Vaccines work against all variants

Progress against the coronavirus pandemic remains "fragile" and international travel should be avoided, a World Health Organization director warned yesterday, while stressing that authorised vaccines work against variants of concern. 

"Right now, in the face of a continued threat and new uncertainty, we need to continue to exercise caution, and rethink or avoid international travel," WHO's European director Hans Kluge said, before adding that "pockets of increasing transmission" on the continent could quickly spread.

The so-called Indian variant, which might be more transmissible, has now been identified in at least 26 of the 53 countries in the WHO Europe region, Kluge said during his weekly press conference.

But he said that authorised vaccines are effective against the new strain.

"All Covid-19 virus variants that have emerged so far do respond to the available, approved vaccines," Kluge said, adding that all Covid-19 variants can be controlled with the same public health and social measures used until now.

Profits from Covid-19 jabs have helped at least nine people become billionaires, a campaign group said yesterday, calling for an end to pharmaceutical corporations' "monopoly control" on vaccine technology.

"Between them, the nine new billionaires have a combined net wealth of $19.3 billion, enough to fully vaccinate all people in low-income countries 1.3 times," The People's Vaccine Alliance said in a statement.

"These billionaires are the human face of the huge profits many pharmaceutical corporations are making from the monopoly they hold on these vaccines," said Anna Marriott from charity Oxfam, which is part of the alliance.

In addition to the new mega-rich, eight existing billionaires have seen their combined wealth increase by $32.2 billion thanks to the vaccine rollout, the alliance said.

Topping the list of new vaccine billionaires were the CEO of Moderna Stephane Bancel, and his BioNTech counterpart Ugur Sahin.

Three other neobillionaires are co-founders of the Chinese vaccine company CanSino Biologics.