Country, Other	Total Cases	New Cases	Total Deaths
World	177,797,438	+397,959	3,848,514
USA	34,365,985	+14,063	616,150
India	29,699,555	+67,294	381,931
Brazil	17,629,714	+85,861	493,837
France	5,747,647	+3,058	110,578
Turkey	5,348,249	+6,221	48,950
Russia	5,249,990	+13,397	127,576
UK	4,589,814	+9,055	127,926
Italy	4,248,432	+1,400	127,153
Argentina	4,198,620	+25,878	87,261
Colombia	3,829,879	+27,827	97,560
Spain	3,749,031	+3,832	80,615
Germany	3,726,731	+1,428	90,748
Iran	3,060,135	+10,487	82,480
Poland	2,878,061	+241	74,688
Mexico	2,459,601	+4,250	230,424
Ukraine	2,226,037	+1,045	51,847
Peru	2,015,190	+7,713	189,522
Indonesia	1,937,652	+9,944	53,476
South Africa	1,774,312	+13,246	58,223
Netherlands	1,675,644	+1,016	17,719
Czechia	1,665,526	+210	30,257
Chile	1,491,561	+4,322	30,922
Canada	1,405,146	+1,053	26,001
Philippines	1,332,832	+5,414	23,121
Iraq	1,269,440	+5,139	16,781
Romania	1,079,983	+104	32,028
Belgium	1,077,087	+508	25,099
Pakistan	944,065	+1,038	21,828
Portugal	860,395	+1,350	17,055
Israel	839,720	+19	6,428
Bangladesh	837,247	+3,956	13,282
Hungary	807,209	+107	29,944
Japan	777,643	+1,418	14,187
Jordan	744,844	+467	9,622
Serbia	715,307	+160	6,980
Malaysia	673,026	+5,150	4,142
Austria	649,002	+153	10,671
Nepal	614,216	+2,014	8,558
UAE	603,961	+2,011	1,738
Lebanon	542,934	+115	7,808
Morocco	524,975	+500	9,221
Saudi Arabia	469,414	+1,239	7,621
Ecuador	441,180	+1,806	21,153
Bulgaria	420,749	+95	17,957
Greece	416,741	+546	12,472
Bolivia	411,677	+2,571	15,738
Belarus	407,748	+887	3,006
Kazakhstan	404,064	+1,068	4,195
Paraguay	398,761	+2,612	11,181
Slovakia	391,149	+62	12,456
Panama	390,221	+1,048	6,457
Tunisia	374,312	+2,091	13,721
Croatia	358,823	+146	8,162
Georgia	356,179	+811	5,096
Costa Rica	347,157	+1,845	4,437
Uruguay	346,515	+2,900	5,120
Azerbaijan	335,291	+27	4,959
Kuwait	332,570	+1,557	1,837
Palestine	312,164	+216	3,544
Denmark	290,686	+353	2,527
Lithuania	278,073	+127	4,353
Guatemala	275,202	+1,472	8,527
Egypt	275,010	+606	15,723
Ethiopia	274,601	+121	4,260
Ireland	267,673	+329	4,941
Bahrain	260,954	+620	1,259
Slovenia	256,701	+118	4,409
Moldova	255,937	+59	6,159
Venezuela	255,457	+1,341	2,886
Honduras	249,118	+1,003	6,674
Oman	240,708	+2,142	2,591
Sri Lanka	230,692	+2,436	2,374
Armenia	223,904	+99	4,490
Qatar	220,198	+165	579
Thailand	204,595	+2,331	1,525
Libya	189,888	+330	3,166
Kenya	176,622	+485	3,428
Nigeria	167,103	+8	2,117
Cuba	161,997	+1,403	1,118
North Macedonia	155,583	+15	5,472
S. Korea	149,191	+544	1,993
Myanmar	146,406	+355	3,250
Latvia	136,403	+156	2,475
Algeria	134,458	+343	3,598
Albania	132,476	+7	2,454
Estonia	130,655	+56	1,266
Norway	128,679	+180	790
Zambia	118,850	+3,026	1,492
Kyrgyzstan	111,990	+647	1,912
Uzbekistan	104,463	+350	711
Montenegro	100,001	+13	1,603
Ghana	94,824	+125	790
Finland	94,026	+103	967
China	91,492	+21	4,636
Mongolia	83,128	+2,395	389
Cameroon	80,328	+238	1,313
Cyprus	73,379	+68	374
Vietnam	11,635	+423	61
Aruba	11,089	+5	107

 

 

Retrieved from:  https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

 

 

 

Fear grows that delta variant will become dominant COVID strain worldwide as WHO says it’s now in 74 countries

By Ciara Linnane

 

The delta variant of COVID-19 has now been detected in 74 countries, prompting fears it will become the dominant strain around the world, as it continues to spread rapidly including in Southern U.S. states that have lagged on vaccination.

The highly infectious variant that was first detected in India has been found in countries including China, the U.S. and the U.K., according to the World Health Organization, where it accounted for more than 90% of new cases in the past week. That prompted Prime Minister Boris Johnson to delay the U.K.’s planned reopening for another four weeks in an announcement at a news briefing on Monday.

In the U.S., cases caused by the variant are roughly doubling every two weeks, according to former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and now account for at least 10% of new cases, he told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“That doesn’t mean that we’re going to see a sharp uptick in infections, but it does mean that this is going to take over,” said Gottlieb. “And I think the risk is really… that this could spike a new epidemic heading into the fall.”

Concerns about the delta variant come as California lifts most of its COVID-19 restrictions and ushers in what it is calling the Golden State’s “Grand Reopening,” as the Associated Press reported.

Starting Tuesday, there will be no more state rules on social distancing, and no more limits on capacity at restaurants, bars, supermarkets, gyms, stadiums or anywhere else. And masks — one of the most symbolic and fraught symbols of the pandemic — will no longer be mandated for vaccinated people in most settings, though businesses and counties can still require them.

The U.S. has now fully vaccinated almost 145 million people, or 43.7% of its overall population, according to a tracker created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That means those people have received two shots of the two-dose vaccines developed by Pfizer Inc. PFE, -0.73% and German partner BioNTech SE BNTX, -6.56% and Moderna Inc. MRNA, -1.86%, or one shot of the Johnson & Johnson JNJ, -0.04% single-dose vaccine. The AstraZeneca AZN, -0.73% AZN, -0.52% vaccine has not been authorized for use in the U.S.

Among Americans 18 years and older, 54.4% are fully vaccinated and 64.5% have received at least one dose. Among those 65 and older, about 42 million are fully vaccinated, equal to 76% of that group. More than 47 million people in that age bracket have received a first jab, covering 86.8% of that population.

But as the map below illustrates, vaccination rates vary widely from state to state, and Southern states, including Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, show the lowest vaccination rates.

Only Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island have managed to fully inoculate more than 50% of their populations so far.

 

Retrieved from: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/fears-that-delta-variant-will-become-dominant-covid-strain-worldwide-as-who-says-its-now-in-74-countries-11623768125

 

 

 

Italy debates its ‘mix-and-match’ plan to finish vaccinating AstraZeneca first-dose recipients

By Emma Bubola

 

 

A health care worker administered a dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine in March at a hospital in Milan.Credit...Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times

A fierce debate has erupted in Italy after the government halted use of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine in people under 60 and said that people in that age group who had already received a first dose of that vaccine would get a different shot for their second.

“A mix for cocktails is one thing,” Matteo Salvini, the leader of the nationalist League party, which is part of the government, told reporters on Tuesday as he asked for clear and consistent directions, “A mix of vaccines is a different one.”

The announcement last week was the latest in a series of policy lurches surrounding the AstraZeneca vaccine that have left many Italians confused and angry.

As reports circulated that an 18-year-old girl who received the vaccine had died after having been hospitalized with a thrombosis, the government said it had reassessed the vaccine, and had concluded that because the spread of the virus had slowed markedly in Italy, the benefits of using the vaccine in people under 60 no longer outweighed the risks.

Other countries have also looked at mix-and-match approaches to second doses, especially after safety concerns arose over the AstraZeneca vaccine’s apparent association with some deaths from the rare blood-clotting condition. In France, about 500,000 people became eligible for a different booster dose in April after the government halted use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in people under 55.

Trials are underway around the world to test the mix-and-match approach, referred to by scientists as heterologous prime-boost. Citing data from two clinical trials in Spain and one in Britain, the Italian drug regulatory agency said the approach was safe and effective.

Still, the idea is meeting with opposition in Italy, where almost a million people aged 18 to 59 who have had first doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine would be affected.

“We are not going to administer vaccines different from the first dose,” Vincenzo De Luca, the president of Campania, the southern Italian region that includes Naples, said in a statement on Sunday. “The current level of confusion risks jeopardizing the very continuation of the vaccination campaign.”

(Mr. De Luca later said his region would comply with the government’s policy, but maintained that there was “communication chaos” around vaccines.)

Public health researchers also raised questions about what they called “creative vaccination.”

“Scientific evidence today on this topic is still preliminary and keeps a certain level of insecurity,” Nino Cartabellotta, the president of GIMBE, a research foundation, said on Italian radio.

Others were more blunt in criticizing the government’s shifting vaccine policies. “We do not understand anything anymore,” Luca Pani, a former director of Italy’s drug regulatory agency, wrote in the Italian newspaper Il Foglio, “besides the fact that, putting one patch above the other, they turned the AstraZeneca saga into a monster.”

The top health care official for the Lazio region, which includes Rome, said that since the policy was announced, about 10 percent of affected people in his area were skipping or canceling their second-dose appointments or were walking out without receiving a shot when told that it would be of a different vaccine. He said the government should allow people to decide for themselves whether to stick with AstraZeneca for their second shot.

 

Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/16/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask/italy-debates-its-mix-and-match-plan-to-finish-vaccinating-astrazeneca-first-dose-recipients

 

 

 

Japan pursues vaccine diplomacy in Asia, even as shots lag at home

By Zia ur-Rehman

 

  

AstraZeneca vaccines donated by the Japanese government to Taiwan were loaded at Narita Airport near Tokyo this month.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Japan’s leaders are racing to lift Covid-19 vaccination rates at home, but that hasn’t stopped them from donating doses in the Asia Pacific region as part of a wider geopolitical strategy.

Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi of Japan said this week that the country would send a million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Vietnam on Wednesday. The shots are among the 120 million doses that Japan expects to obtain as part of a deal it struck with the British-Swedish manufacturer.

Japan also donated more than a million AstraZeneca shots to Taiwan this month, and Mr. Motegi said this week that it planned to donate vaccines to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.

Japan is donating vaccines to Taiwan and Vietnam directly rather than through Covax, the global vaccine-sharing program. That suggests geopolitics are a motivating factor, experts say.

China has been promoting its self-made vaccines in Southeast Asia and beyond in a charm offensive that has clear diplomatic overtones. Stephen Nagy, a political scientist at International Christian University in Tokyo, said that Japan appeared to see its own vaccine diplomacy as a counterweight.

“Watching what China has done, delivering a lot of Sinovac in particular countries, Japan does not want to fall behind,” he said, referring to the manufacturer of one of China’s main vaccines.

China has been asserting its geopolitical muscle in the region for years, flying warplanes over Taiwan and fortifying artificial islands in parts of the South China Sea that are also claimed by Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Japan has often found ways to gently push back.

In Vietnam, Japan has invested in large infrastructure projects and supplied the country’s navy with coast guard vessels for patrolling the South China Sea. After Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan took office last year, he made Vietnam his first overseas stop.

Vietnam could use more vaccines. It kept infections low until recently through rigorous quarantining and contact tracing, but is now experiencing its worst outbreak yet. Only about 1.5 percent of the country’s 97 million people have received even one shot, according to a New York Times tracker.

Japan’s health authorities have authorized the AstraZeneca vaccine for emergency use, and about 90 million of its 120 million doses will be manufactured domestically. But the government has held off administering that vaccine locally because of concerns over very rare complications involving blood clots.

Japan’s inoculation campaign has also been held up by strict rules that allow only doctors and nurses to administer shots, and by a requirement that vaccines be tested on people in Japan before being approved for use.

Only about 25 million vaccine doses have been administered in Japan and 15 percent of the population has received at least one shot. That percentage is about the same as in India, and far below that of most richer countries.

The government wants to speed up vaccines in part so that it can allow domestic spectators when the Tokyo Olympics begin in July. The news agency Kyodo reported on Tuesday that officials are considering allowing up to 10,000 fans or half of a venue’s capacity — whichever is smaller — at Olympic events.

For now, Tokyo and nine other prefectures remain under a state of emergency that has been in effect since late April. The order is scheduled to expire on June 20, barely a month before the Olympics start.

 

Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/16/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask/japan-pursues-vaccine-diplomacy-in-asia-even-as-shots-lag-at-home

 

 

 

The W.H.O. urges wealthy nations to give Latin America priority for vaccine donations

By  Ernesto Londoño

 

Medical personnel transport a patient to an ambulance in Lomas de Zamora, Argentina last week.Credit...Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press

FRIO DE JANEIRO — The World Health Organization is urging the wealthy nations that recently pledged to donate one billion Covid-19 vaccine doses to give priority to Latin American nations with high levels of virus transmission and mortality.

Nine of the ten countries with the most recent deaths in proportion to their populations are in South America or the Caribbean, where vaccination campaigns are mostly off to slow and chaotic starts.

Health care professionals in the region are reporting a surge of younger patients requiring hospitalization, and in several cities, intensive care units are full or nearly so, according to Dr. Carissa F. Etianne, director of the Pan American Health Organization, a part of the W.H.O.

About 1.1 million new coronavirus cases and more than 31,000 deaths were reported last week in the Americas, most of them in South American nations where transmission remains out of control.

Colombia set new records for reported deaths three days in a row this week, peaking on Tuesday with 599 deaths. Brazil is on track to reach the grim milestone of 500,000 total deaths in the next week or two, and is reporting more than 70,000 new cases a day on average. Though Chile has carried out one of the world’s most aggressive inoculation campaigns, it has not yet managed to rein in transmission.

Dr. Etianne urged leaders of the major industrial democracies to use epidemiological criteria to determine which countries will be first in line to receive the one billion vaccine doses that the Biden administration and allied nations pledged to distribute.

“While vaccines are needed everywhere, we hope G7 nations will prioritize doses for countries at greatest risk, especially those in Latin America that have not yet had access to enough vaccines to even protect the most vulnerable,” she said.

W.H.O. officials said that focusing on the countries where the crisis is worst — including Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile — made sense from both a moral and a pragmatic standpoint. Large sustained outbreaks in those countries raise the potential for more dangerous virus variants to emerge and to cross borders.

“No region of the world is protected from new peaks of transmission,” said Dr. Sylvain Aldighieri, the Covid-19 incident manager at the Pan American Health Organization. “No country and no region will be safe until high vaccination coverage is reached.”

 

Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/world/americas/who-vaccine-latin-america.html

 

 

 

The U.S. agrees to buy 200 million more doses of Moderna’s vaccine, in case boosters are needed

By Pam Belluck

 

Preparing a Moderna Covid-19 vaccine in Seattle.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

The Biden administration, planning for the possibility that Americans could need booster shots of the coronavirus vaccine, has agreed to buy an additional 200 million doses from the drugmaker Moderna with the option to include any developed to fight variants as well as pediatric doses.

The purchase, with delivery expected to begin this fall and continue into next year, gives the administration the flexibility to administer booster shots if they prove necessary, and to inoculate children under 12 if the Food and Drug Administration authorizes vaccination for that age group, according to two administration officials not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Experts do not yet know whether, or when, booster shots might be necessary. The emergence of variants in recent months has accelerated research on boosters, and the current vaccines are considered effective against several variants, including the Alpha variant which was first identified in Britain and which became dominant in the United States.

And this week, U.S. health officials classified the Delta variant, which was first found in India, as a “variant of concern,” sounding the alarm because it spreads rapidly and may cause more serious illness in unvaccinated people. Concern over Delta prompted England to delay lifting restrictions imposed because of the pandemic.

Moderna, a company that had no products on the market until the F.D.A. granted its Covid vaccine emergency authorization last year, uses mRNA platform technology to make its vaccine — a so-called “plug and play” method that is especially adaptable to reformulation. Last month, the company announced preliminary data from a clinical trial of a booster vaccine matched to the Beta variant, first identified in South Africa; the study found an increased antibody response against Beta and Gamma, another variant of concern first identified in Brazil.

In announcing the purchase on Wednesday, Moderna said it expected to deliver 110 million of the new doses in the fourth quarter of this year, and 90 million in the first quarter of 2022. The option brings the total U.S. procurement of Moderna’s two-shot vaccine to 500 million doses.

“We appreciate the collaboration with the U.S. government for these additional doses of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine, which could be used for primary vaccination, including of children, or possibly as a booster if that becomes necessary to continue to defeat the pandemic,” Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive officer, said in a statement.

“We remain focused on being proactive as the virus evolves by leveraging the flexibility of our mRNA platform to stay ahead of emerging variants,” he said.

Under its existing contract with Moderna, the federal government had until Tuesday to exercise the option to purchase doses for future vaccination needs at the same price it is currently paying — about $16.50 a dose. Similar conversations are underway with Pfizer-BioNTech, which also makes a two-dose mRNA vaccine, but no agreement has been reached, one of the officials said.

State health departments are also preparing for the necessity of “revaccination,” Dr. Nirav Shah, president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and Maine’s top health official, told reporters on Wednesday.

“It may be just a bit too early to tell with finality whether second doses, booster doses” will be needed in the fall, Dr. Shah said. “Certainly the better job we do now lowers the likelihood that variants could run loose.”

He added, “There is a direct link between what we do now and what we may need to do later.”

As of Wednesday, about 65 percent of U.S. adults had received at least one shot, according to federal data. But with vaccination rates slowing down, the administration is still focused on trying to meet President Biden’s goal of having at least 70 percent of adults get one shot by July 4, and also on addressing the global vaccine shortage.

“With the concerning Delta variant growing and millions more Americans to vaccinate, we are focused on our urgent and robust response to the pandemic,” Kevin Munoz, a White House spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday.

Last week, at the outset of his meeting with leaders of the Group of 7 nations, Mr. Biden announced that the United States would buy 500 million doses of Pfizer vaccine and donate them for use by about 100 low- and middle-income countries over the next year, describing it as America’s “humanitarian obligation to save as many lives as we can.”

One of the officials said Wednesday that if the Moderna purchase left the administration with surplus vaccine, the administration would donate those doses to other countries.

 

Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/us/politics/moderna-covid-vaccine-booster-shots.html

 

 

 

Europe is edging toward a more open summer, with American tourists

 

Spain reopened for external travelers in recent weeks.Credit...Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York Times

Warmer weather and low coronavirus case numbers are raising hope in some countries in Europe that vaccine rollouts could usher in a more normal summer after an erratic year of lockdowns.

France announced on Wednesday, sooner than expected, that it was ending a mandate on mask-wearing outdoors and lifting a nighttime curfew that has lasted for months — an increasingly unpopular measure as days grew longer and cafes reopened.

“The health situation in our country is improving, and it is improving even faster than what we had hoped,” Jean Castex, the French prime minister, said in making the announcement, which some political opponents noted came a few days before regional elections.

In addition, tourists from the United States may be allowed back into European Union countries as early as Friday — a move crucial to lifting Europe’s battered economies. On Wednesday, ambassadors of the European Union indicated their support for adding the United States to a list of countries considered safe from an epidemiological point of view, a bloc official confirmed, though no official announcement is expected until Friday.

The traffic will be one-way, however, unless the United States lifts its ban on many European travelers, which was announced on Jan. 25 of this year, days after President Biden took office. The U.S. barred noncitizens coming from many countries around the globe, including the Schengen area of Europe, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

In Europe, however, low infection numbers in many countries in recent weeks have been taken as an optimistic sign. But that is not the case everywhere. In Britain, officials are keeping watch for the Delta variant, which has spurred a rise in cases, and on Monday delayed by a month a much-anticipated reopening that had been heralded as “freedom day.”

And in Moscow, a surge of cases prompted a shutdown, leaving Russian officials pleading with residents to get vaccinated.

Still, the move to open up the European Union countries to U.S. tourists signaled a wider hope that the bloc is on a pathway to normality.

Health policy in the European Union is ultimately the province of member governments, so each country has the right to decide whether to reopen, and to tailor the travel measures further — adding requirements for P.C.R. tests and quarantines, for example.

Travel from outside the bloc was practically suspended last year to limit the spread of the coronavirus, with the exception of a handful of countries that fulfilled specific criteria, such as low infection rate, and their overall response to Covid-19. Until Wednesday, the list contained a relatively small number of nations, including Australia, Japan and South Korea, but more are coming, including Albania, Lebanon, North Macedonia and Serbia.

Some countries heavily dependent on tourism, like Spain and Greece, have already reopened to external travelers. Germany also lifted more restrictions this month, announcing it would remove a travel warning for locations with low infection rates from July 1.

The European Commission recommended last month that all travelers from third countries who were fully vaccinated with shots approved by the European Medicines Agency or by the World Health Organization should be allowed to enter without restrictions.

The loosening of travel measures was enabled by the fast pace of vaccination in the United States and by the acceleration of the inoculation campaign in Europe, and bolstered by advanced talks between the authorities on how to make vaccine certificates acceptable as proof of immunity.

The European Union is finalizing work on a Covid certificate system, which is supposed to be in place on July 1. Fifteen member countries already started issuing and accepting the certificate ahead of schedule this month. The document records whether people have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, recovered from Covid or tested negative within the past 72 hours, and it would eventually allow those who meet one of the three criteria to move freely across the 27 member countries.

Travelers coming from outside the bloc would have the opportunity to obtain a Covid certificate from an E.U. country, the European Commission said. That would facilitate travel between different countries inside the bloc, but would not be required for entering the European Union.

 

Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/world/europe/us-europe-travel.html

 

 

 

Summary

 

Here are the other key developments from the last few hours:

· MPs in England voted 461 to 60 to approve regulations that delay the easing of coronavirus restrictions in England to 19 July.

· South Africa’s Covid-19 infections jumped by 13,246 on Wednesday, the highest daily total in five months, its government said.

· US president Joe Biden said China was trying to project itself as a responsible nation in regard to the Covid-19 pandemic, but it remained unclear whether Beijing was really trying to understand the origins of the coronavirus.

· Johnson & Johnson is expected to miss its Covid vaccine supply target to the EU for the second quarter after millions of doses were banned for use in Europe over safety concerns, according to the European Commission.

· France and Spain are moving to ease rules around wearing face masks outside, in a development attributed by both countries to their Covid-19 vaccination campaigns.

· Australia’s second largest city will allow its five millions residents to travel more than 15 miles from home and end mandatory masks wearing outdoors from Friday.

· Ursula von der Leyen signed off on the first plans by EU member states to spend Brussels’ €800bn (£687bn) Covid recovery fund, as she sought to reverse the reputational damage inflicted on the bloc by the pandemic during a visit to Portugal and Spain.

· All care home staff in England will need to be fully vaccinated against coronavirus under a controversial new law, the government announced.

· Codogno, the town where the first domestic transmission of Covid-19 was detected in Italy, has registered zero infections among its inhabitants for the first time since February 2020.

· Companies in Germany will from the end of June no longer be forced to allow working from home, chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief of staff was quoted as saying.

· The Taj Mahal reopened to the public as India pushes to lift restrictions in a bid to revitalise its economy.

 

Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2021/jun/17/coronavirus-live-news-tokyo-plans-to-lift-emergency-before-olympics-germanys-curevac-jab-shows-47-efficacy