The White House COVID-19 response team said Friday that all coronavirus vaccines currently available were safe and effective and urged Americans to take whichever one they had access to, after the mayor of Detroit reportedly declined an allocation of the Johnson & Johnson drug.At a news briefing Thursday, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said he was declining a shipment of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, adding that while it was a very good vaccine, he felt the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were better and he wanted to get the people of …

The World Health Organization says it is using every measure it has to curb the spread of parallel Ebola outbreaks in Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo. One of the biggest lessons learned from the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa — the largest in history — is the critical importance of acting quickly to contain the deadly disease.  World health officials began marshaling staff and working on a strategy to combat the disease as soon as the first cases of the Ebola virus were detected in Guinea on February …

The east-central African nation of Rwanda began its COVID-19 vaccination program Friday, using the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, making it the first African nation to administer the drug. The nation received 102,960 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech and 240,000 doses of AstraZeneca through the international vaccine cooperative, COVAX facility earlier this week. Rwandan health authorities began transporting both shots around the hilly nation of 12 million people using helicopters to reach far-flung areas.  Earlier this week, Minister of Health Dr. Daniel Ngamije said the nation’s vaccination plan would prioritize high-risk groups first, including the sick …

A Wall Street Journal report says World Health Organization investigators who recently visited China to determine the origins of the emergence of the COVID-19 virus will not release a promised interim report of their findings.The Journal account, published Thursday, said the WHO team decided not to release its interim account “amid mounting tensions between Beijing and Washington.” Another international group of scientists has called for the WHO to conduct a new inquiry into COVID’s origins.The scientists calling for a new probe said in an open letter Thursday that the WHO …

Confidence in COVID-19 vaccines is growing, with people’s willingness to have the shots increasing as they are rolled out across the world and concerns about possible side effects are fading, a 14-country survey showed on Friday.Co-led by Imperial College London’s Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) and the polling firm YouGov, the survey found trust in COVID-19 vaccines had risen in nine out of 14 countries covered, including France, Japan and Singapore, which had previously had low levels of confidence.The latest update of the survey, which ran from Feb. 8-21, …