Rich countries are opening up societies and vaccinating young people who are not at great risk from Covid-19, while the poorest countries cruelly lack doses, the World Health Organization said on Friday, condemning a global failure.

Brazil set a new record for Covid-19 infections with 115,228 new cases identified within 24 hours, the health ministry said on Wednesday, confirming the arrival of a third wave of the pandemic.

The WHO is setting up a hub in South Africa to give companies from poor and middle-income countries the know-how and licenses to produce Covid-19 vaccines, in what President Cyril Ramaphosa called an historic step to spread lifesaving technology.

Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen yesterday expressed disappointment over rich countries’ behaviour in terms of supplying Covid-19 vaccines, saying they are hoarding vaccines and stipulating conditions for supply to other countries.

Brazil became the second country after the United States to surpass 500,000 Covid-19 deaths as the South American giant grapples with a third wave of the pandemic.

The International Labour Conference has adopted a resolution with a global call for inoculating all workers against Covid-19 to revitalise the world economy.

The rapid spread of the Delta coronavirus variant has driven a 50 percent rise in infections in England since May, a large prevalence study led by Imperial College London found yesterday after Prime Minister Boris Johnson delayed the end of restrictions.

The US death toll from Covid-19 surpassed 600,000 on Tuesday, although officials hailed progress towards a return to normality as its world-leading vaccination program promised to turn the page on one of the worst health crises in American history.

The WHO warned that Covid-19 was moving faster than the vaccines, and said the G7’s vow to share a billion doses with poorer nations was simply not enough.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said unequal distribution of vaccines has allowed the coronavirus to continue spreading, thus increasing odds of a variant emerging that could render these treatments ineffective.

Key Indian cities re-opened for business yesterday, with long queues for buses in the financial hub of Mumbai while traffic returned to the roads of New Delhi after a devastating second wave of coronavirus that killed hundreds of thousands.

The United Nations said yesterday that the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on the world of work was four times worse than the 2008 economic crisis.

France faces the risk of a fourth Covid-19 wave by the end of July due to the progression of the Delta variant of the virus, the country’s health minister warned.

The government has decided to send Tk 25,000 as a subsidy to the hotel quarantine fee for Saudi Arabia-bound migrant workers to their bank accounts.

Countries and private donors pledged nearly $2.4 billion to the Covax vaccine-sharing plan, expanding efforts to make Covid-19 shots more available to people in poorer nations.

The name of Haris Ahmed, younger brother of army chief Gen Aziz Ahmed, has been removed from the list of “wanted person” in the police website following his application in March.

Peru on Monday more than doubled its official coronavirus death toll, becoming the country with the highest Covid-19 mortality per capita anywhere in the world.

The World Health Organization has warned that efforts to uncover the Covid-19 pandemic’s origins were being hampered by politics, insisting scientists needed space to work on solving the mystery.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) will review 3,000-5,000 people above 45 years of age, of which up to 80% will be those who have taken the AstraZeneca vaccine made locally by the Serum Institute of India.

Official tolls showing the number of deaths directly or indirectly attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic are likely to be a “significant undercount,” the World Health Organization said yesterday, saying 6-8 million people may have died so far.