Given the world’s weariness over the pandemic that has now killed some 2.2 million people and infected more than 100 million, countries have been anxious to expedite vaccination campaigns.

There was encouraging news from US biotech firm Novavax, which said its two-shot vaccine showed an overall efficacy of 89.3 per cent in a major Phase 3 clinical trial in Britain, and remained highly effective against a variant first identified there.

The European Union’s inoculation efforts were hit by an announcement from AstraZeneca that it could only supply a quarter of the doses it had promised for the first quarter of 2021.

The EU has demanded the drug maker meets its commitments by supplying doses from its UK factories, but Britain insists it must receive all of the vaccines it ordered.

AstraZeneca and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson immediately defended the vaccine, which has already been widely used in Britain on older people.

The European Medicines Agency on Friday recommended the authorisation of the AstraZeneca vaccine for all people over the age of 18, saying it believed the jab was also suitable for older people. The regulator has already approved the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

The Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus jab has no link to reported post-vaccination deaths and no new side effects, the EMA said on Friday based on the first data from the vaccine’s roll-out.

The EU’s medicines regulator said it had looked at the deaths, including a number in the elderly, and “concluded that the data did not show a link to vaccination with Comirnaty (the vaccine) and the cases do not raise a safety concern.”

More contagious variants have spread to dozens of countries, says WHO

Elsewhere, Ukraine’s parliament on Friday approved a bill intended to speed up the approval of Covid-19 vaccines, which also bans the green-lighting of jabs made in Russia.

The government has said it expects to receive 100,000 to 200,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine under the global Covax scheme in February.

Hungary on Friday became the first EU member to approve the Chinese-made Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine, Chief Medical Officer Cecilia Muller said. Last week Budapest also broke ranks with the bloc by issuing a provisional licence to Russia’s Sputnik V shot.

Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot Covid-19 vaccine has an overall efficacy of 66 per cent, the company announced Friday, following results from a phase 3 trial of almost 44,000 people across many countries.

The figure, however, was higher in the US and lower in South Africa, where a more transmissible variant is dominant.

Covid-19 has killed more than 433,000 in America, by far the highest absolute toll in the world, according to a tracker from Johns Hopkins University. Brazil has the second highest tally, at 221,547 deaths.

Mexico surpassed India as the country with the third-highest official death toll, at 155,145.

Scientists were worried about this mutation because it seems able to elude some of the effects of current vaccines and synthetic antibody treatments, though Moderna and Pfizer said their shots still work against the variant.

A more contagious form of the virus could nonetheless mean more people get sick, a portion of whom could end up hospitalised or in the most severe cases dead.

Philippine leader wants to get shots in buttocks, but critics cry foul

In the Americas overall, 14 countries have reported at least one of three coronavirus variants – first detected in Britain, South Africa and Brazil – the Pan American Health Organization said Thursday.

The economic pain over the last year in the US was clear in data out Thursday that showed the world’s largest economy shrunk by 3.5 per cent in 2020.

The figures underscored the scale of the job awaiting US President Joe Biden, who took office just over a week ago promising to get the country back on track with a US$1.9 trillion spending proposal.

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WHO team probing coronavirus origins in China leave hotel quarantine

WHO team probing coronavirus origins in China leave hotel quarantine

Covid-19 has continued to hammer countries despite the onset of mass vaccination programmes that have seen more than 82 million doses injected, according to a count compiled from national figures.

Pfizer has also faced EU criticism for delays in deliveries but has now revised its production target for this year up from 1.3 billion doses to two billion.

Australia’s health minister Greg Hunt said the country’s foreign ministry would be making “representations” to the EU on suggestions there may be restrictions on vaccine exports.

Those representations would be about “ensuring that our supply is guaranteed on a continuous basis,” he said.

India will make more home-grown coronavirus vaccines available, Modi says

Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his country will supply more locally produced vaccines to other countries.

Concerns have been deepening over rich nations hogging vaccine supplies. The WHO said that Africa can expect to see at least 30 per cent of its population immunised by the end of this year.

Additional reporting by DPA