MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 31st May, 2021) As the pandemic keeps the whole world in its clutches despite the vaccination race, the discussion on the origin of the virus begins again.
As the COVID-19 crisis is worsening, doctors in Malaysia, when deciding whether to place a patient into an intensive care unit, may soon have to start giving preference to those who are more likely to overcome the disease, Straits Times reports citing Director-General of Health Noor Hisham Abdullah. According to Abdullah, the ICUs are 104 percent full, while regular beds are 85 percent full.
France has vaccinated 25 million people with at least the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, the government said on Sunday. By mid-June, the country aims to hit the 30 million mark.
The UK is similarly pushing forward. Over 50% of people in their 30s in England have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine shot in just over two weeks since the start of the vaccine rollout to their age group, the National Health Service said on Sunday.
Meanwhile, the UK government is not ruling out the idea of mandatory vaccine shots for healthcare professionals. When asked by the BBC if this was being considered, the minister for COVID-19 vaccine deployment, Nadhim Zahawi, said it "would be irresponsible for us as a government and ministers not to ask that question."
In a drive to win over the pandemic, countries are looking to secure vaccines. Vaccination is an important topic in diplomatic communication. President of Nepal Bidya Devi Bhandari wrote to Russian President Vladimir Putin to request help obtaining Russia's Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, a Nepal government source told Sputnik.
Sixty percent of Britons believe the claim that at the start of the pandemic Prime Minister Boris Johnson deemed the coronavirus to be "just a scare story," a fresh Opinium poll shows. A few days earlier, prime minister's former adviser Dominic Cummings told a parliament committee that Johnson had downplayed the threat at the beginning of the pandemic and was "unfit" to lead the government.
This finding may be somewhat mitigated by the fact that the same poll found that 71% of respondents do not trust Cummings himself. Still, the public believes that most of Cummings' claims are probably true, with 66% of respondents thinking that the cabinet was indeed pursuing a strategy of "herd immunity" at the start of the pandemic and 60% trusting the allegation that Johnson thought that the coronavirus was a scare story and described it as "the new Swine flu."
In a different kind of controversy, the origins of the coronavirus have come into spotlight once again. UK intelligence agents are investigating a possible leak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, The Sunday Times reports. Earlier this week, The Daily Mail reported that UK Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Birger Sorensen had conducted a study claiming to have proven that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was of laboratory origin.
