begins for millions of children in Europe and Central Asia, UN health and child experts on Monday issued a series of COVID-19 risk reduction measures to ensure that in-person lessons can go ahead, despite rising infection rates.

Variants like Delta are “currently winning the race against vaccines” said the World Health Organization (WHO) chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday, pinning the blame squarely on a lack of equitable vaccine production and distribution.

The virus that causes COVID-19 probably jumped from animals to humans and is “extremely unlikely” to have come from a laboratory, the head of an international team investigating the origins of the disease said on Tuesday.

The roll-out of vaccinations to prevent COVID-19 infections rising in the Maldives is a good example of “vaccine equity in action” according to Catherine Haswell, the UN Resident Coordinator for the Indian Ocean island nation.

The number of COVID-19 cases and deaths has continued to decline globally, with  3.1 million new cases and just over 54,000 new deaths, reported over the last week, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Compared to the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021 was “undoubtedly worse” for the Americas, where infections and deaths tripled, the top UN health official there reported on Wednesday.

The number of new COVID-19 cases reported to the UN health agency has declined for seven weeks in a row, in what the top official there called on Monday “the longest sequence of weekly declines during the pandemic so far”.