Speedometer Blog

Vaccines have played a large role in the global COVID-19 response and saved numerous lives. However, when highly transmissible variants such as Omicron (BA.1) appeared and quickly dominated the reported cases, the effectiveness of vaccinations was noticeably waning.

The ongoing global outbreak of monkeypox is poised to test public health infrastructure across the globe. Monkeypox, a viral infection in the same family as smallpox, is usually uncommon in countries outside of West and Central Africa, where the disease is endemic.

Pills To Treat COVID-19 Are Here… Sort Of

Author: Andrea Taylor

We are excited to release data on purchases of therapeutics to treat COVID-19. The latest numbers are available from the Duke Global Health Innovation Center at the Launch and Scale Speedometer project here.

On January 26, 2022, the White House announced that the United States has shipped over 400 million COVID-19 vaccine doses.

Every day, women and children around the world die from conditions and diseases for which proven and effective health interventions exist, but are inaccessible or reach them too slowly.

Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa with a population of 118 million.  The first COVID-19 case in Ethiopia was identified on March 13, 2020  but, like many African countries, Ethiopia had relatively low reported cases and deaths during the first wave of infections compared with other parts of the world.

We are excited to announce the release of new analysis and recommendations through our initiative, the COVID Global Accountability Platform (COVID GAP), a collaboration between Duke University and the Covid Collaborative.

Widespread administration of oral polio vaccines (OPVs) has resulted in reduced incidence of polio and the eradication of wild poliovirus type 2 and type 31,2.

Most high income and upper middle-income countries have fully vaccinated more than half of their population.

As we and a coalition of over 100 leaders and organizations called for, President Biden hosted a Global COVID-19 Summit on Wednesday. With participation of world leaders mostly virtually, the Summit covered familiar ground as well as some new territory.

Deliveries of vaccine donations are more important than ever, given the persistent gaps in vaccine coverage globally and threat of the highly contagious delta variant.

Cuba has become the leader of COVID-19 vaccine development in Latin America – producing a total of five vaccine candidates so far, four of which are awaiting submission to WHO’s Emergency Use Listing Procedure (EUL).

The past 18 months have shown us what happens when we rely on fragmented responses to a pandemic – the result is an uncoordinated patchwork of insufficient approaches and the continued spread of an ever-mutating virus. It sounds obvious but still needs to be said: pandemics are global and our response must be as well.

The US has continued to advance plans for boosters since we wrote about the issue earlier this month, with an announcement that a third dose will be offered to all residents (not just the highly vulnerable), eight months after the second dose.

Despite the shortage of Covid-19 vaccines globally, millions of doses are being wasted rather than used. Vaccine wastage is defined as vaccines discarded, lost, damaged or destroyed according to the WHO.