Bengal tiger Charly and Bornean orangutan Sandai, both members of endangered species, have received coronavirus vaccines at a Chilean zoo in a Latin American first.

New Covid-19 cases in the locked-down Chinese city of Xi'an fell to their lowest in a week as residents face their eleventh day under strict home confinement.

AstraZeneca said that a third, or "booster", dose of its Covid-19 vaccine Vaxzevria "significantly" lifted antibody levels against the Omicron strain in a laboratory study.

The government has eased up on public mobility restrictions (PPKM) as COVID-19 cases have come under control, but many Indonesians are reluctant to return to the office.

These Y-shaped proteins have made top news recently because COVID-19 shots don't produce as many of them that work against the heavily mutated Omicron variant compared to past strains -- at least, not without a booster. 

The companies' news was called reassuring by experts, and came as the first independent data from labs around the world emerged, suggesting that the new variant is better at evading vaccine-trained immunity than those before it.

The data, yet to be published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, shows that the companies' treatment, sotrovimab, is effective against all 37 identified mutations to date in the spike protein, GSK said in a statement.

This genetic sequence does not appear in any earlier versions of the coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2, but is ubiquitous in many other viruses including those that cause the common cold, and also in the human genome, researchers said.

The Omicron variant has been detected in 38 countries but no deaths have yet been reported, the WHO said on Friday.

In a statement, the British drugmaker said that lab tests and a study on hamsters have demonstrated the sotrovimab antibody cocktail to work against viruses that were bio-engineered to carry a number of hallmark mutations of the Omicron variant.

A stigma persists among the uninformed that people living with HIV are unhealthy and irresponsible. Some Indonesians living healthy lives with the condition are taking to social media to fight the negative perceptions. 

Officials in South Africa have said they are being "punished" for identifying a strain that has now been detected everywhere from the Netherlands to Britain, Canada and Hong Kong.

Senior health ministry official Sharon Alroy-Preis said Israel was putting together a safety plan for Miss Universe and could limit admission to the pageant from countries deemed to be high-risk.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's husband on Tuesday accused unvaccinated Germans of "laziness", as the country grapples with a dramatic rise in coronavirus infections.

Mourning fans of beloved Indian film star Puneeth Rajkumar are pledging to give up their eyes after the actor's untimely death brought his post-mortem organ donation into focus.

Gluten-free is an increasingly common term, but do those who follow such a diet really understand what it means?

The companies have sold the vast majority of their doses to rich countries, leaving low-income nations in the lurch, said the People's Vaccine Alliance (PVA), a coalition campaigning for wider access to Covid vaccines, which based its calculations on the firms' own earning reports.

Mental health communities and their volunteers are reaching out across the archipelago to help people deal with their psychological and emotional impacts from the pandemic.

The report that appeared earlier this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association focused on nearly 27,000 participants across France who took antibody tests to screen for COVID-19 infection. 

Previously, Taliban leaders had told communities in areas they controlled that vaccines were a Western conspiracy aimed at sterilising Muslim children.

Family attorneys say the CDC decision has opened the floodgates for divorce and litigation.

A ground-breaking vaccine against malaria has stoked hopes in Africa of rolling back a disease that claims hundreds of thousands of lives a year, many of them youngsters.

China announced 59 locally transmitted virus cases Saturday -- the highest since mid-September -- including two cases in Beijing linked to a tourist group infected in the north of the country. 

The true number of fatalities is believed to be far higher than the five million based on daily reports provided by health authorities in each country.

Its inventor hopes the Wondaleaf Unisex Condom will empower people to take better control of their sexual health regardless of their sex or sexual orientation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it additionally difficult for recovering drug addicts to recover and not relapse

People aged 40-59 who are at a higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease but have no history of it, should consult with their doctor and make an individual decision on whether to start taking the medicine.

Three mothers of children with cerebral palsy fight to legalize marijuana for healthcare purposes.

The drug, called AZD7442, reduced the risk of developing severe COVID-19 or death by 50 percent in patients who had been symptomatic for seven days or less, meeting the main goal of the trial.

The pandemic already causes enough problems for those living with kidney failure, but things get even worse when they contract the virus as it is near-impossible to find a hospital that accepts hemodialysis patients with COVID-19