(Reuters) – With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping across its shores earlier this year, the U.S. government in April announced orders for almost $3 billion of ventilators for a national stockpile, meant to save Americans suffering from severe respiratory problems brought on by the disease.

But of the 140,000 machines added since then by the government to the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile, almost half were basic breathing devices that don’t meet what medical specialists say are the minimum requirements for ventilators needed to treat Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, the main cause of death among COVID-19 patients, according to a Reuters review of publicly-available device specifications and interviews with doctors and industry executives.

Only about 10% are full intensive care unit (ICU) ventilators of a type that doctors and ventilator specialists say they would normally use to intubate patients suffering from Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome or ARDS, the Reuters review found. The

By Guy Faulconbridge and Paul Sandle

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain approved Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday, jumping ahead of the United States and Europe to become the West’s first country to formally endorse a jab it said should reach the most vulnerable people early next week.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson touted the medicine authority’s approval as a global win and a ray of hope amid the gloom of the novel coronavirus which has killed nearly 1.5 million people globally, hammered the world economy and upended normal life.

Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) granted emergency use approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which they say is 95% effective in preventing illness, in record time – just 23 days since Pfizer published the first data from its final stage clinical trial.

“It’s fantastic,” Johnson said. “The vaccine will begin to be made available across the UK from next week. It’s

By Julie Steenhuysen and Manojna Maddipatla

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A panel of advisers to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday voted 13-to-1 to recommend that healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities should be first in line to receive initial doses of COVID-19 vaccines when they become available.

The vote occurred at an emergency meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which has been meeting for months to study and recommend who in the United States should get the first scarce doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.

There are an estimated 21 million healthcare workers and an additional 3 million nursing home residents in the United States.

Although panel members universally endorsed the recommendation to include frontline healthcare workers in the initial allocation, several members of the panel voiced concerns about the inclusion of long-term care residents. They noted that neither of the

PARIS (Reuters) – As Europeans brace for a grim winter with the threat of rising COVID-19 infections, minimal numbers of flu cases recorded so far point to a possible silver lining.

Data available for Europe since the beginning of October, when flu case numbers usually start to ramp up, mirror shallow figures seen in the Southern Hemisphere earlier this year.

Some doctors say a combination of lockdowns, mask wearing and handwashing appear to have hampered transmission of the flu, while warning that the data should be treated with caution because the peak of the season is weeks or even months away.

According to Flu News Europe, a joint monitoring platform of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the World Health Organization which collects samples in 54 European regions, only one person was diagnosed with flu out of 4,433 sentinel tests during Sept. 28-Nov. 22.

This sentinel-source data

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Pfizer Inc and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine could be rolled out in Europe this month, the companies said on Tuesday after they applied for EU emergency approval for the shot.

The application to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) comes days after the companies applied for emergency use of their vaccine in the United States. They said their candidate, BNT162b2, could be launched in the European Union this month.

“If EMA concludes that the benefits of the vaccine candidate outweigh its risks in protecting against COVID‑19, it will recommend granting a CMA (conditional marketing authorization)that could potentially enable use of BNT162b2 in Europe before the end of 2020,” they said in a joint statement.

In their pursuit of a European launch, the partners are neck-and-neck with rival Moderna, which said on Monday it would ask the EU regulator to recommend conditional approval for its shot.

An effective immunization is