UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a wide-ranging resolution on tackling the coronavirus pandemic Friday over objections from the United States and Israel, which protested a successful last-minute Cuban amendment that strongly urged countries to oppose any unilateral economic, financial or trade sanctions.
...As the global economy absorbs the most punishing reversal of fortunes since the Great Depression, hunger is on the rise. Those confronting potentially life-threatening levels of so-called food insecurity in the developing world are expected to nearly double this year to 265 million, according to the United Nations World Food Program.
ZURICH/GENEVA (Reuters) - Safety of a prospective COVID-19 vaccine comes "first and foremost", the World Health Organization's chief scientist said on Wednesday, as a trial of a leading candidate from AstraZeneca was paused due to concerns over side effects.
Rollout of an effective vaccine is seen as a crucial step in helping battered economies recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
"Just because we talk about speed...it doesn't mean we start compromising or cutting corners on what would normally be assessed," Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said in a social media event.
"The process still has to follow through rules of the game. For drugs and vaccines which are given to people, you have to test their safety, first and foremost," she said.
The first famines of the coronavirus era could soon hit four chronically food-deprived conflict areas — Yemen, South Sudan, northeast Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo — the top humanitarian official of the United Nations has warned.
