After a heavily armed Belgian soldier went missing threatening to kill a high-profile virologist, Belgium’s justice minister has appealed to the public to ignore conspiracy theories after he was discovered yesterday a month after he went missing.
Before he disappeared, Conings left letters for his wife and the police in which he made threats to kill Marc Van Ranst, Belgium’s best-known virologist and an adviser to the government on its tough Covid restrictions.
Conings, believed to have shot himself, was found by the mayor of the nearby town of Maaseik on Sunday morning a few hundred metres from an area searched by soldiers in recent days.
Earlier this year, the Brussels Times reported that excerpts of a speech shared online made it appear like Van Ranst from 2009 was explaining how to use a pandemic for personal gain. But he said he had sought to calm the population with clear explanations.
Putin: Covid in Russia has 'got worse' in many regions
Russian president Vladimir Putin has warned that the coronavirus situation in some Russian regions is getting worse as authorities began promoting the idea of revaccination in an effort to stem new cases.
New cases have been rising, particularly in Moscow, which on Saturday registered a record 9,120 daily cases. The Kremlin has blamed the increase on people’s reluctance to have vaccinations and “nihilism”.
“Unfortunately, the coronavirus threat has not receded,” Putin told the lower house of parliament on Monday. “In many regions the situation has even got worse.”
Video footage emerged on social media on Sunday, purportedly showing people sick with Covid-19 lying flat on the floor of a hospital corridor in St Petersburg, Putin’s home city which is hosting some matches in the Euro 2020 soccer championship, Reuters reports. Local authorities are investigating the video to check its veracity.
The authorities are trying to coax and compel people to get vaccinated, offering those who do the chance to win new cars and flats, while threatening others with loss of earnings and dismissal.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters today that revaccinations were the way forward. “Revaccination will be and is inevitable - not just vaccination, but revaccination - for those who want to keep themselves, their relatives and loved ones safe,” said Peskov, according to Reuters.
South Africa is set to host a “technology transfer hub” for coronavirus vaccines to scale up production know-how, president Cyril Ramaphosa has said.
He said French president Emmanuel Macron and World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus would join him at a media briefing to announce the initiative this afternoon, AFP reports.
“The briefing will focus on the establishment of the first messenger RNA technology transfer hub for Covid-19 vaccines, located in South Africa,” the president said.
During a visit to South Africa last month, Macron said he was pushing for faster transfer of technology to allow poorer countries to start manufacturing their own Covid-19 jabs.
Britain and Germany have been under pressure to drop their resistance to proposals that would slash the cost of Covid-19 vaccines, following accusations that an agreement at the G7 summit to fund 1bn doses will give the world’s poorest countries represents “crumbs from the table”.
Hundreds of people ignored advice not to travel to Stonehenge, the English Neolithic monument, for annual summer solstice celebrations that were officially cancelled due to coronavirus concerns.
English Heritage had planned a live feed of the sunrise at Stonehenge but the programme had to be interrupted after “a number of people have chosen to disregard our request to not travel to the stones this morning”.
‘Forgive us our trespassers,’ says a woman’s T-shirt as she holds a hula hoop at Stonehenge on Monday. Photograph: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images
Thousands of people who tuned in to watch the sunrise at the stones online ended up watching pre-recorded footage before the live feed returned at about 5am, AP reports.
Video showed dozens of people gathering inside the stone circle, with some scaling a low fence to climb inside the restricted area to reach the stones. Some were seen dancing and others held a banner that read “Standing for Stonehenge”.
Senior druid King Arthur Pendragon said closing the sites officially had been unnecessary. “It was never going to be massive anyway,” he told the BBC. “If you think about it a lot of the people who come to the solstice fly in from America, and all around the world. That wasn’t going to happen this year, so I don’t know why they didn’t just let us in.”
Wiltshire police said despite a “minor incursion into the stone circle” today, the solstice weekend was peaceful. The BBC reported: “It all seemed very good-natured, with the security guards and police at both sites fairly relaxed.”
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the live stream of this morning's solstice sunrise at Stonehenge - over 200,000 of you!
World Cup attendees in Qatar next year must be fully vaccinated, says government
The New York Times reports that the government of Qatar has announced that everyone attending the World Cup in the Gulf state next year must be fully vaccinated against Covid.
1.5 million fans are expected the attend the month-long tournament next November. The plans are likely to divide opinion.
The prime minister, Sheikh Khalid bin Khalifa bin Abdulaziz al-Thani, told state media yesterday that the government planned to obtain 1m shots to inoculate attendees if global efforts fell short.
“When the date of the Fifa World Cup Qatar 2022 comes, most countries of the world will have vaccinated and immunised their citizens,” he said, according to Sky News.
“Due to the possibility that some countries will not be able to vaccinate all their citizens, Qatar will not allow fans to enter stadiums without receiving a full vaccination against the virus.”
Fifa president Gianni Infantino said in February that matches would play to full stadiums in the Gulf nation next year.
Qatar is administering the Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna vaccines to citizens and residents. About 57% of the population has received one dose, and 44% have been fully vaccinated, according to data cited by the NYT.
Qatar has recorded 585 deaths and 220,800 cases during the pandemic. The Middle East’s first World Cup is due to start in November, AP reports.
Meanwhile, in an extraordinary congress of the Norway’s soccer federation it voted against boycotting the World Cup if the national team qualifies over the brutal treatment of migrant workers in the country.
The Portuguese Society for Health Management (SPGS) has urged authorities to extend measures around Lisbon’s metropolitan area after a weekend travel plan was put in place around last week, stopping people from leaving or entering the region.
The SPGS said more measures were urgently needed. “The control of Lisbon’s metropolitan area must be more restricted and prolonged to try to avoid the spread of the virus as much as possible,” it said.
Portuguese authorities are working to bring a spike in cases under control and are to accelerate vaccinations – with just over 25% of the population fully vaccinated – and increase testing.
Lisbon’s mayor’s office said that all people, residents and non-residents, could from now get unlimited coronavirus tests for free at the city’s pharmacies and mobile sites.
The manufacturing hub of Dongguan in China’s most populous province Guangdong has today launched mass coronavirus testing and cordoned off communities, after the city detected its first infections of a flare-up in the province.
Reuters has the story:
Dongguan launched its citywide testing programme following two cases reported since Friday. City authorities told residents not to leave the city, except for essential reasons and that those leaving must show negative test results within 48 hours of departure.
A few entrances on highways to other cities were closed, while all shuttle buses linking airports in other cities and check-in terminals in Dongguan were halted. Some museums and libraries in the city also closed to visitors. Its factories are still running, however.
Guangdong has reported 168 confirmed infections since 21 May, with nearly 90% of them in its capital, Guangzhou. The cases are few compared with the rest of the world and previous outbreaks in China. But Guangdong, a key entry point for travellers and cargo, is not taking any chances.
It has sped up its vaccination effort since the outbreak. By 19 May, before any local cases were reported, the province of 126 million people had administered 39.15m doses. By 20 June, the figure was 101.12m, meaning more than 60% of its doses were injected over one month.
GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology have said final results from a late-stage study of their monoclonal antibody confirmed it significantly reduced hospitalisation and death among high-risk Covid-19 patients when given early in the disease.
The treatment, sotrovimab, received an emergency use authorisation from the US Food and Drug Administration in May, while the EU’s drug regulator has also backed it.
Reuters reports that the drugmakers also said today the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has recommended sotrovimab to treat high-risk, non-hospitalised patients with mild-to-moderate Covid-19.
The treatment appeared to “retain activity” against current variants of concern and interest, the agency said in its updated guidelines. In a study of 1,057 patients, sotrovimab resulted in a 79% reduction in risk of hospitalisation for more than 24 hours or death due to any cause, the companies said.
Here’s a short bit on Moderna adding two new production lines at its Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing plant in Massachusetts, US, in a bid to prepare for making more booster shots, the Wall Street Journal reports. The additions will help Moderna increase overall production capacity by 50% at the plant, the report said citing company officials.
