The number of new cases of Covid-19 reported worldwide fell by 16 percent last week to 2.7 million, the World Health Organization said.

The EU will launch a program to study Covid-19 variants and produce "second generation" vaccines against future strains, the bloc's president has said.

Japan launched its coronavirus vaccination programme on Wednesday, five months ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, as the World Health Organization reported a fall in new cases around the world.

Hamas on Tuesday blasted Israel's refusal to allow some 2,000 coronavirus vaccine doses destined for Gaza health workers through its blockade of the territory as a "violation" of international law. 

North Korean hackers tried to break into the computer systems of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer in a search for information on a coronavirus vaccine and treatment technology, South Korea's spy agency said Tuesday, according to reports.

Kazakhstan will be the first country in the world to locally produce Russia's Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, after a pharmaceutical company received government authorisation to make the jab, the company said Tuesday.   

The World Health Organization gave emergency use approval to AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccines on Monday, meaning distribution can start to poorer countries starved of doses to fight the pandemic.

The AstraZeneca-Oxford jab forms the bulk of batches being lined up through Covax, the global program aimed at procuring and shipping out vaccines equitably around the world, regardless of wealth.

Iraq will re-impose partial lockdown measures until early March after detecting a new strain of the coronavirus, including among children, its health minister announced on Monday. 

As the coronavirus spread across the globe, so too did speculation about its origins. Perhaps the virus escaped from a lab. Maybe it was engineered as a bioweapon.

Legitimate questions about the virus created perfect conditions for conspiracy theories. In the absence of knowledge, guesswork and propaganda flourished.

Lebanon administered Sunday its first jabs of COVID-19 vaccine, with an intensive care unit physician and a well-known 93-year-old comedian becoming the first to receive Pfizer-BioNTech doses.

Lebanon launched its inoculation campaign a day after receiving the first batch of the vaccine -- 28,500 doses from Brussels, near where Pfizer has a manufacturing facility. More were expected to arrive in the coming weeks.