AP, Canberra
The Australian government says Moderna next month will become the third Covid-19 vaccine available in Australia. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the Australian vaccine regulator approved the Moderna shot Monday for adults.
The first million doses will arrive in Australia in late September and 10 million Moderna shots are scheduled to be delivered to Australia this year, Health Minister Greg Hunt said.
Australia has a shortage of the Pfizer vaccine and a glut of locally manufactured AstraZeneca, which many are refusing to take because of the slight risk of blood clotting. New South Wales and Victoria states, where cities are in lockdown due to virus outbreaks, have stockpiles of more than a million unwanted doses of AstraZeneca, media reported.
Only 22% of adults among an Australian population of 26 million people had been fully vaccinated by Monday. The government expects to have provided a vaccine to every Australian adult who wants one by the end of the year.
BEIJING — More than 30 local officials have been fired or received other punishments for shortcomings in handling China’s latest virus surge.
Among the officials fired for failing to fully implement anti-pandemic measures were a vice mayor, heads of city districts and health commissions, and staff from hospital management, airport and tourism departments.
China’s National Health Commission said Monday 94 new cases of domestic transmission had been recorded over the previous 24 hours. Of those, 41 were in the central province of Henan, which has been slammed by deadly flooding in recent weeks.
Another 38 cases were reported in Yangzhou, a neighboring city to Nanjing, where China’s widest outbreak since the beginning of the pandemic was traced. The highly contagious delta variant spread among Nanjing airport workers and has since spread from tropical Hainan province in the south to Inner Mongolia in the far north.
While the number of total cases in the outbreak hovers around 1,500, a small number relative to those occurring in other countries, Chinese authorities have renewed travel restrictions, locked down communities and sealed off the entire city of Zhangjiajie, with a population of 1.5 million.
China has administered more than 1.7 billion doses of vaccine domestically, although it doesn’t disclose how many of its 1.4 billion people are now fully protected. China’s vaccines are administered in one-, two- or three-dose regimens, but questions have been raised about the efficacy of the domestic jabs as the delta variant continues to spread.
MELBOURNE— Victoria State in Australia is lifting its pandemic lockdown beginning Tuesday, except in the city of Melbourne.