(Reuters) – As EU leaders voiced frustration over a massive shortfall in contracted deliveries of AstraZeneca vaccines, the bloc’s executive said vaccine exports by the British-Swedish company could be blocked until it delivers the shots it promised to the EU.
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EUROPE
* All airline passengers entering Germany will have to provide a negative coronavirus test result before departure as of Monday, German Health Minister Jens Spahn said.
* Norway will delay its decision on whether to resume the use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, broadcaster TV2 reported.
* Romania extended a night time curfew to stem a rise in coronavirus infections but will relax movement restrictions for pending religious holidays, authorities said.
AMERICAS
* U.S. President Joe Biden said he was setting a new goal of administering 200 million vaccine doses in the United States in his first 100 days in office.
* Moderna has delayed the shipment of 590,400 doses of its vaccine that were due to arrive in Canada this weekend, the federal procurement minister said.
* Colombia has approved emergency use of Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot vaccine, the director of food and drug regulator INVIMA said.
* Argentina has decided to suspend flights from Brazil, Chile and Mexico starting on Saturday to prevent variants of the coronavirus from entering the country.
ASIA-PACIFIC
* Australia is considering diverting COVID-19 inoculations from its vaccination programme to Papua New Guinea where the coronavirus is threatening to unleash a humanitarian disaster, a government source said.
* South Korea said it will extend its coronavirus distancing rules, which include an outside dining curfew and ban on gatherings of five or more people, for two weeks.
* China’s capital Beijing has started offering domestically developed vaccines to foreigners, the city’s foreign affairs office said.
* India will widen its coronavirus vaccination campaign in the near future to include more people, instead of restricting it to those above age 45, Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said.
MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA
* The Biden administration is giving the Palestinians $15 million to aid in their COVID-19 response in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the U.S. State Department said.
* The first 723,000 of up to 7 million vaccine doses that MTN Group is donating to African countries have arrived in nine nations, the African Union’s disease control body said.
* Iraq received 336,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, the first sent there under the global COVAX vaccine-sharing scheme.
* Israel has administered two doses of COVID-19 vaccine to more than half its population.
MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS
* AstraZeneca said its vaccine was 76% effective in a new analysis of its U.S. trial – only a tad lower than the level in an earlier report this week criticised for using outdated data.
* Europe’s drugs regulator said its safety panel will call a meeting of experts on March 29 to further study reported cases of blood clots linked to AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
* Global shares bounced back, with Asian stocks recovering from a three-month low, as investors focused more on optimism about the global economic recovery than rising tensions between the West and China. [MKTS/GLOB]
* Spain’s economy did not grow in the fourth quarter as restrictions to curb a second wave of infection weighed on private consumption, official data showed, revising down a preliminary estimate for slight growth.
(Compiled by Veronica Snoj and Aditya Soni; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila and Peter Graff)
