The antiviral drug Avigan was developed by the firm Fujifilm Toyama Chemical in 2014, and it was later envisioned as Japan’s leading prospect to solve the global Covid pandemic. The drug was enthusiastically promoted by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, but this October its development was quietly terminated.
Continued heavy fighting following the collapse of a ceasefire between the rebel region of Tigray and the Ethiopian national government further imperils aid efforts to a people already facing what some believe to be the world’s gravest humanitarian crisis.
Asserting that humanity “cannot wait for the pandemic to pass” before acting to rapidly reduce carbon emissions fueling the climate emergency, more than 220 health journals around the world published an unprecedented joint editorial calling for “urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5 degrees celsius, halt the destruction of nature, and protect health.”
The Covid-19 crisis became a dominating issue for the world, and Japan is no exception. This is a timeline of the events so far.
“I need to be blunt: the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure—and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.”
Top United Nations officials have called on nearly two hundred member nations—including the world’s wealthiest and most powerful—to help raise tens of billions of dollars in aid for poor countries facing pandemic, ongoing war, and encroaching famine in what will be a “humanitarian crisis year” in 2021.
A press conference by US President Donald Trump took an unexpected turn after Trump announced not only the end of Hong Kong’s favorable trade status under American law, but that the United States would be withdrawing from the World Health Organization.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stoked controversy with comments accusing the Taiwanese government of launching an organized campaign against him in the course of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.
SNA (Tokyo) — The following stories were reported in the first half of March 2020 by the Shingetsu News Agency. Rolling Coverage: Covid-19 —The Sakhalin authorities have requested that the Russian central government restrict all air and sea transport connections with Hokkaido from March 5
The Covid-19 crisis has elevated the visibility of the World Health Organization (WHO) as never before. Indeed, this may be the very first time that a bureaucratic agency of the United Nations, not the Security Council or General Assembly, has become a focus of global media attention. It is quite unfortunate, then, that the WHO’s main face at this crucial juncture has turned out to be a political hack.
