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Health Check: WHO warns against vaccine rollout unfairness

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Pfizer-Biontech Covid vaccines

2021/01/13 GMT

WHO warns against vaccine rollout unfairness

BBC World Service - Health Check, WHO warns against vaccine rollout unfairness

Are poorer countries missing out in the global vaccine rollout?  A warning from the WHO

Covid vaccine rollouts; arthritis drugs treat Covid; teaching dentistry in the pandemic; South Asian air pollution and miscarriage; hernia surgery by non-doctors in Sierra Leone.

BBC global health correspondent Naomi Grimley joins Claudia Hammond for a round-up of the latest developments in Covid vaccines and their rollouts – including the World Health Organisation’s Director General who has admonished richer countries and pharma companies for undermining the chances of access to vaccines for all countries. Plus a controversial vaccine rollout in India and the Iranian leader wants to ban US and UK vaccines.

Claudia’s guest of the week is family doctor Ann Robinson who has perspectives on some of the latest Covid treatment news. Early results suggests a place for two monoclonal antibodies in treating patients who are sick enough to be in intensive care, although the drugs are expensive. And there are some encouraging results from a small trial in Argentina of convalescent plasma therapy in older mildly ill patients.   

The pandemic has disrupted the training of the next generation of health professionals. From Chile, Jane Chambers reports on how a leading dental college in Santiago is innovating to keep the practical tuition of its students up to standard.

Ann Robinson tells Claudia about new research measuring the role of air pollution in miscarriages and stillbirths in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Should only doctors do surgery? Claudia talks to Sierra Leonian surgeon Thomas Ashley and Jenny Lofgren of the Karolinska about training more junior health care workers to perform relatively simple surgical procedures such as hernia repair, in the hope of addressing the enormous unmet need for this operation across sub-Saharan Africa.

Presenter: Claudia Hammond
Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

(Image: Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines pictured in January 2021 in Liege, Belgium. Photo credit: Vincent Kalut/Photonews/Getty Images.)

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