From November 15 to 25, 35 Italian volunteers participated in a clinical trial on the Soberana vaccine in Havana, Cuba. Thanks to its public and high quality biotechnological research and health care system, the Caribbean island is the only low-income country worldwide to have made its own COVID-19 vaccines

Vaccines by the Chinese firms Sinopharm and Sinovac are being administered across the world on terms far more favorable than those of US and UK-based pharma giants

The Narendra Modi government in India chose to believe that it had defeated the pandemic, and therefore the slow pace of its vaccination program posed no problems

Newsclick’s Prabir Purkayastha and immunologist Dr. Satyajit Rath discuss the politics, economics and technical aspects of the global vaccine scenario in light of Bill Gates’ recent statement on technology transfer

The COVID-19 pandemic demands that all nations cooperate to vaccinate the entire global population. The usual rules of which countries win and which ones lose do not operate in this civilizational crisis

In Latin American and the Carribean region, so far, nine countries have begun inoculating their populations against COVID-19 and all of them are providing free vaccination to all citizens

Bolivia hopes to vaccinate up to 20% of its population in the first quarter of this year. The health ministry has endorsed Russia’s Sputnik V and China’s CoronaVac vaccines against COVID-19

The new vaccine candidate by Moderna Inc, called mRNA-1273, has reportedly shown 94.5% efficacy against the SARS-CoV-2 in the phase III clinical trials

With rich countries and big pharma companies getting proactive, there is widespread apprehension about access and price of the vaccine for countries that need it most.

SARS-CoV-2 was directly put into the lungs of eight Rhesus Macaques. None of the monkeys that had been vaccinated were seen to have developed a full-blown infection.