U.S. media report said that an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the US ambassador to South Africa was planned before the presidential election in November.
US President Donald Trump on Monday vowed that any attack by Iran would be met with a response “1,000 times greater in magnitude,” after reports that Iran planned to avenge the killing of top general Qasem Soleimani.
A U.S. media report, quoting unnamed officials, said that an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the US ambassador to South Africa was planned before the presidential election in November.
“According to press reports, Iran may be planning an assassination, or other attack, against the United States in retaliation for the killing of terrorist leader Soleimani,” Mr. Trump tweeted.
“Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!”
Relations between Washington and Tehran have been tense since the Iranian revolution, and have spiralled since Trump unilaterally pulled out of a landmark international nuclear deal with Iran in May 2018.
In January, a US drone strike killed Soleimani in Baghdad, and Washington is pushing to extend an arms embargo on Iran that starts to progressively expire in October as well as reimposing UN sanctions on the Islamic republic.
The Iranian navy last week said it drove off American aircraft that flew close to an area where military exercises were underway near the Strait of Hormuz.
The military said three US aircraft were detected by Iran’s air force radars after they entered the country’s air defence identification zone.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said the drugmaker should have key data from its late-stage trial for the Food and Drug Administration by the end of October.
If the FDA approves the vaccine, the company is prepared to distribute “hundreds of thousands of doses,” he said.
On Saturday, Pfizer submitted a proposal to the FDA to expand the late-stage trial to include up to 44,000 participants, a significant increase from its previous target of 30,000.
Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesIn this Jan. 17, 2019, file photo, Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer pharmaceutical company, waits to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine could be distributed to Americans before the end of the year if found to be safe and effective, CEO Albert Bourla said Sunday.
The drugmaker should have key data from its late-stage trial for the Food and Drug Administration by the end of October, Bourla said during an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” If the FDA approves the vaccine, the company is prepared to distribute “hundreds of thousands of doses,” he said.
Because of the pandemic, U.S. health officials and drugmakers have been accelerating the development of vaccine candidates by investing in multiple stages of research even though doing so could be for naught if the vaccine ends up not being effective or safe.
The U.S. pharmaceutical giant has been working alongside German drugmaker BioNTech. In July, the U.S. government announced it would pay the companies $1.95 billion to produce and deliver 100 million doses of their vaccine if it proves safe and effective. The deal was signed as part of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s effort to accelerate development and production of vaccines and treatments to fight the coronavirus.
Bourla said Sunday that the company has already invested $1.5 billion for the development of the potential vaccine. He said if the vaccine failed to work it would be financially “painful” for the company.
“At the end of the day, it’s only money. But that will not break the company, although it’s going to be painful,” he said.
Pfizer’s experimental vaccine contains genetic material called messenger RNA, or mRNA, which scientists hope provokes the immune system to fight the virus.
Pfizer is one of three companies currently in late-stage testing for a vaccine. The other two are Moderna and AstraZeneca, which announced Saturday it would resume its trial after temporarily pausing it for safety reasons.
On Saturday, Pfizer submitted a proposal to the FDA to expand the late-stage trial to include up to 44,000 participants, a significant increase from its previous target of 30,000.
The developments come as infectious disease experts and scientists in recent weeks have said they have concerns that President Donald Trump is pressuring the FDA to approve a vaccine before it’s been adequately tested. FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, insisting he wasn’t being pressured by Trump to fast-track a vaccine, told The Financial Times last month the agency is prepared to bypass the full federal approval process in order to make a COVID-19 vaccine available as soon as possible.
On Sept. 8, nine drug companies, including Pfizer, released a letter pledging that they would prioritize safety and uphold “the integrity of the scientific process” in their efforts to develop coronavirus vaccines.
Even if a vaccine is approved to be distributed before the end of the year, it will likely be in short supply. The vaccine will likely require two doses at varying intervals, and states still face logistical challenges such as setting up distribution sites and acquiring enough needles, syringes and bottles needed for immunizations.
Earlier this month, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a draft proposal for distributing a vaccine in the U.S. if and when one is approved for public use. The report was requested by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The vaccine would be distributed in four phases, with health-care workers, the elderly and people with underlying health conditions getting vaccinated first, according to the group. Essential workers, teachers and people in homeless shelters as well as people in prisons would be next on the list, followed by children and young adults.
Beijing: China has put its homegrown coronavirus vaccines on display for the first time, as the country where the contagion was discovered looks to shape the narrative surrounding the pandemic.
High hopes hang on the small vials of liquid on show at a Beijing trade fair this week — vaccine candidates produced by Chinese companies Sinovac Biotech and Sinopharm.
Neither has hit the market yet but the makers hope they will be approved after all-important phase 3 trials as early as year-end.
A Sinovac representative told AFP his firm has already “completed the construction of a vaccine factory” able to produce 300 million doses a year.
On Monday, people at the trade fair crowded around booths showing the potential game-changing vaccines.
China, which is facing a storm of foreign criticism over its early handling of the pandemic, has been trying to repurpose the story of Covid-19.
State media and officials are now emphasising the revival of Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the deadly pathogen surfaced, as a success story in the fight against the virus.
They are also touting progress on domestic vaccines as a sign of Chinese leadership and resilience in the face of an unprecedented health threat that has pummelled the global economy.
In May, President Xi Jinping pledged to make any potential vaccine developed by China a “global public good”.
The potential vaccines on display are among nearly 10 worldwide to enter phase 3 trials, typically the last step ahead of regulatory approval, as countries race to stub out the virus and reboot battered economies.
Sinopharm said it anticipates the antibodies from its jab to last between one and three years — although the final result will only be known after the trials.
China’s nationalistic tabloid Global Times reported last month that “the price of the vaccines will not be high”.
Every two doses should cost below 1,000 yuan ($146), the report said, citing Sinopharm’s chairman, who told media he has already been injected with one of the candidate vaccines.
China’s official Xinhua news agency reported Monday that another vaccine candidate, developed by Chinese military scientists, can deal with mutations in the coronavirus.
As of last month, at least 5.7 billion doses of the vaccines under development around the world had been pre-ordered.
But the World Health Organization has warned that widespread immunisation against Covid-19 may not be on the cards until the middle of next year.
Experts from California university said face masks may provide a vaccine-like effect by generating immunity and slowing the spread of Covid-19 infection.
Scientists are comparing face masks to a process called variolation wherein healthy people are exposed to material from the scabs of infected patients in order to increase immunity. Variolation was followed before a vaccine for smallpox was discovered.
In a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine, Monica Gandhi and George W Rutherford of University of California in San Francisco said using masks in the Covid era could achieve similar results.
Gandhi and Rutherford concluded that face masks could reduce the viral inoculum (infecting amount of the virus). This they inferred based on long-standing theory that the severity of the disease is proportionate to the viral inoculum.
(Photo: AFP)
“Since masks filter out some virus-containing droplets (with filtering capacity determined by mask type), masking might reduce the inoculum that an exposed person inhales,” the pair wrote in the journal.
Moreover, an experiment conducted on hamsters supported this theory and showed with simulated masking the animals were less likely to get infected, or were either asymptomatic or had milder symptoms than unmasked hamsters. “Universal masking seems to reduce the rate of new infections; we hypothesise that by reducing the rate of new viral infections, it would also decrease the proportion of infected people who remain asymptomatic,” Gandhi and Rutherford wrote.
The duo also referred to an outbreak on a closed Argentinian cruise ship where passengers were provided with surgical masks and staff with N95 masks. The rate of asymptomatic infection was 81 per cent on testing compared with 20 per cent in earlier cruise ship outbreaks without universal masking.
Dr S K Sarin, director of Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences, said this paper explained how 29 per cent of Delhi were antibody-positive but have never had infection. “Mask may allow a very miniscule amount of virus to enter and provide a vaccine-like effect, leading to antibody formation without true infection,” said Sarin.
‘The result we see a significant drop in the number of coronavirus cases’ says Adhanom
Islamabad: Pakistan’s successful handling of the coronavirus pandemic is getting international recognition and even the World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom has praised the country saying it is among those that the world needs to learn from.
Adhanom in a statement at a media briefing endorsed the Pakistan government’s strategy against the virus and deploying of the infrastructure “built up over many years for polio to combat COVID-19.”
The WHO chief also praised community health workers of the country who have been trained to go door-to-door vaccinating children for polio.
“They have been utilized for surveillance, contact tracing and care and the result we see a significant drop in the number of coronavirus cases”, said Adhanom.
The other countries he mentioned included Thailand, Cambodia, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Rwanda, Senegal, Italy, Spain and Vietnam.
“Many of these countries have done well because they learned lessons from previous outbreaks of SARS, MERS, measles, polio, Ebola, flu and other diseases,” continued Adhanom.
Workers check disinfection tunnels at the Capital University of Science and Technology in Islamabad on September 10, 2020, following the government’s annoucement about reopening educational institutes starting from September 15Image Credit: AFP
Responding to Adhanom’s statement, former Special Assistant to Prime Minister (SAPM) on Health Dr. Zafar Mirza termed it as a recognition of Pakistan’s efforts at the international level.
In a tweet, Dr. Mirza stated: “Pakistan included among seven countries by WHO Director General- countries that the world can learn from about how to fight future pandemics. Great honour for the people of Pakistan. Alhamdolilah.”
<358> Pakistan included among 7 countries by WHO Director General – countries that world can learn from about how to fight future pandemics. Great honor for the people of Pakistan. Alhamdolilah 🙏. https://t.co/33rb8avZA6
Meanwhile, in the federal capital health teams of Islamabad’s District Health Office (DHO) are conducting coronavirus tests of the teachers and non-teaching staff as well ahead of schools reopening from September 15.
“After schools, public sector universities and colleges will be our target”, said a senior official of the DHO while talking to Gulf News.
There are a total of 423 schools, big and small, under the umbrella of the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) and since Class IX and Class X are resuming from Sept 15 authorities are taking every possible precautionary measure to check the spread of coronavirus that has dropped considerably in the country.
According to the Education Ministry of the country, Classes VI-VIII are scheduled to reopen from Sept 23 while primary classes will resume from Sept 30.
“We are pretty sure to complete COVID-19 tests of all the schools’ teaching and non-teaching staff before reopening educational institutions”, said the official of the FDE.
More than 300,000 cases
Pakistan today reported 300,371 cases of coronavirus with 548 new cases emerging in the last twenty-four hours. The number of recoveries is also going up fast and 288,206 cases of coronavirus have been recovered so far (256 in one day).
A total of 6,370 deaths have been caused because of coronavirus with five casualties in the last twenty-four hours.
The number of critical cases has also dropped to 535 showing a promising picture of the overall coronavirus situation in the country. According to the health ministry’s portal a total of 29,534 tests were conducted during the last 24 hours taking the total number of tests to 2,879 million.
New Delhi: As the race to develop the first effective vaccine against Covid-19 intensifies, China on Thursday gave a go-ahead for clinical trials of a nasal spray vaccine against the deadly viral infection.
As per reports in the Chinese official media, the phase 1 clinical trials of this nasal spray vaccine is likely to start in November. Authorities are recuruiting 100 volunteers for this.
Reporting the development, Chinese state-run Global Times said this is the only vaccine of its type to be approved by China’s National Medic
The vaccine is a collaborative mission between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland.
It involves researchers from the University of Hong Kong, Xiamen University, and Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy.
Microbiologist from the University of Hong Kong, Yuen Kwok-yung, said the vaccine stimulates the natural infection pathway of respiratory viruses to activate the immune response.
“The nasal spray vaccination could generate double protection for vaccine recipients – influenza and the novel coronavirus – if it also contains influenza viruses including H1N1, H3N2 and B,” Yuen said, adding that it would take at least another year to finish the three clinical trials.
According to a report in CGTN, the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases has been working on this vaccine with Xiamen University and Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy.
In a statement, the Hong Kong University said its vaccine strategy has been selected as one of the five vaccine technologies by the Ministry of Science and Technology for further evaluation.
The nasal spray vaccine uses live attenuated influenza vaccine; the other four technical routes China is using to develop the coronavirus vaccines are inactivated vaccines, adenoviral vector-based vaccines, and DNA and mRNA vaccines. The inactivated vaccine is estimated to be the earliest to be in the market. However, it is not yet clear whether immunity generated from nasal spray vaccinations will last longer than for injected vaccines, the Global Times report said.
So far, China has approved clinical trials for three Covid-19 vaccine candidates. It has also authorised emergency usage of Covid-19 vaccines developed by some select domestic companies.
“We’ve drawn up a series of plan packages, including medical consent forms, side-effects monitoring plans, rescuing plans, compensation plans, to make sure the emergency use is well regulated and monitored,” Zheng Zhongwei, head of China’s coronavirus vaccine development task force told the official media in Beijing last month.
An emergency use authorisation, which is based on Chinese vaccine management law, allows unapproved vaccine candidates to be used among people who are at high risk of contracting the infection in a limited period.
The novel coronavirus, which originated from China’s Wuhan city in December last year, has claimed 904,485 lives and infected 2,79,02,002 globally. The US is the worst affected country with 190,887 deaths and 6,363,729 infections and India has the second highest number of cases.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh met with Iranian Defence Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami in Tehran, Iran. | Photo Credit: Twitter/RajnathSingh
Defence Ministers of India and Iran discussed ways to take forward bilateral cooperation and exchanged views on regional security issues, including peace and stability in Afghanistan during their meeting in Tehran, the Defence Ministry said on Sunday. In a departure from protocol for defence meetings, the Iranian side also raised the issue of recent reports citing the safety of minorities in India, it has been learnt.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh held a bilateral meeting with Iran’s Minister of Defence and armed forces logistics Brigadier General Amir Hatami at the latter’s request on September 5. Mr. Singh was on a transit halt in Tehran en route from Moscow to New Delhi where he attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Defence Ministers meeting. Iran is an Observer at the SCO. “Both the leaders emphasised upon the age-old cultural, linguistic and civilisational ties between India and Iran,” the Ministry said.
Iran is a 95% majority Muslim country, and Iranian officials raised the issue of safety of minorities as Mr. Singh represents Lucknow, which has a sizeable Muslim population as well, said sources privy to the meeting.
According to the sources, Mr. Singh reassured the Iranian Defence Minister that all minorities in India were secure. He also pointed out that India was one of the rare countries in the world where all sects of Islam were present, and that all sects and religions lived together in the country’s pluralistic culture, the sources said.
With inputs from The Hindu
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Kashmir Today staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
The incident is the latest in a series of fires and explosions that have hit military and civilian sites across Iran since June.
AFP
The explosion of a chlorine gas canister being transported by a truck in western Iran has injured 217 people but caused no deaths, state news agency IRNA reported.
The blast struck late on Friday in Chardavol county in Ilam province, the news agency said.
The head of the province’s medical university, Mohammad Karimian, told IRNA driver “carelessness” was suspected.
The incident is the latest in a series of fires and explosions that have hit military and civilian sites across Iran since June.
Kuwait has refused to allow an Israeli plane heading to the UAE to fly through its skies, stressing that no Israeli planes will ever use its airspace, Quds Press reported yesterday.
El Al’s airliner lifting off from the tarmac in the first-ever commercial flight from Israel to the UAE at the Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv [JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images]
According to the news site, the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Qabas reported government sources saying: “Israeli planes will never fly over Kuwait’s skies to reach the UAE.”
First Israeli plane landed in Abu Dhabi after taking off from Tel Aviv and flying through Saudi airspace – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]
The sources said that the new route between Israel and the UAE “does not pass through Kuwait, but through another country,” stressing the route is far from Kuwait.
Al Qabas reported the sources saying that the reports about Kuwait permitting the Israeli flight to pass through its skies “are completely false”.
“Kuwait will be the last state to normalise relations with Israel,” a source was quoted by Al Qabas saying earlier this week.
On Monday, the first Israeli plane landed in Abu Dhabi after taking off from Tel Aviv and flying through Saudi airspace.
In a new study, researchers have identified two markers of inflammation that reliably predict the severity of COVID-19 cases and the likelihood of survival.
When the pandemic began, the team of Mount Sinai scientists promptly implemented a rapid test to measure the levels of four cytokines associated with pathogenic inflammation, which were suspected to cause severity in COVID-19 patients.
In just one month, cytokine blood levels were tested in 1,484 patients upon admission to Mount Sinai Health System’s hospitals, and patients were followed for up to 41 days.
The researchers studied four proteins known as cytokines that circulate in the blood and are commonly associated with infections and found that two of them, called IL-6 and TNF-α, were able to predict which patients were likely to develop more severe forms of COVID-19 and die.
(Photo: AFP)
![El Al's airliner lifting off from the tarmac in the first-ever commercial flight from Israel to the UAE at the Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv [JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images]](https://i1.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/GettyImages-1228281007-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)
El Al’s airliner lifting off from the tarmac in the first-ever commercial flight from Israel to the UAE at the Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv [JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images]![First Israeli plane landed in Abu Dhabi after taking off from Tel Aviv and flying through Saudi airspace - Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]](https://i1-wp-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/i1.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Untitled-Artwork.jpg?resize=933%2C583&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)
First Israeli plane landed in Abu Dhabi after taking off from Tel Aviv and flying through Saudi airspace – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]