VIENNA - Austrian Health Minister Rudolf Anschober announced on Tuesday his intention to step down from the ministerial post due to health problems and exhaustion from combating the coronavirus pandemic. The 60-year-old recently had to take sick leave twice due to blood circulation problems. "After consultations with my doctors, I decided to step down from my duties as minister of social [...]

Australia has declined to purchase a vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson, because its mechanism is similar to the one used in AstraZeneca’s jab. Both vaccines are currently being investigated for links to blood clots. The Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine is “an adenovirus vaccine, the same type of vaccine as the AstraZeneca vaccine,” a spokesperson for Australian Health Minis [...]

Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine has “a lot of good scientific data” behind it, the head of Germany’s Bionorica SE pharmaceutical company, Michael Popp, told RT, as he shared his company’s experience working with Russian specialists. Russian researchers have a lot of experience and expertise in vaccine development,” said the CEO of the German-based international company, which calls itse [...]

Austria is to order a million doses of Russia's Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine, one month after a successful phone call between Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and the Kremlin. It will be the third EU country to receive the formula. The news came from the chancellor himself, who revealed that Vienna and Moscow are engaged in talks, and said a deal should be agreed soon. On Tuesday, Kurz explained th [...]

Drugmakers Pfizer and BioNTech wanted to charge the EU Commission €54.08 per dose of their Coronavirus vaccine, according to German media reports. The jab would have cost more than 20 times that of a rival shot from AstraZeneca. The prospective price tag was revealed on Thursday by German broadcasters NDR and WDR, and the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. The paper claims that Pfizer and Bio [...]

Once again, the world has failed to unite when faced with a common threat. The response to the Covid-19 pandemic proves that much of the West, especially the US, is committed to bloc politics, no matter the real-world human cost. It was revealed in the annual report of the US Department of Health and Human Services that the US government worked towards convincing Brazil to reject Russia’s Spu [...]

Holidays abroad might have been an early casualty of Covid-19 lockdowns, but Russia is betting that wanderlust has only grown, and plans to make it easier for tourists to take a long trip round the world’s largest country. Under the rule change, adopted by the national parliament in its first reading on Wednesday, visas for sightseers can be issued for up to six months, and can be granted s [...]

Covid-19 jabs are being distributed unevenly between EU member states, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said, pointing to “secret contracts” signed at a “vaccine bazaar” with big pharma by the bloc’s vaccination steering board. “Deliveries are not happening in line with population,” Kurz told a press conference organized at short notice on Friday. He added that the situation [...]

Austria launched its vaccination effort in December, offering citizens inoculations with Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, or AstraZeneca. Certain Austrian firms are also negotiating with Russia on Sputnik V production, according to the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, one of the vaccine's promoters abroad. Austria's top infectologist, Professor Florian Thalhammer, believes that the ef [...]

MOSCOW - Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz says he is ready to get vaccinated with the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine or the Chinese vaccine, if they are approved by the EU. "Yes [I am ready to get vaccinated], if the vaccines [Russia’s and China’s] are approved in Europe," Kurz said in an interview with the German Welt am Sonntag newspaper. The chancellor said that Austria [...]

Brussels’ beleaguered coronavirus vaccination program could be poised to get a shot in the arm as the EU’s central regulator completes its initial stage in appraising Sputnik V, the vaccine developed by Moscow’s Gamaleya Center. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) told Russian media on Tuesday that the scientific consultation process was now finalized. “As a next step, the company ca [...]

GENOA, Italy - The report in the medical journal The Lancet on the safety and efficacy of the Russian vaccine against the novel coronavirus has put Sputnik V among the world's top vaccines, David Livermore, a member of the scientific advisory board on Sputnik V, said in an interview with Sputnik. On Tuesday, peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet published an interim analysis from the [...]

MOSCOW - European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen's recent remark on the possible approval of Russia's Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine smacks of an attempt to save face and her position, Roman Haider, an EU lawmaker from the Freedom Party of Austria, told Sputnik on Thursday. Haider's comments follow the EU authorities' attempts to grapple with criticism over the slowdown in vaccination [...]

Wuhan, where the Covid-19 pandemic began, has now returned to a life resembling that before the virus swept in, after China was able to control the outbreak of the disease with strict but necessary lockdown measures. Seeing Wuhan’s success ought to bring a ray of hope to those around the world facing the worst of their country’s outbreaks; yet, in their annual retrospectives, American med [...]

Moderna, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are currently reviewing the batch after around 10 people suffered "a possible severe allergic reaction". According to the California Department of Public Health, doses from Moderna Lot 041L20A are suspected of causing a "higher-than-usual number of adverse events", and should be p [...]

After a video of his mother’s condition went viral, the son of a woman who was hospitalized after receiving Pfizer’s Covid jab told RT that, even though he was not an anti-vaxxer, he had serious doubts about the drug’s safety. Brant Griner issued an appeal on Facebook last week, after his mother began experiencing serious medical issues several days after taking the vaccine. In a now-vi [...]

The Russian vaccine created at the Gamaleya Research Centre in Moscow is being rolled out internationally in the race to control the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the chief executive of Russia's sovereign wealth fund said on Thursday. The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) plans to expand its operations and increase the rollout of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine across the globe amid the ong [...]

Created by the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, Sputnik V was the first SARS-CoV-2 vaccine to be registered anywhere in the world, with dozens of countries across Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America expressing interest in obtaining it. Russia began a coroanvirus vaccination campaign using Sputnik V last month. The New York Times has published a comprehensive arti [...]

BUENOS AIRES - A physician in Mexico who received the Pfizer vaccine against the COVID-19 coronavirus, was admitted to an intensive care unit with seizures, breathing difficulties and possible encephalomyelitis, the country's Health Ministry said on Saturday. "The 32-year-old doctor who received the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine was admitted to the intensive care unit [...] after developing rashes, [...]

With the vaccine not providing immediate immunity to the coronavirus, over two hundred Israeli citizens have been diagnosed with the disease days after getting the Pfizer/BioNTech jabs, local media reported. The number of those who got Covid-19 despite being vaccinated was at around 240 people, according to data from Channel 13 News. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which the Israeli health au [...]

Side-by-side comparisons of how New York City and Wuhan, China rang in the new year have sparked a heated debate on social media about whether the US should have embraced Beijing’s approach to handling the coronavirus pandemic. Photographs showing empty streets on Times Square, typically a hub of merry-making on New Year’s Eve, spread across social media on Thursday night, with several co [...]

VIENNA - The experience of administration of Russian vaccines against COVID-19 is raising a great interest in Austria even though the countries are not currently engaged in specific negotiations, Russian ambassador Dmitry Lyubinsky said, praising the efficacy of the Russian vaccines. "There are currently no negotiations on exact plans related to the potential use of the Sputnik V vaccine in [...]