AFP UK

Almost 900 firefighters slowly gained control of a nine-day-old wildfire on the Greek island of Evia, officials said on Wednesday, with reinforcements rushing to a massive blaze hundreds of miles to the west.

Wildfires have scorched through several Mediterranean countries in recent weeks, with Greece, neighbouring Turkey and Algeria hard hit.

Dozens have died in Algeria while the Greek blazes have killed three, left hundreds homeless and torpedoed the tourism season.

Greek officials have pointed the finger at climate change, which experts say increases the intensity and frequency of such extreme weather events.

For nine days, Greek firefighters and locals have battled a blaze on Evia, the country’s second largest island just northeast of the capital Athens.

“Yesterday, we saw the light of the sun for the first time in days,” said Yiannis Kontzias, mayor of Istiaia on Evia, referring to the thick smoke clearing away.

“I think we can say that the fire fronts are slowly coming under control.” 

The focus on Wednesday shifted to Gortynia, an area 200 kilometres (120 miles) west of Athens whose forests and ravines were coming under threat from a separate 10-kilometre-wide blaze.

Regional official Christos Lambropoulos said crews were concentrating on keeping the fire from reaching the area’s highest mountain, Mainalo.

Forces in Gortynia were beefed up Wednesday to nearly 600 firefighters including crews from the Czech Republic and Britain.

However, forecasters expected rain to arrive overnight in Gortynia and the surrounding area, which could bring respite for fire crews.

– ‘Start from scratch’ –

On Evia island, locals were struggling to comprehend the loss from the fires.

“My heart has to calm down, I’ve got to start everything again from scratch,” Kostis Angelou told AFP while he surveyed the charred corpses of his 372 goats.

With the fires receiving global attention, international help has poured in.

Hundreds of firefighters have arrived on Evia from abroad, with EU states and other countries also contributing aircraft and scores of vehicles.

“When we arrived, it seemed like the whole of Greece was burning,” said Nicolas Faure, part of a detachment of more than 170 French firefighters that began arriving late last week.

– ‘Colossal loss’ –

As the immediate danger for his town receded, Mayor Kontzias said local businesses “face extinction” in coming months in a tourism season already  devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We have lost the month of August, which would have sustained people here over the coming year,” he said.

“The damage is huge, and the environmental disaster will have economic repercussions for decades.”

Theodoros Roumeliotis, who represents the hotel industry on Evia, said August reservations had collapsed by 90 percent.

“It’s a colossal loss,” he told AFP.

“Right now, hotels are obliged to refund one million euros in reservations cancelled.”

Although Greece suffers from regular wildfires during hot, dry summers, this year the land area burnt has dwarfed previous years.

A draft UN assessment seen by AFP called the Mediterranean a “climate change hotspot” and said increasing temperatures and aridity had lengthened fire seasons and “doubled potential burnable area”.

Dimitris Haliotis of the Red Cross said “the entire ecosystem is destroyed” on Evia island, with hundreds of forest animals killed.

– Calls for sackings –

There have been growing calls in Greece for the resignation of top public safety officials who as recently as June had insisted that the country was well-prepared.

There was additional anger over the loss last week of much of the forest of Varibobi, one of Athens’ last remaining nature reserves. 

The former royal estate of Tatoi narrowly avoided destruction in that fire.

Civil protection deputy minister Nikos Hardalias said Greece’s resources were “stronger than ever before”.

“We faced an operationally unique situation with 586 fires in eight days during the worst weather phenomenon in 40 years,” he said on Tuesday.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis this week apologised to the nation for any possible “shortcomings” in the state’s response. 

The prime minister has pledged hundreds of millions of euros in additional funds for civil protection, reforestation and flood prevention. 

Scientists on Italy’s side of the Mont Blanc massif are constantly monitoring a melting glacier, where the risk of collapse due to rising temperatures threatens the valley below.

The Planpincieux glacier, at an altitude of about 2,700 metres (8,860 feet), hangs over the hamlet of Planpincieux, underneath the south face of the Grandes Jorasses within the Mont Blanc massif in Italy’s picturesque northwest corner. 

Known as a “temperate” glacier, it is already at a melting point, as opposed to polar glaciers that are still frozen to bedrock.

That means the Planpincieux glacier can slide faster, via water just under its surface, making it more unpredictable and dangerous for the Val Ferret valley below, experts say.

“We’ve got a significant temperature rise and this causes a more rapid formation of the sub-glacial water flow, an important underground circulation of water,” Valerio Segor, the Aosta Valley region’s director of natural risk management, told AFP.

In years past, the Planpincieux glacier was lodged in a more stable position on the rock, and was thicker with fewer fractures, said Paolo Perret, a glacier expert at the Courmayeur-based Safe Mountains Foundation.

But due to rising temperatures caused by climate change, “the glacier withdrew to a smooth and steep surface which causes it to be in an unstable position,” Perret said.

The movements are not insignificant, with the glacier in extreme cases slipping as much as 150 centimetres (4 feet 9 inches) in a day, he said.

By contrast, the Whymper serac, a polar glacier above it looming nearly 4,000 metres above sea level, can slide between two and 20 centimetres per day, said Perret, resulting in “imminent collapses”.

A massive block of ice from the Whymper serac measuring 15,000 square metres tumbled to the ground last October, a day after authorities had prohibited access to paths underneath. 

Movements of the Planpincieux glacier — and those above it — are closely monitored via radar, and the region’s safety plan anticipates a variety of potential scenarios.  

The “extreme scenario” would be the fall of an 800,000 metre cube of ice to the village and road below, said Segor. 

“But there are no absolute guarantees that it will really behave in that way.”

Regional authorities in Sicily recorded temperatures of 48.8 degrees Celsius (119.8 Fahrenheit) Wednesday as an anticyclone dubbed “Lucifer” swept in, which if confirmed would be a new Italian and European record.

The blistering temperature was recorded near Syracuse, beating Italy’s all-time record of 48.5 degrees, set in Sicily in 1999, and the 1977 record of 48 degrees at Eleusis in Greece.

A spokesman for Italy’s national meteorological service said the result still had to be validated, while the World Meteorological Organization, which lists the Greece record as Europe’s highest, did not respond to requests for comment.

Elsewhere in southern Italy, the anticyclone was forecast to send the mercury rising to 39-42 degrees before sweeping northwards, with weekend temperatures of up to 40 degrees in the central regions of Tuscany and Lazio, which includes Rome.

As the capital warmed up on Wednesday, tourists sought out shade and water. 

“I kinda like it, it’s the goal of summer to be hot and sweat and just enjoy it!” said Nora Vert, a 20-year-old from France.

The heat has raised fears for the fires that have blighted Sicily and the region of Calabria all summer, many caused by arson but fuelled by warm winds and dry soil and plants.

Firefighters said earlier Wednesday they had recorded 300 interventions in the past 12 hours, while a 77-year-old man died from burns received while trying to shelter his herd in the countryside near Reggio Calabria.

Elsewhere in Calabria, fires threatened the Aspromonte mountain range, designated as a UNESCO area of international geological significance.

The deputy head of environmental NGO WWF Italy, Dante Caserta, called for more resources, such as air support, to quell the flames “or it will be too late, and we will lose forever a priceless heritage”.

The Madonie mountain range, near the Sicilian capital Palermo, has also for several days been besieged by flames that have destroyed crops, animals, homes and industrial buildings.

Sicily’s governor, Nello Musumeci, called for a state of emergency to be declared for the mountains, while Agriculture Minister Stefano Patuanelli visited Wednesday to meet local mayors around Palermo.

“The fires are an emergency that need immediate responses, first and foremost with the relief that must be given to those who have lost everything,” Patuanelli said. 

Blazes have also devastated Sardinia, with 13 fires recorded during the day on Tuesday. Over 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) burned last month in the west of the island during the worst fires seen in decades.

Southern Europe has experienced intense heatwaves and wildfires this summer as experts warn climate change increases the intensity and frequency of such extreme weather events.

Nearly 100,000 hectares of forestry and farmland have burned in less than two weeks in Greece in the worst wave of wildfires since 2007, the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) said Wednesday.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mistotakis described the 586 fires that ravaged several regions of Greece in just a few days as “a natural disaster of exceptional magnitude”.

More than 93,600 hectares (231,000 acres) went up in smoke in just 14 days, fuelled by an extraordinary heatwave that struck at the beginning of August, according to AFP calculations based on EFFIS data from July 29 to August 11.

The average burn over the same period between 2008-2020 was 2,330 hectares. 

“They are still very destructive today everywhere, and have a rare high level of intensity,” according to Mark Parrington of Copernicus, the European Climate Change service, which includes EFFIS.

The symbolic threshold of 100,000 hectares burned in Greece is expected to be reached on Thursday or Friday, as fires continued to rage Wednesday in the Peloponnese in the west and the island of Evia in the east.

Evia, Greece’s second biggest island, has borne the brunt of the fires, home to more than half the total area burned.

Its thick pine forests, still ablaze on Wednesday, have been largely reduced to ash in the northern part of the island.

While fires were to be expected given the very dry conditions, nothing suggested their dreadful scale, said Charalampos Kontoes, director of the National Observatory in Athens.

“To some extent, fires were expected because of the very dry season,” Kontoes told AFP. “But I can tell you that in Greece we never had such big fires. We have fires during hot seasons but not at that size.”

– Deadly 2007 fires –

In all, a total of around 110,000 hectares have gone up in flames this year as of August 11, with over 90 percent of the damage coming in the last two weeks alone. That’s compared to an average of just over 9,000 hectares over the previous 12 years, according to the latest EFFIS figures.

“Our data shows that we didn’t have such intense fires since August 2007,” said Parrington.

More than 250,000 hectares of forests and olive groves were burnt in August 2007 in wildfires that killed 77 people.

This year’s fires came as Greece suffered its worst heatwave in three decades. For a week, temperatures reached 45 degrees Celsius in several parts of the country, and flirted with a stifling 43 degrees Celsius in the capital Athens.

Experts say there is a clear link between the heatwave and climate change. A draft UN assessment seen by AFP described the Mediterranean as a “climate change hotspot”, saying increasing temperatures had lengthened fire seasons.

– ‘Blisteringly clear’ climate change links –

“The links between climate and wildfire are blisteringly clear in Mediterranean Europe,” said Matthew Jones, an expert in climate change at the University of East Anglia in eastern England.

“Since the 1980s, the annual number of days with extreme fire weather conditions has roughly doubled, dramatically increasing the risk of wildfires.”

“A lot of agricultural area has also been destroyed,” said the National Observatory’s Kontoes, adding that this would have a devastating effect on the economy of communities impacted by the fires. 

The land will take “years to regenerate”, he said.

The weather offers no immediate respite, according to  Thomas Smith, Professor of Geography at the London School of Economics.

“Unfortunately, EFFIS forecasts suggest that forest fires will persist in Greece until there is significant rainfall — at least until August 17,” Smith said.

“The wildfires will persist until there is some significant rainfall, and it is likely that the situation might worsen before it gets better.”

Regional authorities in Sicily recorded temperatures of 48.8 degrees Celsius (119.8 Fahrenheit) Wednesday as an anticyclone dubbed “Lucifer” swept the country — which if confirmed would be a new Italy record.

The blistering temperature was recorded near Syracuse, beating Italy’s all-time record of 48.5 degrees in Sicily in 1999, although a spokesman for the national meteorological service told AFP this still had to be validated.

Elsewhere in southern Italy, the anticyclone was forecast to send the mercury rising to 39-42 degrees before sweeping northwards, with weekend temperatures of up to 40 degrees in the central regions of Tuscany and Lazio, which includes Rome.

As the capital warmed up on Wednesday, tourists sought out shade and water. 

“I kinda like it, it’s the goal of summer to be hot and sweat and just enjoy it!” said Nora Vert, a 20-year-old from France.

The heat has raised fears for the fires that have blighted Sicily and the region of Calabria all summer, many caused by arson but fuelled by warm winds and dry soil and plants.

Firefighters said earlier Wednesday they had recorded 300 interventions in the past 12 hours, while a 77-year-old man died from burns received while trying to shelter his herd in the countryside near Reggio Calabria.

Elsewhere in Calabria, fires threatened the Aspromonte mountain range, designated as a UNESCO area of international geological significance.

The deputy head of environmental NGO WWF Italy, Dante Caserta, called for more resources, such as air support, to quell the flames “or it will be too late, and we will lose forever a priceless heritage”.

The Madonie mountain range, near the Sicilian capital Palermo, has also for several days been besieged by flames that have destroyed crops, animals, homes and industrial buildings.

Sicily’s governor, Nello Musumeci, called for a state of emergency to be declared for the mountains, while Agriculture Minister Stefano Patuanelli visited Wednesday to meet local mayors around Palermo.

“The fires are an emergency that need immediate responses, first and foremost with the relief that must be given to those who have lost everything,” Patuanelli said. 

Blazes have also devastated Sardinia, with 13 fires recorded during the day on Tuesday. Over 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) burned last month in the west of the island during the worst fires seen in decades.

Southern Europe has experienced intense heatwaves and wildfires this summer as experts warn climate change increases the intensity and frequency of such extreme weather events.

Namibia said Wednesday it had sold just a third of the 170 live elephants it put up for auction in a bid to reduce tusker populations under pressure from drought and territorial conflict with humans.

In a statement, the environment ministry said it has “successfully sold 57 of the 170 elephants which were put on tender in December 2020”.

It raised 5.9 million Namibian dollars ($400,000) from the sale.

Forty-two of those pachyderms will be exported to destinations that government did not disclose.

The other 15 will remain in Namibia but under private ownership.

The sparsely-populated semi-arid southern African country is home to some 28,000 elephants, according to official estimates.

Government resorted to selling live animals after being criticised for shooting elephants to control overpopulation.

The ministry spokesman Romeo Muyunda attributed the slow sale to a paucity of buyers and the failure of some bidders to meet the sale conditions. 

“It’s an auction, so buying and selling is by chance, there are no guarantees for both the seller and potential buyers,” he told AFP. 

Some potential buyers may have stayed away because “there was a lot of negative publicity which surrounded the auction,” he added.

Nearly 900 firefighters were slowly bringing a wildfire under control that has raged for nine days on the Greek island of Evia, authorities said Wednesday, while fresh forces were deployed to fight a massive blaze on the Peloponnese peninsula.

“I think we can say that the fire fronts are slowly coming under control,” Yiannis Kontzias, mayor of Istiaia on Evia, told state TV ERT.

But the battle was far from won, with sudden flare-ups an ever present danger owing to bone-dry conditions on the ground.

The wildfires in Greece have scorched their way through thousands of hectares, leaving three dead, hundreds homeless, causing incalculable damage and capsizing the critical tourism season.

Those staying behind have been without running water and electricity, sometimes for days on end.

The fires have been fanned by the country’s worst heatwave in decades and the authorities have pointed the finger at climate change, which experts say increases the intensity and frequency of such extreme weather events.

Algeria has meanwhile become the latest Mediterranean country to be hit by devastating wildfires this summer, with the death toll there rising to 65 on Wednesday.

Eight people were killed in blazes in Turkey earlier in the month.

– Peloponnese fires –

The fire situation in Greece was most precarious on Wednesday in the mountainous and forested Peloponnese region of Gortynia.

Christos Lambropoulos, deputy governor for the broader Arcadia region, said efforts were concentrated on keeping the fire from reaching the area’s tallest mountain, Mount Mainalo.

“We estimate the front is over 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) long,” he told Skai TV.

“It’s a very thick forest with many communities,” he said.

Forces in Gortynia were beefed up Wednesday to nearly 600 firefighters including crews from the Czech Republic, Britain, France and Germany.

Another 60 firemen were tackling a smaller fire in Laconia, in the southeastern Peloponnese, the fire department said.

A huge multinational force of nearly 900 firefighters has meanwhile been deployed to back fire crews on the Greek island of Evia, where the town of Istiaia has been under threat for days. 

It included Cypriots, Moldovans, Poles, Serbs, Slovaks, Romanians and Ukrainians. Serbian, Swedish and Swiss planes and helicopters were among a fleet of seven aircraft providing support.

“Yesterday, we saw the light of the sun for the first time in days,”  Istiaia mayor Yiannis Kontzias told state TV ERT.

He was referring to giant smoke clouds that have choked residents and obstructed flights by water-bombing aircraft.

EU states and other countries have so far contributed 21 aircraft, 250 vehicles and more than 1,200 firefighters, some of whom were due to arrive by Friday.

Support from abroad has helped avert an even greater disaster.

“When we arrived, it seemed like the whole of Greece was burning,” said Nicolas Faure, part of a detachment of more than 170 French firefighters that began arriving late last week.

– ‘Entire ecosystem destroyed’ –

Even as the immediate danger for his town receded, Kontzias said local businesses “face extinction” in coming months in a tourism season already decimated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We have lost the month of August, which would have sustained people here over the coming year.”

“(Local) tourism has been demolished, most (visitors) have left,” the mayor said.

“The damage is huge, and the environmental disaster will have economic repercussions for decades.”

From July 29 to August 11, more than 93,000 hectares (231,000 acres) were burnt in Greece, according to the European Forest Fire Information System. The average area burnt over the same period between 2008 and 2020 was 2,330 hectares.

A draft UN assessment seen exclusively by AFP called the Mediterranean a “climate change hotspot” and said increasing temperatures and aridity had lengthened fire seasons and “doubled potential burnable area”.

Dimitris Haliotis, the head of a Red Cross team, said that “the entire ecosystem is destroyed” on the island, with the loss of forest animals running in the hundreds.

Theodoros Roumeliotis, the local hoteliers president in the Greek spa town of Aidipsos, said August reservations had collapsed by 90 percent.

“It’s a colossal loss,” he told AFP.

“Right now, hotels are obliged to refund one million euros in reservations cancelled,” he said, adding that some operators were unlikely to survive the blow.

– Calls for sackings –

There have been growing calls in Greece for the resignation of top public safety officials who as recently as June had insisted that the country was well-prepared.

There was additional anger over the loss last week of much of the forest of Varibobi, one of Athens’ last remaining nature reserves. In that fire, the former royal estate of Tatoi narrowly avoided destruction.

Civil protection deputy minister Nikos Hardalias said Greece’s resources were “stronger than ever before”.

“We faced an operationally unique situation with 586 fires in eight days during the worst weather phenomenon in 40 years,” he said on Tuesday.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis this week apologised to the nation for any possible “shortcomings” in the state’s response. He is to hold a press conference on Thursday.

The PM has pledged hundreds of millions of euros in additional funds for civil protection, reforestation and flood prevention. 

A boost in production agreed on by the world’s leading oil producers is “simply not enough” to fuel the global economic recovery from Covid-19, US national security advisor Jake Sullivan said Wednesday. 

The increases agreed on by OPEC+ (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies) last month “will not fully offset previous production cuts that OPEC+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022,” he said in a statement released by the White House.

“At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough,” the statement said.

“Competitive energy markets will ensure reliable and stable energy supplies, and OPEC+ must do more to support the recovery.”

The price of gasoline is currently $3.19 per gallon, up from $3.14 a month ago and more than a 45 percent jump from the year-ago level when travel was constrained in the United States by myriad Covid-19 restrictions.

Sullivan’s statement comes three weeks after the OPEC+ group unveiled an agreement to boost output by 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) each month from August.

The deal means the group’s output will be restored to its pre-pandemic level by the end of 2022.

Oil producers have faced a complex challenge to modulate output amid Covid-19, with the most recent uptick in infections from the Delta variant raising doubts about demand, especially in China.

Crude prices, which briefly hit six-year peaks in June, have fluctuated in recent days amid these worries.

The Biden administration also released a letter from National Economic Council Chief Brian Deese to the Federal Trade Commission calling on the agency to use “all of its available tools to monitor the US gasoline market” and guard against “anti-competitive” conduct. 

Nearly 900 firefighters were slowly bringing a wildfire under control that has raged for nine days on the Greek island of Evia, authorities said Wednesday, while fresh forces were deployed to fight a massive blaze on the Peloponnese peninsula.

Greece has started to count the cost from wildfires that have scorched their way through thousands of hectares, leaving three dead, hundreds homeless, causing incalculable damage and capsizing the critical tourism season.

The fires have been fanned by the country’s worst most severe heatwave in decades and the authorities have pointed the finger at climate change, which experts say increases the intensity and frequency of such extreme weather events.

Algeria has meanwhile become the latest Mediterranean country to be hit by devastating wildfires this summer, with the death toll there rising to 65 on Wednesday after eight people were killed in blazes in Turkey earlier in the month.

A huge multinational force has been deployed to back fire crews on the Greek island Evia, where the town of Istiaia has been under threat for days. 

“I think we can say that the fire fronts are slowly coming under control,” Istiaia mayor Yiannis Kontzias told state TV ERT.

“Yesterday, we saw the light of the sun for the first time in days,” he said, referring to giant smoke clouds that have choked residents and obstructed flights by water-bombing aircraft.

– ‘Entire ecosystem destroyed’ –

But even as the immediate danger receded, Kontzias said local businesses “face extinction” in coming months in a tourism season already decimated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We have lost the month of August, which would have sustained people here over the coming year.”

“(Local) tourism has been demolished, most (visitors) have left,” he said.

“The damage is huge, and the environmental disaster will have economic repercussions for decades.”

From July 29 to August 11, more than 93,000 hectares (231,000 acres) were burnt in Greece, according to the European Forest Fire Information System. The average area burnt over the same period between 2008 and 2020 was 2,330 hectares.

A draft UN assessment seen exclusively by AFP called the Mediterranean a “climate change hotspot” and said increasing temperatures and aridity had lengthened fire seasons and “doubled potential burnable area”.

Dimitris Haliotis, the head of a Red Cross team who came to Evia from across the country in Patras, said that “the entire ecosystem is destroyed” on the island, with the loss of forest animals running in the hundreds.

Theodoros Roumeliotis, the local hoteliers president on the Greek spa town of Aidipsos, said August reservations had collapsed by 90 percent.

“It’s a colossal loss,” he told AFP.

“Right now, hotels are obliged to refund one million euros in reservations cancelled,” he said, adding that some operators were unlikely to survive the blow.

– Peloponnese fires –

The fire situation was more precarious on Wednesday in the mountainous Peloponnese region of Gortynia.

Christos Lambropoulos, deputy governor for the broader Arcadia region, said efforts were concentrated on keeping the fire from reaching the thickly forested Mount Mainalo.

“Villages do not seem at risk at the moment… but conditions change by the hour,” he told ERT.

Forces in Gortynia were beefed up Wednesday to nearly 600 firefighters including crews from the Czech Republic, Britain, France and Germany.

EU states and other countries have so far contributed 21 aircraft, 250 vehicles and more than 1,200 firefighters, some of whom were due to arrive by Friday.

Support from abroad has helped avert an even greater disaster.

“When we arrived, it seemed like the whole of Greece was burning,” said Nicolas Faure, part of a detachment of French firefighters that arrived last week, and was later bolstered to over 170.

Another 60 firemen were tackling a smaller fire in Laconia, in the southeastern Peloponnese, the fire department said.

In Evia, nearly 900 firefighters had been deployed, including Cypriots, Moldovans, Poles, Serbs, Slovaks, Romanians and Ukrainians. Serbian, Swedish and Swiss planes and helicopters were among a fleet of seven aircraft providing support.

There have been growing calls in Greece for the resignation of top public safety officials who as recently as June had insisted that the country was well-prepared.

There was additional anger over the loss last week of much of the forest of Varibobi, one of Athens’ last remaining nature reserves. 

Civil protection deputy minister Nikos Hardalias said Greece’s resources were “stronger than ever before”.

“We faced an operationally unique situation with 586 fires in eight days during the worst weather phenomenon in 40 years,” he said on Tuesday.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis this week apologised to the nation for any possible “shortcomings” in the state’s response. He is to hold a press conference on Thursday.

China’s drug regulator has approved the country’s first mixed-vaccine trial, a company involved in the study said, as the rapid spread of the Delta variant raises concern about the efficacy of domestically produced jabs.

The trial will test the efficacy of combining an “inactivated” vaccine made by China’s Sinovac with a DNA-based one developed by US pharmaceutical company Inovio, a statement issued on Tuesday said.

The statement was put out by Advaccine Biopharmaceuticals Suzhou, Inovio’s trial partner in China.

Preclinical work has found that “two different vaccine applications… produce an even stronger and more balanced immune response”, Advaccine chairman Wang Bin said in the statement. 

There are several types of Covid vaccines, including those using an inactivated or weakened virus to generate an immune response, and more cutting-edge RNA- or DNA-based jabs that use engineered versions of the coronavirus’ genetic code to create a protein that safely prompts an immune response.

Five out of the seven vaccines approved in China are two-shot inactivated vaccines.

Their published efficacy lags RNA jabs by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which have pre-Delta success rates above 90 percent.

The World Health Organization has said there is still not enough data to say whether using two different vaccines together is safe or can boost immunity. 

Inovio has not published any efficacy data from its global clinical trials. It is the first DNA-based vaccine to be trialled in China.

China is battling its worst coronavirus outbreak in months, with officials saying many of those infected had already been vaccinated. 

This has added to calls for China’s two biggest vaccine producers — state-run Sinopharm and privately owned Sinovac — to provide data proving their jabs work against the Delta variant.

Beijing is yet to approve any foreign vaccines for domestic use.