LONDON: Britons aged over 75 and those in care homes will be offered COVID-19 booster shots in spring, Britain’s vaccine advisers said on Tuesday.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) said in January that plans should be made to offer COVID-19 booster vaccination programs in spring and autumn this year to those at higher risk of severe disease.
Britain will also offer the booster to children aged five and to immunosuppressed individuals.
Bivalent shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna as well as a beta variant shot from Sanofi-GSK are among the vaccines that will be offered, the JCVI said in a statement, adding that a children’s formulation of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine would be given to those under 12 years of age.
“This year’s spring program will bridge the gap to the planned booster program in the autumn, enabling those who are most vulnerable to be well protected throughout the summer,” said Wei Shen Lim, chair of JCVI’s COVID-19 committee.
Britons aged over 75 to be offered COVID-19 booster shot in spring
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Britons aged over 75 to be offered COVID-19 booster shot in spring
- Britain will also offer the booster to children aged five and to immunosuppressed individuals
India plans AI ‘data city’ on staggering scale
- ‘The data city is going to come in one ecosystem ... with a 100 kilometer radius’
NEW DELHI: As India races to narrow the artificial intelligence gap with the United States and China, it is planning a vast new “data city” to power digital growth on a staggering scale, the man spearheading the project says.
“The AI revolution is here, no second thoughts about it,” said Nara Lokesh, information technology minister for Andhra Pradesh state, which is positioning the city of Visakhapatnam as a cornerstone of India’s AI push.
“And as a nation ... we have taken a stand that we’ve got to embrace it,” he said ahead of an international AI summit next week in New Delhi.
Lokesh boasts the state has secured investment agreements of $175 billion involving 760 projects, including a $15 billion investment by Google for its largest AI infrastructure hub outside the United States.
And a joint venture between India’s Reliance Industries, Canada’s Brookfield and US firm Digital Realty is investing $11 billion to develop an AI data center in the same city.
Visakhapatnam — home to around two million people and popularly known as “Vizag” — is better known for its cricket ground that hosts international matches than cutting-edge technology.
But the southeastern port city is now being pitched as a landing point for submarine internet cables linking India to Singapore.
“The data city is going to come in one ecosystem ... with a 100 kilometer radius,” Lokesh said. For comparison, Taiwan is roughly 100 kilometers wide.
Lokesh said the plan goes far beyond data connectivity, adding that his state had “received close to 25 percent of all foreign direct investments” to India in 2025.
“It’s not just about the data centers,” he explained while outlining a sweeping vision of change, with Andhra Pradesh offering land at one US cent per acre for major investors.
