News Room

Another wave of COVID-19 cases is now triggering another wave of panic buying across the country. But the Maryland Department of Commerce says it has no regulatory oversight on grocers in the state. At this point, it's up to each individual company to set purchasing limits on high-demand items. In some instances, stores are starting to see empty shelves again.

Scientists work at the mAbxience biosimilar monoclonal antibody laboratory plant in Garin, Buenos Aires province, on August 14, 2020, where an experimental coronavirus vaccine will be produced for Latin America. - Argentina will manufacture while Mexico will pack and distribute in Latin America, except of Brazil, the vaccine against COVID-19 developed by the University of Oxford and the AstraZeneca laboratory.

Two drug companies have now reported highly successful results from phase III trials of COVID-19 vaccines. On November 18 Pfizer and partner BioNTech said their vaccine was 95 percent effective at preventing the disease, based on full trial results. Two days earlier Moderna reported its vaccine was 94.5 percent effective, based on interim data.

It’s probably not exactly what President Donald Trump meant when he borrowed the historic jingoistic slogan “America First” for his administration, but since early in the global COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. has consistently held the Number One spot in coronavirus cases and deaths. It took less than two months for these numbers to grow from 200,000 to a mind-boggling 250,000 now.

Operation Warp Speed, a Trump administration initiative to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines as fast as possible, should be lauded as a successful endeavour in what has otherwise been a poor effort to deal with the coronavirus, experts say. "No doubt, Operation Warp Speed is a huge success," said Tinglong Dai, associate professor of Operations Management and Business Analytics at Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School in Baltimore.