(TibetanReview.net, Sep09’20) – Late-stage studies of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate, one of the most promising one expected to hit the market before the end of this year, are on temporary hold while the company investigates whether a recipient’s “potentially unexplained” illness is a side effect of the shot. The test could resume within days if the vaccine is determined not to be the cause of the illness. The great hope is that the illness, reported in the UK, was not a side effect of the vaccine.
Late last month, AstraZeneca began recruiting 30,000 people in the US for its largest study of the vaccine. It is also testing the vaccine, developed by Oxford University, on thousands of people in Britain, and in smaller studies in Brazil and South Africa, noted the AP Sep 9. The testing was also begun recently in India, which will manufacture the vaccine if the test is successful.
Two other vaccines are in huge, final-stage tests in the United States: one being made by Moderna Inc. and the other by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech. Those two vaccines work differently than AstraZeneca’s, and the studies already have recruited about two-thirds of the needed volunteers, the report noted.
The need for a proven vaccine is acutely felt in all countries across the world whose economies and freedom have been severely hit by the pandemic that China unleashed on the world by brutally suppressing information about its outbreak in Wuhan city late last year.
The need for a vaccine is especially acute in India which now reports more new infections each day than any other country.
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The latest data from India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare show that there were 89,706 new cases and 1,115 new deaths in the country in the past 24 hours as of Sep 09 at 8AM, taking their totals to 4,370,128 cases and 73,890 deaths.
A total of 3,398,844, or 77.77 %, had recovered, so that the number of active cases was 897,394, or 20.53% of the total. The case fatality rate was 1.69%. These were marginal improvements over the previous day’s figures.
Besides, the latest daily number of new cases, at 89,706, was more than the daily number of those who had recovered, at 74,894, which meant an increase in the number of active cases by 14,812.
India is currently the country with the world’s second highest number of Covid-19 cases and the third highest number of deaths.
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Four states, namely Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka had accumulated more than 400,000 cases each in that order.
Nine other states, namely Utttar Pradesh, Delhi, West Bengal, Bihar, Telangana, Assam, Odisha, and Gujarat had reported more than 100,000 cases each so far in that order.
Six other states, namely, Rajasthan, Kerala, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, and Jharkhand had reported more than 55,000 cases each so far in that order.
Six more states/Union Territories, namely Chattisgarh, Jammu & Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Goa, Puducherry, and Tripura, had reported more than 17,000 cases each in that order.
Besides, there were 11 other states/Union Territories with a total more than 1,100 cases each, namely, Himachal Pradesh, Manipur, Chandigarh, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Ladakh, Meghalaya, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Sikkim, and Mizoram in that order.
Maharashtra also had the most number of deaths at 27,407 (↑380); followed by Tamil Nadu with over 8,000 deaths; Karnataka with more than 6,600 deaths, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh with over 4,000 deaths each; West Bengal and Gujarat with more than 3,100 deaths each; Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan with over 1,100 deaths each; and Telangana, Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Assam, Kerala, and Uttarakhand, with between 916 and 360 deaths each, and so on in that order.
