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FILE PHOTO: Health workers in hazmat suits walk outside the Manila COVID-19 Field Hospital in Manila, Philippines, September 7, 2021. REUTERS/Lisa Marie David - 

The Philippines has slashed its inoculation target for an ambitious three-day national vaccination push due to a shortage of supplies and other logistical challenges, authorities said on Saturday (Nov 27).

The Southeast Asian nation is facing the region's second-highest COVID-19 infections and deaths, and officials tagged vaccination as key to a sustainable economic recovery in what was one of the region's fastest-growing economies before the pandemic.

Target vaccination output for the Nov 29 to Dec 1 "National Vaccination Days" was cut to nine million from 15 million, the national task force said in a statement. The targeted three million shots a day is nearly four times the country's 829,000 average daily doses for November.

"There is currently a shortage in ancillary supplies, particularly syringes for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines and other logistical challenges," the task force said.

While 95 per cent of the capital region's eligible population were already fully vaccinated, barely half of residents in the provinces have completed their inoculation, government data show. The Philippines has so far fully inoculated roughly 35 million or 45 per cent of its eligible population.

To achieve its goal of inoculating 54 million Filipinos by year-end, the government will hold another three-day national inoculation event from Dec 15 to 17.

The national vaccination days aim to increase the Philippines' first-dose coverage to 70 per cent from 58 per cent and increase the booster jabs, while the Dec 15 to 17 activities will focus on second doses and boosters.

"Again, we enjoin everyone to get vaccinated and be a hero to your family and loved ones," the task force said.

Since the start of the pandemic, the Philippines has reported 2.83 million infections and 48,017 coronavirus-related deaths, as it remains on alert for Omicron, which the World Health Organization has described as a "variant of concern"//CNA

FILE PHOTO: People sit in the arrivals section of the international terminal of Kingsford Smith International Airport in Sydney, Australia, March 21, 2020. REUTERS/Loren Elliott - 

Australia imposed new restrictions on Saturday (Nov 27) on people who have been to nine southern African countries, as the new Omicron variant of COVID-19 raises concerns about another wave of the pandemic.

The countries are South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, the Seychelles, Malawi and Mozambique.

Effective immediately, the government will ban non-citizens who have been in those countries from entering and will require supervised 14-day quarantines for Australian citizens and their dependents returning from the countries, said Health Minister Greg Hunt.

These restrictions also apply to people such as international students and skilled migrants arriving from countries with which Australia has travel bubbles, who have been in any of the nine countries within the past 14 days.

"If the medical evidence shows that further actions are required, we will not hesitate to take them. And that may involve strengthening or expanding the restrictions," he said.

Anyone who has already arrived in Australia and who has been in any of those countries within the past 14 days must immediately isolate and be tested.

The Australian government will also suspend all flights from the nine southern African countries for two weeks.

Twenty travellers from South Africa are in quarantine in the Northern Territory's Howard Springs facility, 19 of whom have returned negative coronavirus tests. It is not yet known if the one positive test result is the Omicron variant, Hunt said.

The discovery of the variant - which has a spike protein dramatically different from the one that existing vaccines are based on - triggered global alarm on Friday as countries rushed to suspend travel from southern Africa and stock markets suffered their biggest falls in more than a year.

Australia early this month eased its international border restrictions for the first time during the pandemic allowing fully vaccinated residents to return to the country without quarantine after higher vaccination levels.

Australia had largely stamped out infections for most of this year until an outbreak of the highly infectious Delta variant in late June spread rapidly across its east. About 205,000 cases and 1,985 deaths have been recorded so far, lower than many other countries in the developed world//CNA

FILE PHOTO: A worker welds a bicycle steel rim at a factory manufacturing sports equipment in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China September 2, 2019. China Daily via REUTERS/File Photo - 

Profits at China's industrial firms grew at a faster pace in October, the statistics bureau said on Saturday, providing a buffer for a faltering economy battered by soaring raw material prices.

Profits in October rose 24.6per cent from a year earlier to 818.7 billion yuan (US$128.1 billion), the official data showed, quickening from a 16.3per cent gain reported in September.

For the January-October period, industrial firms' profits rose 42.2per cent year-on-year to 7.2 trillion yuan, slower than a 44.7per cent rise in the first nine months of 2021.

The industrial profit data covers large firms with annual revenues of over 20 million yuan from their main operations.

Government efforts to ensure supply and stabilize prices helped companies mitigate difficulties, which in turned helped improve production conditions and profits, said Zhu Hong a senior statistician at the National Bureau of Statistics.

However, he said profit differentiation between upstream and downstream industries had not significantly improved, with downstream industries still facing pressures on their profitability.

Prices in China have surged amid a power crunch and Beijing has been trying to cool a red-hot market for coal, the country's main fuel for power generation.

However, an official from China's state planner said last Sunday that "energy prices including, coal prices have fallen significantly" and have pushed down prices for steel, aluminium, pulp, PVC and coal chemical products.

The world's second-largest economy staged an impressive rebound from last year's pandemic slump, but has since lost momentum as it grapples with a slowing manufacturing sector, debt problems in the property market and COVID-19 outbreaks.

China's industrial output grew faster than expected in October but remained the second lowest print this year.

On Friday, China's Ministry of Industry and Information (MIIT) Technology held a meeting with representatives from industry associations and companies including Aluminium Corp of China and China Minmetals Corp to discuss issues in the raw materials industry, it said in a Saturday statement. 

The development of the upstream and downstream should be better coordinated to ensure the stability of the supply chain, and the industry's risk response capabilities should be strengthened to prevent "grey rhino" and "black swan" incidents, it quoted MIIT vice minister Wang Jiangping as saying.

The industrial profit data covers large firms with annual revenues of over 20 million yuan from their main operations//CNA

FILE PHOTO: A sign of the 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) is pictured at the World Trade Organization (WTO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, November 25, 2021. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse - 

The World Trade Organization (WTO) became the first major diplomatic casualty of the new coronavirus variant on Friday (Nov 26) when it postponed its first ministerial meeting in four years due to the deteriorating health situation.

Ministers from WTO members were due to have gathered next week for a meeting widely seen as a test of the WTO's relevance.

The WTO said that its members had agreed late on Friday to postpone the ministerial conference after the new variant outbreak led to travel restrictions that would have prevented many ministers from reaching Geneva.

No new date has been set for a rescheduled meeting.

The World Health Organisation has classified the B11529 variant detected in South Africa as a "variant of concern", saying it may spread more quickly than other forms of the virus. Scientists are also seeking to find out if it is vaccine-resistant.

Switzerland, home to the WTO, on Friday banned direct flights from South Africa and the surrounding region, and imposed test and quarantine requirements on travel from other countries, including Belgium, Hong Kong and Israel.

The Geneva-based trade body had planned a meeting in person, but the new restrictions meant delegations of large players such as South Africa and the Brussels-based European Commission would have been limited to a largely virtual presence.

Even before the postponement the prospects were not bright.

The WTO has only managed one update of its global rules in its near 27-year history, the red tape-cutting Trade Facilitation Agreement, and its 164 members looked far from agreement in its most active talks - on curbing fishing subsidies and spreading COVID-19 vaccines more widely.

India, South Africa and other developing countries are calling for a waiver of intellectual property (IP) rights for vaccines and other COVID-19 treatments. US President Joe Biden said on Friday he supported a waiver for vaccines.

WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said the postponement did not mean negotiations should stop.

"On the contrary, delegations in Geneva should be fully empowered to close as many gaps as possible. This new variant reminds us once again of the urgency of the work we are charged with," she said in a statement.

Santiago Wills, the Colombian WTO ambassador who chairs the fishing subsidy talks, said the news was "deflating, to say the least", but pledged to keep working towards an agreement to save global fish stocks//CNA