coronavirus

COVID-19: Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can only be scaled up globally if many more suppliers can produce

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Geneva – As the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) starts meeting today and later this month to discuss emergency use authorisation of both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine candidates, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warns that any eventual COVID-19 vaccine approval won’t be enough to solve the global pandemic unless corporations take urgent … Read more

Responding to COVID-19: Global Accountability Report 2 – June to August 2020

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This report is the second of the accountability reports MSF is producing on our COVID-19 response. Read also the first report, covering the period March – May 2020. The COVID-19 global health crisis continues to hold the world firmly in its grip. In many countries around the world, the initial emergency response has turned into a sustained … Read more

MSF: Governments must demand pharma make all COVID-19 vaccine licensing deals public

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Terms of a deal disclosed show that we cannot rely on pharma’s goodwill to do the right thing, even in a pandemic. Geneva, 11 November 2020 – After the worrying terms of a deal struck between pharmaceutical corporation AstraZeneca and Brazilian public research body Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz) were disclosed recently, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans … Read more

Syria: Dozens of people treated following an airstrike in Idlib

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On the morning of Monday 26 October, an airstrike hit an area in the north of Idlib governorate, northwest Syria. Local media outlets have reported more than 75 deaths and another 135 injured so far. The vast majority of the injured people were immediately transferred to two hospitals, one of which is a facility co-managed … Read more

Greece: Negligent and dangerous COVID-19 response in Vathy camp, Samos

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Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is urging the Greek authorities to immediately scale up their response to COVID-19 in Vathy camp on Samos island and transfer people at high risk to safe accommodation on Greece’s mainland or in other EU states. Vathy camp, which hosts 4,300 people, has registered more than 100 positive cases … Read more

5 reasons a new proposal by India and South Africa could be a gamechanger in the COVID-19 response

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5 reasons a new proposal by India and South Africa could be a gamechanger in the COVID-19 response. And why ALL governments should support it. On October 2, 2020, India and South Africa submitted a landmark proposal to the World Trade Organization. The ground-breaking move proposes to ease rules that impose intellectual property (IP) barriers that restrict … Read more

Access to Medicines: In landmark move, India and South Africa propose no patents on COVID-19 medicines, tools during pandemic

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Governments make request to WTO for intellectual property waiver for all countries until herd immunity reached Geneva – In a landmark move, India and South Africa on 2 October asked the World Trade Organization (WTO) to allow all countries to choose to neither grant nor enforce patents and other intellectual property (IP) related to COVID-19 … Read more

Tackling COVID-19 in Hebron, the epicentre of the outbreak in Palestine

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Palestine is experiencing a spike in COVID-19 cases, both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Of the more than 43,000 cases confirmed in the West Bank since the start of the pandemic, more than a third have been in Hebron governorate [1]. Since August 2020, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been supporting local health … Read more

Iraq: COVID-19 outbreak in Baghdad is “very alarming”

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The COVID-19 pandemic has become very alarming in Iraq, with the country currently reporting close to 4,000 new cases every day and around 500 deaths a week. Over the past month alone, more than 100,000 cases have been identified in the country. And on 23 September, 5,055 new COVID-19 cases were confirmed, representing the highest daily rate in … Read more

Syria: Ten-fold increase in COVID-19 cases adds new challenges in northwest Syria

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Northwest Syria is currently witnessing a sharp increase in the number of patients with COVID-19, which is now ten times higher than what it was just a month ago. As of 22 September, 640 people had tested positive for the new coronavirus in the region, almost 30 per cent of them health workers. Eighty new cases were recorded on 14 … Read more