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SINGAPORE: Mario Draghi, the Prime Minister of Italy, recently blocked the export of 250,000 AstraZeneca vaccine doses from his country to Australia. To many in the international community, this was an act of “vaccine nationalism”. In fact, Mr Draghi’s decision reflected different variants of nationalistic behaviour, spurred on by geopolitical forces and compounded by COVID-19. At the outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020, for example, China, the US, the EU, India and the UK all imposed export restrictions on personal protective equipment (PPE). Shipments of ventilators and antiseptic chemicals were also blocked as national health services competed for scarce supplies. This behaviour contradicted the norms of international commerce, science and social exchange, which, for decades, have benefitted from a highly interconnected and interdependent global system. Worse, vaccine nationalism may be the precursor to “vaccine diplomacy,” a form of realpolitik that compels nations ... » Learn More about Commentary: How COVID-19 vaccines are being weaponised as countries jostle for influence

HARTFORD, Connecticut: Spring has sprung, and there is a sense of relief in the air. After one year of lockdowns and social distancing, more than 171 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered in the US and about 19.4 per cent of the population is fully vaccinated. But there is something else in the air: Ominous SARS-CoV-2 variants. READ: UK variant of COVID-19 is now most common strain in United States: CDC We humans are in a race to become immune against this cagey virus, whose ability to mutate and adapt seems to be a step ahead of our capacity to gain herd immunity. Because of the variants that are emerging, it could be a race to the wire. FIVE VARIANTS TO WATCH RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 constantly mutate as they make more copies of themselves. Most of these mutations end up being disadvantageous to the virus and therefore disappear through natural selection. Occasionally, though, they offer a benefit to the mutated or so-called genetic-variant ... » Learn More about Commentary: Those new coronavirus variants sure are worrisome

JERUSALEM: The coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa can "break through" Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study in Israel found, though its prevalence in the country is low and the research has not been peer reviewed. The study, released on Saturday (Apr 10), compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine, against the same number of unvaccinated patients with the disease. It matched age and gender, among other characteristics. The South African variant, B1351, was found to make up about 1 per cent of all the COVID-19 cases across all the people studied, according to the study by Tel Aviv University and Israel's largest healthcare provider, Clalit. But among patients who had received two doses of the vaccine, the variant's prevalence rate was eight times higher than those unvaccinated - 5.4 per cent versus 0.7 per cent. COMMENTARY: Those new ... » Learn More about South African COVID-19 variant can ‘break through’ Pfizer vaccine: Israel study