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SYDNEY – Poland is selling one million doses of the Pfizer vaccine to boost Australia’s comparatively low COVID-19 inoculation rates. Australia has bought extra doses of the Pfizer vaccine from the Polish government for an undisclosed amount. The first shipment arrived in Sydney Sunday. Reports have said Poland has been trying to sell-on at least four million spare doses from its national stockpile. The deal is part of Canberra’s international hunt for extra doses to boost its vaccination rollout. With only about a quarter of its population fully inoculated, Australia has lagged behind many other countries. Half of the doses from Poland will go to 20-to-39-year-olds in the

The U.S. military will start requiring service members to receive a COVID-19 vaccine by the middle of September, anticipating full regulatory approval of a vaccine by then. In a memo to service members, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he would seek President Joe Biden’s approval to make the vaccines mandatory no later than mid-September or as soon as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gives final approval to the Pfizer vaccine, “whichever comes first.”   The memo urges troops to prepare for the requirement, and Austin added that if coronavirus infection rates rise, “I will not hesitate to act sooner

    A student organization is trying to combat misinformation about COVID-19 and pandemic on American campuses through social media. COVID Campus Coalition’s mission is to dispel “misconceptions surrounding COVID vaccines by providing students with weekly digestible scientific summaries through a plethora of virtual and in-person platforms,” according to its website. “Look at the comments of an Instagram post about the vaccine and you have people spouting myths and conspiracies about the virus,” said sophomore James Lifton of Edinburgh, Scotland, a political science major, who has teamed up with COVID Campus Coalition on his campus, Texas A&M (TAMU). Social media has

One-third of Israel’s seniors — about 420,000 of those age 60 and older — have received a coronavirus booster shot, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Sunday, adding that the figure could reach 500,000 by the end of the day. Bennett announced the progress of the vaccine campaign, which began 10 days ago and uses the Pfizer vaccine, at a Cabinet meeting. Israel became a vaccination leader early in the pandemic, with about 5.4 million of its population of 9.3 million people fully vaccinated. Still, with hospitalizations on the rise, almost exclusively with the delta variant, the government offered the third

  TOKYO – The official price tag for the Tokyo Olympics in $15.4 billion, which a University of Oxford study says is the most expensive on record. What else could those billions buy? The ballpark figure for building a 300-bed hospital in Japan is $55 million. So you could put up almost 300 of these. The average elementary school in Japan costs about $13 million. For that price, you get 1,200 schools. A quick search finds a Boeing 747 is priced at roughly $400 million. Voila: 38 jumbo jets for the cost of the Tokyo Olympics. The point is that Olympic Games