Ciara Linnane
India said it would resume COVID-19 vaccine exports starting in the next quarter, Al Jazeera reported, and will give priority to the World Health Organization’s Covax program and neighboring countries. India, the world’s biggest maker of vaccines, stopped exports of COVID shots in April to focus on inoculating its own population as infections exploded.
China recorded 49 new COVID-19 cases on Monday, according to news site Todayonline.com, down from 66 a day earlier. National Health Commission data found that of the new infections, 28 were locally transmitted, all of them in the southeastern province of Fujian, the health authority said. That compares with 43 local cases a day earlier.
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The U.K. has started to vaccinate 12-to-15-year-olds, the Guardian reported. Some three million people in that age group are eligible. Prime Minister Boris Johnson defended his government’s decision to offer boosters to the elderly and vulnerable, insisting that the U.K. is also contributing to global vaccine programs.
The WHO has called for a moratorium on boosters until the rest of the world has received first vaccine doses.
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Latest tallies
The global tally for the coronavirus-borne illness climbed above 228.8 million on Monday, while the death toll rose to 4.69 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University .
The U.S. continues to lead the world with a total of 42.1 million cases and 674,346 deaths.
India is second by cases after the U.S. at 33.5 million and has suffered 445,123 deaths.
Brazil has second highest death toll at 590,752 and 21.2 million cases.
In Europe, Russia has most fatalities at 195,438, followed by the U.K. at 135,588.
China, where the virus was first discovered late in 2019, has had 107,966 confirmed cases and 4,849 deaths, according to its official numbers, which are widely held to be massively underreported.
