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March
Canada clears Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, first to approve - WPRI.com
Canada's drug regulator has approved Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine, the fourth such shot to be given the green light, the government said on Friday (Mar 5), amid frustration over the slow start to the country's inoculation program.
Health experts are eager for a one-and-done option to help speed vaccination. Canada has also approved vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca and Health Canada is the first major regulator to approve four different vaccines, said Dr Supriya Sharma, Health Canada’s chief medical adviser.
Canada has pre-purchased 10 million Johnson & Johnson doses, with options to buy another 28 million. It was not immediately clear when Canada would get its first shipment.
“This is the fourth vaccine to be deemed safe by Canada's health experts - and with millions of doses already secured, we're one stop closer to defeating this virus,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted.
The vaccine shortage is so acute in Canada that provincial governments are now saying they will extend the interval between the two doses of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines to four months rather than three to four weeks so they can quickly inoculate more people.
Canadians 80 and above in the general public are only starting to get vaccinated this month and the National Advisory Committee on Immunisation said this week that extending the dose interval to four months would allow as many as 80 per cent of Canadians over the age of 16 to receive a single dose by the end of June simply with the expected supply of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.Canada also faces the prospect of vaccine delivery disruptions from the European Union. A shipment of over a quarter million AstraZeneca vaccines destined for Australia has been blocked from leaving the European Union in the first use of an export control system instituted by the bloc to make sure big pharma companies respect their local contracts//CNA
March
US administers 85 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines: CDC - US News
The United States has administered 85,008,094 doses of COVID-19 vaccines as of Friday (Mar 5) morning and delivered 114,133,115 doses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
The tally of vaccine doses are for both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, vaccines as of 6:00am on Friday, the agency said.
The agency said 55,547,697 people had received one or more doses, while 28,701,201 people have received the second dose as of Friday.
A total of 7,306,425 vaccine doses have been administered in long-term care facilities, the agency said//CNA
March
A portion of a panorama made up of individual images taken by the Navigation Cameras, or Navcams, aboard NASA's Perseverance Mars rover shows the Martian landscape February 20, 2021. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via REUTERS
NASA's Mars rover Perseverance has taken its first, short drive on the surface of the red planet, two weeks after the robot science lab's picture-perfect touchdown on the floor of a massive crater, mission managers said on Friday (Mar 5).
The six-wheeled, car-sized astrobiology probe put a total of 6.5m on its odometer on Thursday during a half-hour test spin within Jezero Crater, site of an ancient, long-vanished lake bed and river delta on Mars.
"It went incredibly well," Anais Zarifian, a JPL mobility test engineer for Perseverance, said during a teleconference briefing with reporters, calling it a "huge milestone" for the mission.
NASA displayed a photo taken by the rover showing the wheel tread marks left in the reddish, sandy Martian soil after its first drive.
Another vivid image of the surrounding landscape shows a rugged, ruddy terrain littered with large, dark boulders in the foreground and a tall outcropping of rocky, layered deposits in the distance - marking the edge of the river delta.
Some additional, short-distance test driving is planned for Friday. Perseverance is capable of averaging 200 meters of driving per day.
But JPL engineers still have additional equipment checks to run on the rover's many instruments before they will be ready to send the robot on a more ambitious journey as part of its primary mission to search for traces of fossilised microbial life.
So far, Perseverance and its hardware, including its main robot arm, appear to be operating flawlessly, said Robert Hogg, deputy mission manager. The team has yet to conduct post-landing tests of the rover's sophisticated system to drill and collect rock samples for return to Earth via future Mars missions.
NASA announced it has named the site of Perseverance's Feb 18 touchdown as the "Octavia E. Butler Landing," in honor of the award-winning American science-fiction writer. Butler, a native of Pasadena, California, died in 2006 at age 58//CNA
March
Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speaks - WHYY
The head of the World Health Organization called Friday (Mar 5) for patent rights to be waived until the end of the coronavirus pandemic so that vaccine supplies can be dramatically increased, saying these “unprecedented times” warrant the move.
At a press briefing, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said countries with their own vaccine capacity should “start waiving intellectual property rights ” as provided in special emergency provisions from the World Trade Organization.
The Associated Press found factories on three continents whose owners say they could start producing hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines at short notice if only they had the blueprints and technical know-how.
But that knowledge belongs to the large pharmaceutical companies that have produced the first three vaccines authorised by countries including Britain, the European Union and the US - Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca.
The factories are all still awaiting responses.
Pharmaceutical companies that took taxpayer money from the US or Europe to develop inoculations at unprecedented speed say they are negotiating contracts and exclusive licensing deals with producers on a case-by-case basis because they need to protect their intellectual property and ensure safety.