The head of the World Health Organisation on Monday urged countries to work together to bring the acute phase of the pandemic to an end, saying that they now have all the tools available to do so.
"The COVID-19 pandemic is now entering its third year and we are at a critical juncture," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press conference alongside Germany's development minister Svenja Schulze.
"We must work together to bring the acute phase of this pandemic to an end. We cannot let it continue to drag on, lurching between panic and neglect."
Tedros said on Monday that Germany had become the agency's largest donor, without giving details. Historically, the United States has made the biggest financial contribution among member states to the organisation.
Schulze said that the top priority of Germany, which took over the G7 Presidency, is to end the pandemic worldwide and called for a "massively accelerated, truly global vaccination campaign" in order to do so.
The event in Geneva kicks off a week of WHO Executive Board meetings where key aspects of the U.N. health agency's future are due to be discussed, including Tedros' bid for a second term and a proposal to make the agency more financially independent.
GlaxoSmithKline sued Pfizer and BioNTech in Delaware federal court on Thursday, accusing them of infringing GSK patents related to messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in the companies' blockbuster COVID-19 vaccines.
Israel's military is poised to evacuate Palestinian civilians from Rafah and assault Hamas hold-outs in the southern Gaza Strip city, a senior Israeli defence official said, despite international warnings of a humanitarian catastrophe.
Relentless rains, hail and winds of near hurricane intensity battered southern China, forcing the evacuation of an entire town of more than 1,700 people in the province of Guangdong, media said on Thursday.
Marine wildlife experts were frantically trying to rescue some 140 pilot whales stranded on Thursday in the shallow waters of an estuary in the southwest of the state of Western Australia.
A grand jury has charged 18 people with allegedly participating in an Arizona fake elector scheme to re-elect then-US President Donald Trump in 2020, the state's attorney general said on Wednesday.