COVID-19: European regulators set to give limited approval to AstraZeneca jab

EU drug regulators are due to grant only restricted approval of AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine, according to Germany's health minister.

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  • EU unity in face of coronavirus under pressure over vaccines supplies

    Austria and Denmark have become the latest EU countries to break away from Brussels' vaccines strategy, raising fears that the bloc's unity in the face of the coronavirus pandemic was crumbling. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz on Monday night said that Austria would work with Israel and Denmark on second generation coronavirus vaccines and “no longer rely on the EU in the future”. It is widely seen as a rebuke to the European Commission-led joint procurement scheme for vaccines, which has lagged far behind the UK, Israel and US, and involved negotiating for supplies as a bloc. Mr Kurz told Bild, Germany’s biggest selling newspaper, that the European Medicines Agency had been “too slow” in approving the jabs. "We must therefore prepare for further mutations and should no longer be dependent only on the EU for the production of second-generation vaccines," he said. Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that she had already bid for supplies of Israel’s leftover vaccines in another sign of the disintegrating confidence in Brussels to deliver the jabs. 7.54 doses per 100 people have been administered in the EU, compared to 31.58 in the UK and 89.99 in Israel. Austria has given 7.4 doses per 100 people and Denmark 11 doses. Mr Kurz is due to travel with Ms Frederiksen to see Israel's rapid vaccine roll-out up close in a visit that will cause blushes in Brussels. An EU diplomat said the joint procurement strategy was “born out of fear” that smaller countries would miss out. “That said if all the smaller chickens are leaving the nest it begs the question why we initiated joint procurement at all,” the diplomat said. "You can't have enough vaccines that are effective against the different virus strands," a second EU diplomat from a major member state said in Brussels. "So we should wish them luck - I guess." The European Commission's preference is for member states to stick to the joint approach because side deals sap the bloc’s negotiating power. EU rules allow national governments to approve and buy vaccines which are not part of the joint scheme, such as the Russian Sputnik and Chinese vaccines. Other EU leaders have already moved to secure national supplies of the vaccines rather than wait for the EU scheme, which involved countries negotiating as a bloc to drive down prices. Last night, Poland’s President talked to China’s leader Xi Jinping about a possible purchase of Chinese vaccines. Slovakia took the first delivery of two million doses of the Sputnik vaccine, which has not been approved by the European Medicines Agency, on Monday. Andrej Babis, the Czech prime minister, said he would not wait for the EU regulator before buying Sputnik. Hungary has already approved and bought Sputnik without waiting for the EU regulator and is also the first member state to approve the Chinese vaccine. On Sunday, Viktor Orbán, the prime minister, posted a photo of himself being vaccinated by the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine. Budapest has bought 2m doses of Sputnik and 5m jabs of Sinopharm. The authoritarian leader attacked the EU scheme in late February. “We’ve sought to do something together that we could have managed more successfully on an individual basis – take a look at the examples of Britain or Serbia,” he said. Regional leaders in France said they would try and negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies in January but have so far had no success. Germany ordered 30 million extra doses of the Pfizer vaccine outside of the scheme in September. Berlin also has a separate order of 20m doses with CureVac. “We have all agreed that there will be no parallel negotiations or parallel contracts,” Ursula von der Leyen told reporters after news of the German side deals broke. A commission spokesman said that the joint vaccine programme had not crumbled and warned that emergency authorisations of jabs at national level could be risky. "It's not that the strategy unravelled," the spokesman said,"For our vaccines, we go through the European Medicines Agency because we want to ensure efficacy and safety. What member states do in addition to that, it's their responsibility." The under-fire European Commission president has repeatedly defended the decision to negotiate as a bloc, despite a row following supply shortfalls from AstraZeneca. She said the strategy ensured smaller member states had access to the jabs in the European Parliament in February. She claimed it would have been “the end of our community”, if larger, richer countries had snapped up all the vaccines instead of securing them jointly as a Union. Brussels has secured and authorised supplies of the Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines but the distribution of the jabs at national level have been slow.

  • COVID-19: What EU leaders said about AstraZeneca vaccine - and the data forcing a rethink

    European countries are revising their refusal to give older people the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine following the release of fresh data. The French government has made a partial U-turn, with people aged between 65 and 74 with pre-existing health conditions now able to get the AstraZeneca vaccine. The vaccine, developed with Oxford University, has suffered rollout setbacks and doses are languishing after nearly half of the EU's members limited its use to under 65s.

  • Salmond inquiry: Nicola Sturgeon’s government forced to reveal legal advice

    SNP minister admits lawyers raised ‘reservations’ about government’s court battle with Alex Salmond

  • Meghan Markle seeks £1.5m in legal costs from Mail On Sunday after 'comprehensive win'

    Meghan Markle wants £750,000 of the costs to be paid within the next two weeks.

  • Search For Missing UK Case Of Brazil Covid Variant Narrowed To 379 Households

    Matt Hancock says the hunt is now focused on the south-east of England.

  • I took the government to court over its Covid restrictions on pubs – this is why

    We have wound up our court case following the judgement that the substantial meal restriction imposed on wet-led pubs was arguably discriminatory towards certain sections of society

  • Chinese hackers infiltrated India's power grid ahead of Mumbai blackout, says report

    Chinese state hackers seeded India's power grid with cyber malware as the rivals last year skirmished over a disputed border in the Himalayas, a report has found. As the standoff continued, Chinese illicit programs were being inserted into control systems managing India's power supply, as well as a high-voltage transmission substation and a coal-fired power plant. The disclosure lends weight to the idea that a massive power outage in Mumbai last year was a deliberate attack by China to warn India not to press its claim, the New York Times reported. The October 12 blackout in India's financial capital shut down the stock market and trains and forced hospitals to run emergency back-up generators. Indian officials at the time said state-sponsored cyber attackers were suspected to be behind the blackout. A new report by Recorded Future, a firm that monitors state cyber activity, found a sharp increase in attacks by Chinese-backed groups from the start of last year. That increased further from the middle of the year. Indian and Chinese soldiers were involved in hand-to-hand fighting in Ladakh over the summer as the armies clashed over the disputed border. Record Future found “a concerted campaign against India’s critical infrastructure”, with 10 different power sector organisations targeted, including centres for balancing supply and demand in the power grid. Stuart Solomon, Recorded Future’s chief operating officer, said that the Chinese state-sponsored group, which the firm named Red Echo, “has been seen to systematically utilise advanced cyberintrusion techniques to quietly gain a foothold in nearly a dozen critical nodes across the Indian power generation and transmission infrastructure”. Most of the malware was never activated. But even just by signalling that it has the capability, China could potentially wield significant deterrence against India, experts suggested.

  • SNP government lawyers had 'reservations' about continuing Alex Salmond court fight

    John Swinney has admitted the Scottish Government's lawyers had “reservations” about continuing its costly legal fight with Alex Salmond months before its case collapsed. The Deputy First Minister confirmed the SNP administration was aware of what would prove a fatal flaw in its case as early as October 2018, yet persisted until the following January when it conceded. He insisted there were “good public policy grounds” for continuing the defence action, but did not say there were justifiable legal grounds for doing so. His admission, in a letter to a Holyrood inquiry into the debacle, came after Mr Salmond claimed the Scottish Government prolonged its defence longer than was legally justifiable - a potential breach of the ministerial code. Mr Swinney said the government aimed to release the advice to the inquiry on Tuesday afternoon, ahead of Nicola Sturgeon's appearance on Wednesday morning. He caved in to opposition demands for the advice to be published on Monday evening after a majority of MSPs swung behind a Tory motion of no confidence, which would have forced his resignation if passed. In a humiliating about-turn, he promised to publish the "key" advice. However, the Scottish Tories warned they would press ahead with the vote of no confidence if he failed to hand over everything the inquiry demanded.

  • Channel migrants seeking UK asylum are smuggling themselves back to France, says charity

    Channel migrants seeking asylum in the UK are smuggling themselves back to France because of Priti Patel’s crackdown, says a UK charity. Care4Calais has revealed the case of an Iranian who came to Britain on a small boat but has since managed to return to Dunkirk after becoming disillusioned with his experience in the controversial Napier barracks used to house Channel migrants in Folkestone, Kent. He told volunteers working for the charity that he had smuggled himself back to France on a lorry. “England does not have any law,” he told them. “I don’t have a good memory of the place. It is broken from the inside.” Napier barracks was at the centre of a near-riot when migrants being kept on the former military base after an outbreak of Covid-19 went on the rampage and set fire to buildings in protest at the Home Office’s refusal to move them to a hotel. The Home Secretary has been under pressure to close down the barracks as an asylum centre, including from local Tories because of the conditions, location and spartan regime. Care4Calais’s founder Clare Moseley also disclosed that two young men from El Salvador who had come to the UK to seek asylum had also applied to the Home Office to be repatriated, but had been told there was a waiting list before they could be returned home. “Their father is in the military and the family was being pursued by terrorist and criminal groups so he sent them to England, but they are now stuck in Manchester. All they want to do is work and don’t like relying on the state,” said Ms Moseley. She blamed the increasingly tough restrictions and hostility that the migrants faced for their decisions to seek to leave the UK. The Government is seeking to deter illegal migrants from making the perilous journey across the Channel through increased patrols and surveillance on French beaches and a tougher approach to asylum. A new law, introduced after Brexit, makes any migrant’s asylum claim inadmissible if they have been in a safe third country before their arrival in the UK. This weekend it emerged that Ms Patel is drawing up plans for smugglers to face life sentences, rather than the current maximum of 14 years. A policy paper due this month is expected to tighten up what ministers claim is the “broken” asylum system by placing curbs on “litigious” human rights claimants who seek to delay their deportation and encourage judges to take a tougher stance against asylum seekers with criminal records.

  • Meghan is nothing like Diana but The Crown effect is changing all that

    On Sunday evening, the world was presented with two not unrelated televisual events. In the first, CBS, the US television network that will broadcast Oprah Winfrey’s interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, released a tantalising trailer of its big tell-all released next weekend – in which Prince Harry noted that his biggest fear has been “history repeating itself”. Lest his message be insufficiently clear, he added: “I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for her going through this process by herself all those years ago,” while the screen revealed a picture of a toddler Harry with his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.

  • Pair fined £10,000 each for skipping hotel quarantine after returning from Dubai

    They were fined – and then transferred to a quarantine hotel anyway.

  • EastEnders' Ruby Allen discovers more complications from fall

    She will need to undergo a procedure.

  • Giuliani suspended from YouTube over election conspiracies again, days after returning to platform

    Giuliani is facing a $2.7 billion lawsuit from a voting technology company for spreading election conspiracies

  • Alec Baldwin and wife reportedly welcome sixth child

    Alec Baldwin's wife Hilaria has hinted the couple has welcomed their sixth child, less than six months after the arrival of son Eduardo.

  • France reverses stance on Oxford Covid jab which Macron labelled ‘quasi-ineffective’

    France earlier said the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab could only be used by people under 65 and without underlying health conditions

  • People without vaccinations should be banned from travelling in holiday jets, says public

    The vast majority of people want bans on non-vaccinated people travelling on planes - and would be happy to share their vaccination details to be shared for a digital travel health app, an exclusive survey has revealed. More than six in ten (61 per cent) say they are in favour of flights which only accept passengers who have been vaccinated, according to the survey of more than 2,100 people for the travel think tank Thrive. Eight in ten (79 per cent) said they were happy for their vaccination details to be passed on by the NHS to a digital health app, for examination by airport officials in other countries. The findings come as EU leaders indicated that the UK would be included in the EU-wide “vaccine passport” scheme which is designed to open up travel in time for this year’s summer holidays. The public also appear resigned to the continued need for measures such as mask wearing to protect against Covid even after the roll out of the vaccine. Three-quarters of UK adults interviewed (74 per cent) felt it would be reasonable to be expected to wear a facemask on a plane, even after having had the vaccine. Nine in ten UK adults said they intended to fly abroad at some point in the future, with over two-thirds (69 per cent) saying they would fly abroad this year if the vaccination programme is fully rolled out. This is up from 53 per cent when last surveyed in December 2020. Sania Haq, Research Director for Thrive, said: “These findings suggest consumers are now conditioned to ongoing social distancing measures which reduce transmission and prevent the spreading of Covid-19. “It is also clear that few are worried about any privacy issues regarding their vaccination details if it means they can seamlessly access other countries and travel for business or leisure.” The survey also raised concerns over the level of compliance with quarantine: 80 per cent said they would actively try to get around the rules in order to avoid hotel quarantine for 10 nights. Some 78 per cent of those intending to fly abroad this year said they would consider the option of re-routing their return journey to avoid having to spend time in an hotel and avoid the cost of up to £1,750 per person.

  • COVID infections now rising in 55 areas – map shows rate in your area

    One in seven areas of the UK have seen a weekly rise in COVID cases, the latest government data reveals.

  • Denmark strips 94 Syrian refugees of residency permits deeming Damascus 'safe'

    Denmark has stripped 94 Syrian refugees of their residency permits after deciding Damascus and its surrounding regions are safe for people to return to. Immigration minister Mattias Tesfaye insisted last month that Denmark had been "open and honest from the start" with refugees coming from Syria. "We have made it clear to the Syrian refugees that their residence permit is temporary. It can be withdrawn if protection is no longer needed," he said as his ministry extended the parts of Syria considered safe to include the southern Rif Dimashq Governorate. "We must give people protection for as long as it is needed. But when conditions in the home country improve, a former refugee should return home and re-establish a life there." Denmark's ruling, centre-Left Social Democratic Party has adopted a fierce anti-migration stance in a bid to ward off challenges from the Right. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen promised to aim for 'zero' asylum seekers applying for residence in the country. Germany has ruled that criminals can be deported to Syria but Denmark is the first European country to say that ordinary refugees can be sent back. The decision on the Rif Dimashq area of Syria will mean a further 350 Syrians residents in Denmark will have their temporary protection permits reassessed, on top of the roughly 900 from around Damascus who had their cases reopened last year. By mid January, 94 Syrians from the Damascus area living in Denmark had lost their permits. Denmark's Refugee Appeals Board ruled in December 2019 that conditions in Damascus were no longer sufficiently dangerous to give grounds for temporary protection, without any additional personal reason for asylum. Michala Bendixen, from the rights group Refugees Welcome, said that Syrians in Denmark now faced "a very, very tragic situation", forced out of their homes, jobs or studies and into the country's deportation camps, where they face years in limbo. "They will not be forced onto a plane. So it means that they will have to stay in one of the deportation camps, where you don't have access to education or work, and you have to stay in the centre every night. The government hopes that they will go voluntarily, that they will just give up and go on their own." The opposition Liberal party, a Right-wing group, has also called for the returns to be sped up through a return agreement with the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad, Syria's authoritarian ruler. In order to prevent Syrians being stranded in deportation camps, Mads Fuglede, the foreign spokesperson for the opposition Liberal Party on Sunday suggested a cooperation deal with the Syrian government. "I can imagine an agreement that will only extend to the framework for sending people back, with some guarantees that you can return without being persecuted," he told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. He later stressed in a post on Facebook that by advocating such a deal, he was not suggesting recognising the "criminal dictatorship" led by Assad.

  • Biden news: Trump ‘got vaccine while president’, as New York AG set to probe Cuomo harassment claims

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  • Support for Keir Starmer plunges to new low, poll suggests

    Public support for Sir Keir Starmer has fallen to its lowest level since he was elected Labour leader, new polling suggests. A survey released by Deltapoll on Monday found that Sir Keir’s net approval rating has crashed to zero, with Boris Johnson now enjoying a 10 per cent cushion over the opposition leader. While the significant decline in Mr Johnson’s own standing in the middle of the pandemic coincided with a steady level of support for Sir Keir, their fortunes have since reversed as the covid-19 vaccines have rolled out. Between 21-23 January and 24-26 February, Sir Keir’s approval rating has tumbled from 14 per cent, while Mr Johnson’s rating has increased from 1 per cent to 10 per cent. Sir Keir is now 12 per cent down on his approval rating on 23 April, shortly after he saw off the pro-Corbyn MP Rebecca Long-Bailey and moderate rival Lisa Nandy to secure the Labour leadership. The findings come amid mounting tensions within Labour over the party’s approach during the pandemic, with Sir Keir facing claims from the hard-Left that his “constructive” opposition is failing to cut through with the public. Read more: What is the point of this vacuous and confused Labour Party?