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US and EU to back new Covid origin probe; Pfizer to expand trial in under-12s – as it happened

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An Israeli youth receives a Pfizer vaccine in Rishon LeZion. Pfizer will expand its trial in under-12s.
An Israeli youth receives a Pfizer vaccine in Rishon LeZion. Pfizer will expand its trial in under-12s. Photograph: Sebastian Scheiner/AP
An Israeli youth receives a Pfizer vaccine in Rishon LeZion. Pfizer will expand its trial in under-12s. Photograph: Sebastian Scheiner/AP

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Key events

This blog is closing now but thanks for reading and we’ll be back in a few hours with more rolling coverage of the pandemic. In the meantime you can read all our coronavirus coverage here.

And these were the main developments in the past 24 hours:

  • The US and the European Union are expected to support a renewed push into investigating the origins of Covid-19 after conflicting assessments about where the outbreak started, according to Bloomberg News.
  • Washington is also forming working parties with Brussels, Canada, and Mexico to determine how best to safely restart international travel. It came as the World Travel and Tourism Council said the UK government had to scrap its traffic light system for travel because it had “wreaked havoc”.
  • Portugal will allow vaccinated US tourists into the country, Reuters reports. “We are in a position to approve the opening of non-essential travel and flights to people from the US to Portugal as long as they have a vaccination certificate,” economy minister Pedro Siza Vieira, cited by Portuguese radio Renascenca, said.
  • Vaccine passports will be used for the first time at UK sporting events for England’s Euro 2020 group games at Wembley stadium, with those not fully vaccinated able to show proof of a negative lateral flow test taken within the previous 48 hours.
  • World Bank president David Malpass said the institution does not support waiving intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organization, claiming it is out of concern that it would hamper innovation in the pharmaceuticals sector.
  • South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa placed the country’s health minister on “special leave” over alleged links to a corruption scandal involving coronavirus communications funding.
  • Pfizer is to begin testing its Covid-19 vaccine on a larger cohort of thousands of children under 12 years old in the US, Finland, Poland and Spain after selecting a lower dose of the shot in an earlier stage of the trial.
  • Many thousands of vaccine doses have been destroyed in African countries after exceeding their expiry dates amid a reluctance to be inoculated and a lack of medical infrastructure, while some jabs were donated relatively late in their shelf life.
  • Music fans flocked to the first unrestricted European festival since the pandemic began over the weekend at an event in Albania that had 10,000 attendees across four days, with everyone showing proof of a recent negative test.
  • Washington state is to give adults a free cannabis spliff after they receive a Covid jab in an attempt to accelerate vaccination uptake through a promotion coined “Joints for Jabs” by the state’s liquor and cannabis board.

US president Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific policy chief said he was “relatively confident” a target for the production of a billion vaccine doses for the region by the end of 2022 would be met, despite the Covid-19 crisis in India, where they are due to be made.

Asked at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security think tank if he expected a delay in the four-nation plan, Kurt Campbell said Washington had been in close consultation with India and others involved in the project, Reuters reports.

“Obviously, this is an extremely difficult period for Indian friends. The United States has tried to stand with Delhi and to bring others, both in the private and public sector, to support them,” he said.

“Our discussions with both our partners in the private sector, and also in government, suggest that we are - knock on wood - still on track for 2022.”

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Brazil has had 52,911 new cases of coronavirus reported in the past 24 hours and 2,378, the country’s health ministry said.

The South American country has now registered 17,037,129 cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 476,792, according to ministry data, Reuters reports.

Uruguay released data on the impact of Sinovac Biotech’s Covid-19 vaccine among its population that showed it was more than 90% effective in preventing intensive care admissions and deaths.

The dose reduced deaths by 95% and intensive care admissions by 92%, and also showed 61% efficacy in cutting coronavirus infections, the government said.

A total of 795,684 people – health workers and members of the general population between the ages of 18 and 69 – at least 14 days after receiving their second dose of Sinovac’s CoronaVac were compared with unvaccinated people to determine the real-world vaccine effectiveness, the government said in a report.

The government also studied the effectiveness of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine among 162,047 health workers and people over 80. The shot was 94% effective at preventing intensive care unit admissions and deaths, and reduced infections by 78%, the report said.

Overall, intensive care hospitalisations and deaths from Covid-19 dropped by more than 90% among Uruguayans who were fully inoculated, the data showed, Reuters reports.

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The “failed and damaging” traffic light system for international travel must be abandoned if the UK travel and tourism sector is to be saved from total collapse, an industry body warned.

World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) said the government must scrap the system which has “wreaked havoc” among consumers and businesses in order to save hundreds of thousands of jobs, PA reports.

The risk-based system with red, amber and green ratings for countries around the world determines the quarantine and coronavirus testing requirements people face when returning to the UK.

But Portugal being moved from the green to amber caught many holidaymakers by surprise and left thousands of UK tourists scrambling to get home before new quarantine rules came into force on Tuesday morning.

The WTTC said that moving to a more transparent and easier to understand system will restore consumer confidence and provide a “much-needed” boost to the travel and tourism sector.

It warned that a further 218,000 jobs were at “serious risk” if international travel continued to be off-limits for most of the summer, on top of the 307,000 jobs which were lost in the UK sector last year.

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The British Olympic Association (BOA) has reacted to speculation that Japan could place the UK on its red list by revealing that 86% of Team GB has already had at least one Covid vaccine – and pledging to do everything possible to keep the local population in Tokyo safe.

In a letter to the head of the Tokyo organising committee, Seiko Hashimoto, the BOA chair, Hugh Robertson, said Team GB athletes and staff were “doing everything possible to minimise any risk to the people of Japan” in the lead-up to the Olympic Games. He also promised the hosts that the BOA would “do everything we can to get the entire team fully vaccinated before we depart for Japan”.

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The US administered 303,923,667 doses of Covid-19 vaccines and distributed 372,100,285 doses in the country as of Tuesday morning, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Those figures are up from the 302,851,917 vaccine doses the CDC said had gone into arms by 7 June out of 371,520,735 doses delivered, Reuters reports.
The agency said 171,731,584 people had received at least one dose while 140,441,957 people are fully vaccinated as of Tuesday.

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Brazil’s government will need at least 11bn reais ($2.2bn) in extra cash to extend emergency cash transfers to the poor for two or three months until the Covid-19 outbreak is under control, economy minister Paulo Guedes said.

The monthly cost of the programme is about 9bn reais, so a two-month extension would cost 18bn reais, Guedes said, adding that the government already has an unspent 7bn left from the previous package that was revived in April, Reuters reports.

President Jair Bolsonaro is deciding whether the aid will be extended for two or three months, Guedes said. This will depend on how the pandemic evolves, but even three months should not cause ripples in financial markets, Guedes said.

“I wouldn’t expect any noise from the market ... if you spend 11 or 12bn more. That’s reasonable (in view of the pandemic).”

The additional funding would come from emergency spending from a parallel budget to combat Covid-19 that is not subject to the government’s spending cap rules.

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Amid the stress and unknowability of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic – which continues to wreak daily havoc and decimate arts industries around the world – there was a moment when some Australian musicians actually felt lucky.

“A lot of my friends overseas weren’t getting any sort of stimulus or funding from [their] governments, and we were,” recalls Harriette Pilbeam, who records as Hatchie. After months of lobbying, the state and federal governments had begun drip-feeding the industry with rescue packages, and some musicians found themselves eligible for fortnightly jobkeeper supplements (although many working behind the scenes were not).

“We were so grateful to be here – for [nearly] a year, we thought ‘God, we’re so lucky’,” she says. “It felt like it would be silly [to complain] while everyone else was so much worse off.”

Fast-forward to June 2021, and that moment has passed. Where Australian musicians may once have felt protected from the worst of the global crisis, they now feel left behind by a government that has botched the vaccine rollout, scrapped jobkeeper, and allowed sporting matches to continue while the music equivalents – stadium shows and festivals – have been cancelled repeatedly, often with no insurance.

The US is forming expert working groups with Canada, Mexico, the European Union and the UK to determine how best to safely restart travel after 15 months of pandemic restrictions, a White House official said.

Another US official said an announcement expected on Tuesday indicated the administration will not move quickly to lift orders that bar people from much of the world from entering the US because of the time it will take for the groups to do their work, Reuters reports.

“While we are not reopening travel today, we hope that these expert working groups will help us use our collective expertise to chart a path forward, with a goal of reopening international travel with our key partners when it is determined that it is safe to do so,” the White House official said.

They added: “Any decisions will be fully guided by the objective analysis and recommendations by public health and medical experts.”

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Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez thanked the Mexican government for agreeing to donate 100,000 Covid-19 vaccines, as he seeks to inoculate the population of the Central American country against coronavirus, Reuters reports.

Hernandez, in a tweet, also thanked El Salvador and Israel for helping his country secure vaccine doses.

Hundreds of UK passengers on a cruise ship sailing around the country have been told they will not be allowed to disembark when they arrive in Scotland on Wednesday.

The MSC Virtuosa left Liverpool on Tuesday and was due to dock at Greenock on Wednesday at about 9.30am, departing at 8pm the same day, PA reports.

The domestic seven-night cruise is then due to drop anchor at Belfast, Southampton and the Isle of Portland before returning to Greenock and with a final stop at Liverpool the following day.

However the Scottish Passenger Agents’ Association, the professional body for travel agents and the sector in Scotland, has seen a copy of an email sent to current passengers by the cruise operator.

It says: “Due to the latest Scottish Government Covid 19 restrictions and regulations ... we are sorry to inform you that the port call of Greenock has been cancelled.

“No guests are allowed to embark or disembark ... This decision has been made by the Scottish Government and is out of our control.”

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A summary of today's developments

  • The US and the European Union are expected to support a renewed push into investigating the origins of Covid-19 after conflicting assessments about where the outbreak started, according to a document seen by Bloomberg News.
  • Portugal will allow vaccinated US tourists into the country, Reuters reports. “We are in a position to approve the opening of non-essential travel and flights to people from the US to Portugal as long as they have a vaccination certificate,” economy minister Pedro Siza Vieira, cited by Portuguese radio Renascenca, said.
  • Vaccine passports will be used for the first time at UK sporting events for England’s Euro 2020 group games at Wembley stadium, with those not fully vaccinated able to show proof of a negative lateral flow test taken within the previous 48 hours.
  • World Bank president David Malpass said the institution does not support waiving intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organization, claiming it is out of concern that it would hamper innovation in the pharmaceuticals sector.
  • South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa placed the country’s health minister on “special leave” over alleged links to a corruption scandal involving coronavirus communications funding.
  • Pfizer is to begin testing its Covid-19 vaccine on a larger cohort of thousands of children under 12 years old in the US, Finland, Poland and Spain after selecting a lower dose of the shot in an earlier stage of the trial.
  • Many thousands of vaccine doses have been destroyed in African countries after exceeding their expiry dates amid a reluctance to be inoculated and a lack of medical infrastructure, while some jabs were donated relatively late in their shelf life.
  • Music fans flocked to the first unrestricted European festival since the pandemic began over the weekend at an event in Albania that had 10,000 attendees across four days, with everyone showing proof of a recent negative test.
  • Washington state is to give adults a free cannabis spliff after they receive a Covid jab in an attempt to accelerate vaccination uptake through a promotion coined “Joints for Jabs” by the state’s liquor and cannabis board.
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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has eased travel recommendations for more than 110 countries and territories including Japan just ahead of the Olympics.

Reuters reports:

The CDC’s new ratings include 61 nations that were lowered from its highest “Level 4” rating that discouraged all travel to recommending travel for fully vaccinated individuals, the agency confirmed on Tuesday.

Another 50 countries and territories have been lowered to “Level 2” or “Level 1,” a CDC spokeswoman said.

Countries ranked lowest for Covid-19 risks now include Singapore, Israel, South Korea, Iceland, Belize and Albania.

Among those now listed at “Level 3,” are France, Ecuador, Philippines, South Africa, Canada, Mexico, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, Honduras, Hungary, and Italy.

A US State Department official said it was in the process of revising its travel advisory to reflect the CDC changes.

As of early Tuesday, the State Department had lowered its ratings on more than 90 countries and territories, including for Japan.

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Mexico reported 3,449 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the country and 262 more fatalities on Tuesday, bringing total infections to 2,438,011 and the death toll to 229,100, according to health ministry data, Reuters reports.

Separate government data recently published suggests the real death toll may be at least 60% above the confirmed figure.

Rishi Sunak, the UK’s chancellor, is willing to accept a delay of up to four weeks to the final stage of England’s reopening roadmap, the Guardian understands, as the government considers extending restrictions beyond 21 June.

Ministers will continue to scrutinise data on cases and hospitalisations over the coming days, with a final decision set to be announced by the prime minister on Monday. From 21 June nightclubs are due to reopen, with the cap on wedding numbers, large-scale events and indoor mixing lifted and guidance on working from home and mask-wearing dropped.

A delay in all these changes would infuriate many Conservative backbenchers. On Tuesday the former Tory minister Steve Baker pressed for the date dubbed “freedom day” to go ahead, calling it the “last chance” to save industries such as hospitality, which is calling for the 2-metre distancing rule to be scrapped.

Sunak, the chancellor, has in the past been regarded as more keen to lift lockdown constraints than some cabinet colleagues.

But a Whitehall source said he was not fixated on the 21 June date and was more concerned that when restrictions are lifted, the move can be permanent. “The Treasury’s main thing is that freedoms are irreversible and businesses have clarity,” the source said.

Portugal to allow vaccinated US tourists to enter from next week

Portugal will allow vaccinated US tourists into the country, Reuters reports.

“We are in a position to approve the opening of non-essential travel and flights to people from the US to Portugal as long as they have a vaccination certificate,” economy minister Pedro Siza Vieira, cited by Portuguese radio Renascenca, said.

Tourists from the US wanting to travel to Portugal should have received final doses of one of the vaccines approved by the European Medicines Agency at least 14 days before their trip, Siza Vieira said.

“I believe that next week we will be able to have this up and running,” he said.

Vieira did not give an exact date for when US tourists would be allowed in.

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