The mental health impact of the pandemic will be “long term and far reaching”, the World Health Organization has said.
“Everyone is affected in one way or another,” the WHO said in a statement at the start of a two-day meeting in Athens. It said “anxieties around virus transmission, the psychological impact of lockdowns and self-isolation” had contributed to a mental health crisis, along with stresses linked to unemployment, financial worries and social alienation, AFP reports.
“The mental health impacts of the pandemic will be long term and far reaching,” the statement added. The WHO’s regional director for Europe, Hans Kluge, said mental health should be considered a “fundamental human right”, stressing how the virus had torn lives apart.
“The pandemic has shaken the world,” he told the conference. “More than four million lives lost globally, livelihoods ruined, families and communities forced apart, businesses bankrupted, and people deprived of opportunities.”
The WHO called for the strengthening of mental health services in general and the improvement of access to care via technology. It also urged better psychological support services in schools, universities, workplaces and for people on the frontline of the fight against Covid-19, AFP reports.
The ministers heard from a 38-year-old Greek woman called Katerina who told them how she had been receiving treatment for a psychiatric disorder since 2002 and had been coping well until the pandemic hit.
She was no longer able to attend in-person support groups and could not see her father, forcing her to boost her treatment. “The pressure of social isolation led to increased anxiety,” she said.
Johnson & Johnson, which has produced a widely used Covid vaccine, has just resolved thousands of opioid lawsuits along with other drug companies – but campaigners say the affair has raised serious questions over its trustworthiness.
The world’s largest healthcare company helped “cause an epidemic” in the pursuit of “bottom lines over the health and safety and wellbeing of people”, according to the Pennsylvania attorney-general, Josh Shapiro.
The Financial Times reports that US states on Wednesday unveiled a landmark $26bn settlement in which J&J will pay $5bn (£3.6bn), after an opioid epidemic that claimed more than half a million lives over two decades.
In a 2019 ruling, one US judge said that the company had promoted “false, misleading, and dangerous marketing campaigns” that had “caused exponentially increasing rates of addiction, overdose deaths” and babies born exposed to opioids.
As news of the settlement emerged, the charity Global Justice Now’s director, Nick Dearden, tweeted: “This includes Covid-19 vaccine producer J&J. Yet we’re supposed to trust these same corporations to deal with the equitable rollout of vaccines worldwide?”
The J&J general counsel, Michael Ullmann, said: “We recognise the opioid crisis is a tremendously complex public health issue, and we have deep sympathy for everyone affected. This settlement will directly support state and local efforts to make meaningful progress in addressing the opioid crisis in the United States.”
EU under pressure over paltry vaccine donations despite pledges
EU countries have so far donated just a tiny portion of excess Covid-19 vaccines to poor nations, mostly out-of-favour AstraZeneca shots, less than 3% of the 160m doses they plan to give away in total to help tame the global pandemic, an EU document shows.
The EU has committed to helping inoculate the most vulnerable across the world but, like other wealthy countries, EU states have so far focused on buying shots to inoculate their own citizens, contributing to a shortage of vaccines elsewhere, Reuters reports.
EU states, with a combined adult population of 365 million, have so far received about 500m doses from drugmakers and expect nearly a billion by the end of September.
But as of 13 July they had donated less than 4m shots, the internal document, compiled by the European Commission and reviewed by Reuters, shows.
In total, it says EU countries have committed to sharing about 160m doses, mostly without preference about their destination. The tally of shipments and pledged total have not been reported before.
Brussels had previously said EU nations planned to donate at least 100m doses by the end of the year. There is no timeline for the target listed in the document.
Those jabs distributed so far went mostly to countries and territories with a link to the donor as member states seek to boost relations with nearby countries and deepen diplomatic ties. The small shipments are likely to stir the debate about how wealthy countries are sharing their surplus shots while poor countries still struggle to get supplies.
The EU document shows that most doses will be shared through the Covax programme. Many poor countries rely on Covax for their vaccines, but it has so far delivered only 135m shots globally and is highly dependent on donated doses, according to Reuters. Plans to buy shots on its own were temporarily derailed by vaccine makers’ production problems and export restrictions in a number of countries.
The EU has received enough vaccine to fully inoculate 70% of adults, while South Africa has given only 7% of its adult population one dose and Nigeria only 1%.
Many EU countries have set limits on the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine as well as Johnson & Johnson due to concerns about extremely rare blood clotting, reducing the capacity to use them.
France is by far the EU’s main donor in terms of pledges. It has promised 60m doses, mostly to Covax and largely without any preference on their final destination. However, it has so far delivered only about 800,000 doses, half of which went to its former colonies Senegal, Mauritania and Burkina Faso, the document shows.
Unemployed workers are pushing for reforms and changes to the US unemployment insurance system after millions of workers experienced severe problems in receiving benefits throughout the pandemic.
Workers across the US faced long delays in receiving unemployment benefits as state systems were quickly overwhelmed with the mass influx of applications that caused months-long backlogs. Meanwhile, workers who made errors on their applications, had missing records or had their claims flagged had their benefits stopped – and often had difficulty restarting them once problems were resolved.
About 9 million Americans are estimated to have lost work due to the pandemic but received no unemployment benefits.
Ireland will wait a few weeks before considering easing Covid-19 restrictions beyond Monday’s planned resumption of indoor dining and drinking in restaurants and bars, the deputy prime minister, Leo Varadkar, has said.
Ireland has been gradually unwinding its third and longest lockdown and earlier this month delayed plans to allow indoor service in pubs and restaurants for the first time this year due to concerns about the Delta variant, Reuters reports.
Fully vaccinated customers will now be allowed to eat and drink inside from next week after the Dáil passed controversial legislation that can be applied to other indoor settings such as nightclubs and concert venues if the government decides to open up further.
“The advice from [the National Public Health Emergency Team], the feeling in government, is let’s hold on to what we’ve gained and let’s take a pause for a few weeks before we ease any further restrictions,” Varadkar told the Newstalk radio station.
Ireland’s tough restrictions have left 18.3% of the workforce either permanently or temporarily out of work. More than half of those are in receipt of temporary Covid-19 jobless benefits, which should fall further with the reopening of indoor dining.
Ireland has reported 287,951 Covid-19 cases among its 4.9 million population, with 5,026 related deaths.
China refuses WHO request for second Covid origins audit with closer inspection of lab
Helen Davidson
China’s government has refused to cooperate with the second stage of an international investigation into the origins of Covid-19, labelling a proposal to audit Chinese labs as “arrogance towards science”.
The lab theory – which posited the virus leaked from, or was manufactured in, a Wuhan lab – was amplified by the former US president Donald Trump and his allies, and largely dismissed as a rightwing conspiracy theory. However, calls for closer investigation of the possibility have recently gained ground, and last week the World Health Organization director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the push to discount the theory had been “premature”.
The New York Times reports that a telephone survey of 1,719 people suggests trust in US federal health agencies leading the pandemic response remains strong.
The paper said the University of Pennsylvania poll found that 76% of respondents were somewhat or very confident in the trustworthiness of information about Covid-19 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A slightly higher proportion, 77%, were also confident about the Food and Drug Administration, according to the survey, which was conducted between 2 June and 22 June.
Of the participants in the survey, 68% said they believed that the US public health chief, Dr Anthony Fauci, provided trustworthy advice on the pandemic, though he has faced growing criticism since the poll was carried out.
It comes after a fiery senate hearing this week in which senator Rand Paul accused Fauci of lying about the role played by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in funding controversial research in Wuhan, China.
Paul said the NIH effectively funded gain of function research that had been banned under the Obama administration in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, before the pause was lifted in 2017, but Fauci denied that any of it could have led to Sars-CoV-2.
The Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin tweeted: “The NIH was funding gain of function research in Wuhan but NIH pretended it didn’t meet their ‘gain of function’ definition to avoid their own oversight mechanism.”
Indian authorities raid prominent newspaper after critical Covid coverage
Indian tax authorities have raided a prominent newspaper and a TV channel which have been critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic, triggering accusations of intimidation.
AFP reports that Bhaskar, which has a readership of millions, had carried a series of reports on the devastation caused by the pandemic in April and May and criticised the government’s management of the crisis.
The daily said on its website in response to the raids that in the last six months it had sought to “put the real situation in front of the country”. It said: “Be it the matter of dead bodies in the Ganges or ... hiding deaths due to corona, Bhaskar showed fearless journalism.”
Bhaskar’s editor, Om Gaur, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times last month saying the bodies in the Ganges were symbolic of the “failures and deceptions” of Narendra Modi’s administration. He also wrote:
Uttar Pradesh has been governed by the Bharatiya Janata party of prime minister Narendra Modi since March 2017, under chief minister Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk turned politician. Mr Adityanath’s response in April to grave shortages of oxygen, ventilators and beds in intensive care units throughout the state and to the images of overcrowded cemeteries and crematories was to issue denials and threats. He directed state officials to invoke antiterrorism laws against and seize property from people he accused of spreading rumours.
Brijesh Mishra, the editor-in-chief of Bharat Samachar, said the raids were harassment. “We are not afraid of these raids ... we stand by the truth and the 240 million people of Uttar Pradesh,” he was quoted as saying in Hindi on their website.
India ranks 142nd out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ 2021 press freedom index.
Ashok Gehlot, the chief minister of the northern state of Rajasthan, said the raids were a brazen attempt to suppress the media. “Modi government cannot tolerate even an iota of its criticism,” Gehlot, who is from the opposition Congress party, wrote on Twitter.
Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, tweeted that the raids were “an attempt to scare the media”.
There was no official comment from authorities on the raids, but local media quoted unnamed tax officials as saying they had “conclusive evidence of fraud”.
Surely, Tokyo 2020 organisers must have thought they were doing Mother Earth a solid by commissioning 18,000 beds made of cardboard and polyethylene and other sustainable materials. But you know what would really be doing the world a favour? Not having the Olympics in the middle of a global pandemic.
Here’s a dispatch from Brazil by my colleague Tom Phillips on how the pandemic has piled further misery on what was already one of Brazil’s most depressed and vulnerable neighbourhoods, leaving its residents, like millions of fellow citizens, hungry and afraid.
Hello and greetings to everyone reading, wherever you are in the world. Mattha Busby here to take you through the next few hours of global Covid developments. Thanks to my colleague Miranda Bryant for covering the blog up until now. Please feel free to drop me a line on Twitter or message me via email (mattha.busby.freelance@guardian.co.uk) with any tips or thoughts on our coverage.
