Day: January 29, 2021

More than 80 million Covid-19 vaccine doses have been distributed around the world so far. Only 55 — 55! — have gone to people in low-income countries. In fact, just one country: Guinea.

Those 55 doses in Guinea don’t even represent “the start of a ‘real’ national vaccination rollout,” said Edouard Mathieu, head of data at Oxford University’s Our World in Data, which has been tracking the global vaccine effort. Rather, a few Guinean public officials were vaccinated at the end of December — with the Russian Sputnik V vaccine — on an experimental basis, the Associated Press reported.

“Then …

fast-spreading variant first discovered in South Africa, another setback in the global race to end a pandemic that has already killed more than 2.1 million people.

The news was problematic for the United States, which hours earlier reported its first known cases of the contagious variant in two unrelated people in South Carolina. And it came just days after Moderna and Pfizer said that their vaccines were also less effective against the same variant.

Novavax, which makes one of six vaccine candidates supported by Operation Warp Speed last summer, has been running trials in Britain, South Africa, the United States …