On Monday, children in the Philippines returned to school for in-person teaching for the first time since the pandemic started over two years ago. More than 28 million youngsters filed back into classrooms, according to the country's Education Department, after one of the world's longest pandemic-related shutdowns.
Plans to lift Covid restrictions, imposed in March 2020, had stalled due to fears that a slow vaccine rollout among students and teachers could lead to new outbreaks. But remote learning had proven challenging in a country where many families lack internet access.
The government extended a pilot of face-to-face classes, implemented in 300 facilities, to cover all schools. Currently, the education ministry's mandate states that in-person teaching must happen for at least three days a week, with all schools to have transitioned completely to in-person teaching by November 2, Reuters reported.
In a statement, UNICEF said: "Prolonged school closures, poor health risk mitigation, and household-income shocks had the biggest impact on learning poverty, resulting in many children in the Philippines failing to read and understand a simple text by age 10." The organization is providing guidelines and operating procedures to enable the safe reopening of schools and to help the nation overcome its educational crisis.
In vaccine news this week, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have submitted separate applications to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seeking emergency use authorization for their bivalent vaccines (targeting two variants of virus) for people aged 12 and above, and 18 and above respectively.
Meanwhile, the FDA authorized Novavax's Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use in adolescents aged 12 to 17 last week, after it showed a clinical efficacy of around 80% in that age group. In adults -- who the vaccine was approved for in July -- the overall efficacy is 90%.
Silvia Taylor, Novavax's senior vice-president of global corporate affairs, said the vaccine shows a "good immune response" against variants including Omicron BA.1 and BA.5.
The Novavax vaccine is the fourth jab to gain approval for use in the US, but the first to use a protein-based technology. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), around 60% of all 12- to 17-year-olds in the US are fully vaccinated.
Novavax's next steps will be to obtain trial data on children below 12, looking at groups aged 6 months to 23 months, 2 to 5, and 6 to 11. Taylor added that they have already started a trial with the 6 to 11 age group and expect to see the results in early 2023.
In other news
Pastor Jerry Eze's YouTube prayer channel rose to fame during the pandemic, running a live stream daily to thousands of followers across the world; with over 90,000 peak concurrent viewers, his platform is the second most watched gospel channel worldwide.
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Despite North Korea declaring victory over Covid-19 last week after an outbreak that, according to its government, only lasted a few months, Chinese customs has said that 1.23 million face masks and 15,000 pairs of rubber gloves were exported to the state in July.
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