“There is no silver bullet at the moment and there might never be,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

Geneva Hope to have a number of effective vaccines, prevent people from infection: Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

The World Health Organization warned Monday that there might never be a “silver bullet” for the new coronavirus, despite the rush to discover effective vaccines.

The WHO urged governments and citizens to focus on doing the known basics, such as testing, contact tracing, maintaining physical distance and wearing a mask in order to suppress the pandemic, which has upended normal life around the globe and triggered a devastating economic crisis.

“We all hope to have a number of effective vaccines that can help prevent people from infection,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual press conference.

“However, there’s no silver bullet at the moment — and there might never be.”

“For now, stopping outbreaks comes down to the basics of public health and disease control.

“Do it all,” he urged.

The novel coronavirus has killed nearly 690,000 people and infected at least 18.1 million since the outbreak emerged in Wuhan in China last December, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP.

The WHO began pressing China in early May to invite in its experts to help investigate the animal origins of COVID-19.

The UN health agency sent an epidemiologist and an animal health specialist to Beijing on July 10 to lay the groundwork for a probe aimed at identifying how the virus entered the human species.

Their scoping mission is now complete, said Tedros.

“The WHO advance team that travelled to China has now concluded their mission to lay the groundwork for further joint efforts to identify the virus origins,” he said.

“WHO and Chinese experts have drafted the terms of reference for the studies and programme of work for an international team, led by WHO.

“The international team will include leading scientists and researchers from China and around the world.

“Epidemiological studies will begin in Wuhan to identify the potential source of infection of the early cases.

“Evidence and hypotheses generated through this work will lay the ground for further, longer-term studies.”

The pair have not yet returned to the WHO’s Geneva headquarters for a debriefing.

Scientists believe the killer virus jumped from animals to humans, possibly from a market in the city of Wuhan selling exotic animals for meat.

Chinese officials said early in the outbreak that the virus may have spread from a market in the city, which sold live and wild animals, but no further confirmation of that has been revealed.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in June that a German shepherd in New York state was the first dog in the country to test positive for COVID-19, but did not identify the owners.

NEW YORK: A German shepherd in New York that had the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in a dog in the U.S. has died.

Robert and Allison Mahoney of Staten Island told National Geographic that their 7-year-old shepherd, Buddy, developed breathing problems in mid-April after Robert had been sick with the coronavirus for several weeks. A veterinarian tested Buddy in May and found him positive for the virus.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in June that a German shepherd in New York state was the first dog in the country to test positive for COVID-19, but did not identify the owners.

Buddy’s health declined steadily after he developed breathing problems and thick nasal mucus in April. He was euthanized on July 11 after he started vomiting clotted blood, the Mahoneys told National Geographic.

It’s unknown if the coronavirus played a role in his death. Blood tests indicated Buddy likely had lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system, veterinarians told the family.

A spokesman for the New York City Department of Health said arrangements were made to take the dog’s body for a necropsy but when the instructions were shared with the veterinarian, the body had already been cremated.

A USDA database of confirmed cases of the coronavirus in animals in the United States includes 12 dogs, 10 cats, a tiger and a lion. The agency says there is currently no evidence that animals play a significant role in spreading the coronavirus but it appears the virus can spread from people to animals in some situations.

JEDDAH: About 1,000 pilgrims converge on the Mina Valley outside Makkah on Wednesday to begin their spiritual journey of a lifetime.

The Day of Tarwiyah (fetching water) marks the beginning of Hajj. There are no major rituals, so the pilgrims will spend their time praying and reflecting until sunrise on Thursday.

Mina, 7 km northeast of the Grand Mosque in Makkah and within its boundaries, would normally be the site of the world’s largest tent city, accommodating about 2.5 million pilgrims.

However, Hajj participation is restricted this year to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, and the pilgrims are all Saudis or expatriates who live in the Kingdom.

Those selected to take part in this year’s Hajj were subject to temperature checks and placed in quarantine as they began arriving in Makkah, and health workers sanitized their luggage.

Health and safety staff with disinfectant cleaned the area around the Kaaba, the structure at the center of the Grand Mosque draped in gold-embroidered cloth toward which Muslims around the world pray.

Hajj authorities have cordoned the Kaaba this year, and pilgrims will not be allowed to touch it, to limit the chances of infection. They have also set up dedicated health centers, mobile clinics and ambulances to care for the pilgrims, who will be required to wear masks and observe social distancing.

All pilgrims were required to be tested for coronavirus before they arrived in Makkah, and they will be quarantined after the pilgrimage.

They were given amenity kits that include sterilized pebbles for the Jamarat stoning ritual, disinfectants, masks, a prayer rug and the ihram, the seamless white garment worn by pilgrims.

“There are no security-related concerns in this pilgrimage, but it is to protect pilgrims from the danger of the pandemic,” said Khalid bin Qarar Al-Harbi, Saudi Arabia’s director of public security.

On Thursday the pilgrims will travel to Arafat to listen to the sermon, the pinnacle of Hajj. They then go to Muzdalifah and stay overnight, before returning to Mina for the Jamarat ritual.

The campaign began with newspaper editorials and a social media blitz that included a video showing Johnson walking in slow-motion — in a white button-down shirt and blue slacks — accompanied by inspirational string music and his dog, Dilyn.

Boris Johnson tried to assure Brits on Monday that he wasn’t trying to force anything on them.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested a link between his weight and his susceptibility to covid-19, as he launched a new government anti-obesity program on Monday that will see junk food advertising limited and restaurants and pubs required to post calories for food and drink.

The campaign began with newspaper editorials and a social media blitz that included a video showing Johnson walking in slow-motion — in a white button-down shirt and blue slacks — accompanied by inspirational string music and his dog, Dilyn.

“I was too fat,” Johnson says in the video, about his physique back in April when he was sick with covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and rushed to a hospital to be saved by supplemental oxygen.

He says he’d struggled with his weight for ages. But since recovering from the coronavirus, he has begun to focus more on exercise, starting his days with “quite a gentle run.” He notes that he has lost more than 14 pounds. And he encourages Brits to join him in his effort.

Embracing the role of weight watcher in chief is a bold move for a 56-year-old leader who has boasted his favorite meal is a plate of English sausages, plural and a good Tignanello red from Tuscany.

It is also a somewhat unusual stance for Johnson, as a longtime critic of the so-called “nanny state.”

He tried to assure Brits on Monday that he wasn’t trying to force anything on them.

The point of the new anti-obesity campaign is “just trying to help people a little bit to bring their weight down – not in an excessively bossy or nannying way, I hope,” the prime minister said.

He added, “We want this one to be really sympathetic to people, to understand the difficulties that people face with their weight, the struggles that many, many people face to lose weight, and just to be helpful.”

The British newspapers, though, didn’t seem to buy any nuance in Johnson’s approach.

“Boris Johnson orders GPs to be brutally honest with patients about their weight,” the Sun headline read, about general practitioners. The Daily Mail went with: “Boris Johnson orders obese people to get on their bikes and lose weight.”

Some on social media appreciated Johnson’s effort – and promised to accompany him on his “weight journey.” Others were dismissive, even cruel, posting fat-shaming memes and videos of the prime minister huffing and puffing in his rumpled running outfits.

During Monday’s press briefing, political reporters tried to drill down on precisely how much the prime minister weighed. Johnson has, in effect, invited the Westminster press pack to forever keep close tabs on his waist size.

Government officials were evasive.

“I don’t have anything for you on that I’m afraid,” a 10 Downing Street spokesman said in response to a call from The Washington Post.

Johnson is sending the country to the scale at a stressful time, when Britons have been hunkering in place for months, jawing on comfort food. Britain has reopened its pubs – but not the gyms.

England is the second “fattest country” (their words, not ours) in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — a 37-member club for mostly well-off democracies. The first is the United States – and, according to projections, the proportion of people overweight is growing.

The British government’s new strategy includes a ban on junk food advertisements on television before 9 p.m. — so children are not bombarded by ads for fatty snacks. Other promotions, such as “buy one get one free,” are banned, as is displaying candy bars in prominent positions in stores.

The government hopes this saves lives. Almost 8% of critically ill patients with covid-19 in intensive care units are morbidly obese. About 3% of the British population is morbidly obese.

“This deadly virus has given us a wake-up call about the need to tackle the stark inequalities in our nation’s health, and obesity is an urgent example of this,” said Heath Secretary Matt Hancock.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Hancock said that if everyone who is overweight lost five pounds, the national health service could save more than $130 million over the next five years.

Some businesses said the new regulations would have little effect beyond hurting companies that are already trying to recover from the economic effects of the lockdown.

Sue Eustace, director of public affairs at the Advertising Association, told the BBC that the U.K. already had some of the “strictest” advertising rules in the world.

“Children’s exposure to high fat, salt, and sugar adverts on TV has fallen by 70 percent over the last 15 years or so, but there’s been no change to obesity, so we don’t think these measures are going to work.”

Graham MacGregor, professor of cardiovascular medicine at Queen Mary University of London, noted that the measures announced Monday were largely focused on marketing.

“I wouldn’t see it as a major revolution to beat obesity, but it’s certainly a positive step,” he said.

He added that this campaign was likely to have less impact than efforts by previous British governments, including salt reduction targets and a “sugar tax” that resulted in manufactures reducing the sugar in soft drinks.

“These are very clever maneuvers,” MacGregor said, “because people go on buying the same rubbish, but it’s got less of the sugar or less salt or less fat. And, if it’s done slowly, they don’t actually realize.”

Johnson has opposed those types of interventions in the past.

In his leadership race last year, he vowed to review “sin taxes” on unhealthy food and alcohol. He recently told the Times Radio that “in the great anthology of embarrassing former articles that people always drag up . . . you will find I have taken a sort of very libertarian stance on obesity.”

That stance seemed to shift somewhat on Monday. Though Johnson might need to work a bit more on his sales pitch.

The vaccination marks a much-anticipated milestone: the official launch of the first in a series of large US clinical trials that will each test experimental vaccines in 30,000 participants, half receiving the medicine and half receiving a placebo.

Samples at a clinical trial at Meridian Clinical Research in Rockville.

At 6:45 am Monday, a volunteer in Savannah, Georgia in US, received a shot in the arm and became the first participant in a massive human experiment that will test the effectiveness of an experimental coronavirus vaccine candidate. The vaccine is being developed by the biotechnology company Moderna in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health.

The vaccination marks a much-anticipated milestone: the official launch of the first in a series of large US clinical trials that will each test experimental vaccines in 30,000 participants, half receiving the medicine and half receiving a placebo. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer also announced that it was initiating a 30,000-person vaccine trial, at 120 sites globally.

“We are participating today in the launching of a truly historic event in the history of vaccinology,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at a news conference. He noted that the United States has never moved faster to develop a vaccine, from basic science to a large Phase 3 trial designed to test safety and effectiveness.

Fauci predicted that researchers probably would be able to tell whether the Moderna vaccine was effective by November or December, though he explained that it was a “distinct possibility” that an answer could come sooner. Pfizer officials have said the company expects to be able to seek regulatory authorization or approval by October.

Company and government officials repeatedly underscored that while the vaccine effort is moving at record-breaking speed, safety is not being sacrificed.

“There is no compromise at all, with regard to safety, nor of scientific integrity,” Fauci said.

Both vaccines require two doses, spaced several weeks apart. Then researchers will have to wait to see whether people get infected or sick from the novel coronavirus. What they hope to witness is a clear benefit: fewer infections in people who received the vaccine, or less severe episodes of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. There are many unknowns about how long it could take to see a clear signal of success or failure – including how fast the trials will recruit participants and how long it takes for enough people to become infected to observe whether there is an effect.

Statisticians have been crunching the numbers to predict how many infections would need to occur in the study population to gauge the vaccine’s effectiveness. To show that the Moderna vaccine is 60% effective, Fauci said, there would need to be about 150 infections among the 30,000 participants.

The trials are also the biggest test yet of a promising technology that has never been approved for use outside medical research. Either vaccine could become the first in a new class of medicines. The vaccines deliver a snip of genetic material that carries the blueprint for the spiky protein that dots the surface of the coronavirus. After a person is vaccinated, their cells will follow the genetic instructions to build the proteins, and their immune systems, confronted with the spike protein, learn how to recognize and mount a defense to the virus without ever being infected.

“I believe it is a historic day: the first Phase 3 covid-19 vaccine being run in the U.S.,” Moderna chief executive Stephane Bancel said. “It’s a historic day for science, as well. This is the first Phase 3 of a messenger RNA medicine in the world.”

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld during a clinical trial at Meridian Clinical Research in Rockville.

Mark Mulligan, director of the New York University Langone Health’s vaccine center, said eight people will be vaccinated in the late-stage Pfizer trial Tuesday, after promising results in early stage human tests.

“Now it becomes important to continue to assess them in larger numbers of people, and to ask the final question: Does it provide the protection?” Mulligan said.

Matt Slovick, 61, volunteered to be part of that history and showed up to receive a shot Monday afternoon at Meridian Clinical Research in Rockville, Md. Before the pandemic, Slovick, who works for an insurance company, did much of his work face-to-face, with on-site visits to clients and presentations to groups of people. Now, he works remotely and has seen small businesses shut down. His oldest daughter was furloughed from her hospitality job because of the pandemic, and his younger daughter was on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the Navy aircraft carrier that was home to a major outbreak in March.

“Thank goodness, my daughter’s results came back negative,” Slovick said. “As an American, I was doing what I was supposed to do – staying at home, wearing a mask. I thought: Maybe I can help the whole populace of the country to get this thing going” when he heard about the vaccine trial.

Meridian Clinical Research is one of nearly 87 sites recruiting participants across the country for the Moderna trial – and was scheduled to vaccinate the first dozen people on Monday. Shishir Khetan, a physician leading the effort to recruit 300 to 400 people there, said that the first day of any trial is typically slower, but that conducting a trial in a global pandemic is even more complicated. Researchers cannot conduct information sessions about the trial with groups, as they might under normal circumstances, or let people stay in a communal waiting room after their vaccination.

Khetan said the biggest misconception he hears about the vaccine trial is the worry that the vaccine could infect people. But the vaccine does not pose an infection risk; it’s just a fragment of genetic material that codes for a piece of the virus. He also encounters people who mistakenly believe that the trial participants will be infected with the virus.

“That’s absolutely not true. Nobody is given the virus,” Khetan said. “You’re encouraged to follow CDC guidelines of wearing a mask and social distancing.”

At least three other large trials facilitated by Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to speed vaccine development, are expected to follow. Those include an experimental vaccine being developed jointly by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, one from Johnson & Johnson, and another candidate from the biotechnology company Novavax.

Interest in the trials is surging in the pandemic, but researchers said it would be essential for volunteers to include those who are most at risk of severe consequences of covid-19, including black, Hispanic, Native American and older people.

“This is going to be a big American opportunity for people to come onboard as our partners, to take part in what is a historic effort to bring to an end what has been the worst pandemic our world has seen in over 100 years,” National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins said.

Moderna is planning to produce 500 million vaccine doses a year, with the possibility of making 1 billion doses annually in 2021. Over the weekend, the US government committed $472 million to support the large trial, doubling the federal investment in Moderna’s vaccine candidate.

President Donald Trump visited Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies in North Carolina on Monday, a contract development and manufacturing organization that is working to ramp up production of the vaccine candidate being developed by Novavax. The Department of Health and Human Services also announced that it was improving the nation’s ability to manufacture vaccine by reserving capacity through December 2021 at Texas A&M University’s Center for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing.

Several other vaccine developers have begun large trials designed to test effectiveness, including two candidates from Chinese companies and one being developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca that is being tested in Brazil and South Africa and will soon start US trials.

Washington: Democrat Joe Biden urged Muslim Americans on Monday to join him in the fight to defeat President Donald Trump as he addressed an online summit hosted by the advocacy organisation Emgage Action to mobilise Muslim voters ahead of the presidential election.

I want to earn your vote not just because he’s not worthy of being president, the presumptive presidential nominee told participants.

I want to work in partnership with you, make sure your voices are included in the decision-making process as we work to rebuild our nation.

Biden also reiterated a pledge to overturn a Trump administration ban on travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries, calling it vile.

Wa’el Alzayat, CEO of Emgage Action, said by email that the organisation was seeking to maximise Muslim American turnout in key battleground states.

In Michigan alone one of the states where the organisation has chapters and where Trump won in 2016 by fewer than 11,000 votes he said he believed there are more than 150,000 registered Muslim voters.

Several prominent Muslim American elected officials endorsed Biden for president in a letter organised by Emgage Action ahead of the summit.

Among those who signed the letter are Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Indiana Rep. Andre Carson, all Democrats.

Omar, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, served as a high-profile surrogate for Bernie Sanders before he exited the presidential race in April making her support for Biden potentially helpful as the former vice president seeks to mobilise Muslim voters this fall.

Muslim American voices matter to our communities, to our country, Biden said.

But we all know that your voice hasn’t always gotten recognised or represented.

Emgage Action has titled the event Million Muslim Votes, underscoring its emphasis on boosting Muslim turnout in November.

Joe Biden’s presence serves not only to galvanise Muslim Americans to cast their ballots, but to usher in an era of engaging with Muslim American communities under a Biden administration, Alzayat said by email before the summit.

The pro-Biden letter from Muslim American elected officials decried a number of Trump’s domestic and international policies, including his administration’s travel ban and his pullout from the Iran nuclear deal.

A Biden administration will move the nation forward on many of the issues we care about, the letter said, citing racial justice, affordable health care, climate change and immigration.

The Muslim American officials also praised Biden’s agenda for their communities.

Among other goals, Biden has vowed to rescind the travel ban affecting Muslims on Day One if he’s elected.

In his address, he pledged to include Muslim American voices in his administration, if elected, and to speak out against human rights abuses against Muslim minorities around the world.

I’ll continue to champion the rights of Palestinians and Israelis to have a state of their own as I have for decades, each of them a state of their own, he said.

Other states and local-level Muslim American officials signing onto the pro-Biden letter hail from several states, including Michigan.

Dubai: Saudi Arabia’s King Salman has been admitted to a hospital in the capital, Riyadh, for medical tests due to inflammation of the gallbladder, the kingdom’s Royal Court said Monday in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.

The statement said the 84-year-old monarch is being tested at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital. The brief statement did not provide further details.

King Salman has been in power since January 2015. He is considered the last Saudi monarch of his generation of brothers who have held power since the death of their father and founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz.

King Salman has empowered his 34-year-old son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as his successor. The crown prince’s assertive and bold style of leadership, as well as his consolidation of power and sidelining of potential rivals, has been controversial.

With the support of his father, Prince Mohammed has transformed the kingdom in recent years, opening it up to tourists and eroding decades of ultraconservative restrictions on entertainment and women’s rights as he tries to diversify the Saudi economy away from reliance on oil exports.

The prince has also detained dozens of activists and critics, overseen a devastating war in Yemen and rounded up top members of the royal family in his quest for power.

The Saudi king has not been seen in public in recent months due to social distancing guidelines and concerns over the spread of the coronavirus inside the kingdom, which has one of the largest outbreaks in the Middle East.

He has been shown, however, in state-run media images attending virtual meetings with his Cabinet and held calls with world leaders.

King Salman, who oversees Islam’s holiest sites in Mecca and Medina, was crown prince under King Abdullah and served as defense minister. For more than 50 years prior to that, he was governor of Riyadh, overseeing its evolution from a barren city to a teeming capital.

On Sunday, Kuwait’s 91-year-old ruler underwent a successful surgery that required the oil-rich nation’s crown prince to be temporarily empowered to serve in his place, its state-run news agency reported.

Kuwait has yet to elaborate what required Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah to seek a previously unannounced medical treatment beginning Saturday. His sudden surgery could inspire a renewed power struggle within Kuwait’s ruling family.

Tehran: Iran executed a man convicted of providing information to the United States and Israel about a prominent Revolutionary Guard general later killed by a U.S. drone strike, state TV reported on Monday.

The report said the death sentence was carried out against Mahmoud Mousavi Majd, without elaborating.

The country’s judiciary had said in June that Majd was linked to the CIA and the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and alleged that Majd shared security information on the Guard and its expeditionary unit, called the Quds, or Jerusalem Force, which Qassem Soleimani commanded.

Soleimani was killed in an American drone strike in Baghdad in January.

The strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, and five others.

Iran later retaliated for Soleimani’s killing with a ballistic missile strike targeting US forces in Iraq. That same night, the Guard accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jetliner in Tehran, killing 176 people

Tokyo: A United Arab Emirates spacecraft began its journey to Mars with a blast off in Japan on Monday in what is the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission.

The launch of the spacecraft named Amal, or Hope, marks the start of the seven-month journey to the red planet.

The launch, initially planned for July 15, had been delayed for five days due to bad weather.

The probe will study the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change while circling Mars for at least two years.

The craft is expected to reach Mars in February 2021, the year the UAE celebrates 50 years since its formation.