The latest coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic from Research Professional News
Special investigation: UK higher education institutions spent millions of pounds making their campuses Covid-secure for this academic year, Research Professional News can reveal.
Full story: Universities spend millions on Covid-safe campuses
UK
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has called for “authoritative and comprehensive national guidelines” on resource allocation decisions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The University and College Union is among 13 organisations to sign a letter to health secretary Matt Hancock, urging him to prioritise Covid-19 vaccination for education staff.
The UK’s health regulator has warned that patient involvement in the design of research studies is not just “a nice to have” but must be “business as usual”, even with fast-moving work on Covid-19.
EU
Uğur Şahin, the chief executive of the Germany-headquartered healthcare company BioNTech, has said the development of the technology used in its Covid-19 vaccine was made possible in part by sustained support from EU R&D programmes.
Most employees at Norwegian universities and colleges feel unhappy, worry that their work is undervalued and are angry at a lack of pay increases, a survey on the impact of Covid-19 has shown.
University teachers and researchers will strike across France on 26 January as part of a “month of struggle”, unions have announced.
The Association of Historians of Germany (VHD) has called for more attention to be paid to the difficulties faced by entry-level history researchers due to the coronavirus pandemic.
US
The cost of the Covid-19 pandemic to US research is reaching tens of billions of dollars, an association of research institutions has estimated.
New Zealand
Current and prospective international students in New Zealand face a difficult year, as border closures remain in place and those already in the country must choose whether to stay indefinitely.
Africa
The World Health Organization has urged African countries to expand sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 in order to track variants that could be driving a resurgence in Covid-19 infections.
World
The World Health Organization is calling on researchers to prioritise work on rapidly spreading variants of the Covid-19 virus, especially vital sequencing that is currently limited to a small number of nations.