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Nearly three dozen companies worldwide will soon start making generic versions of Pfizer’s coronavirus pill, the U.N.-backed Medicines Patent Pool that negotiated the deal said Thursday. The Medicines Patent Pool said in a statement that agreements signed with 35 companies should help make Pfizer’s antiviral nirmatrelvir, or Paxlovid, available to more than half of the world’s population. (3/17)

The number of Africans being inoculated against Covid-19 jumped 15% in February as several countries embarked on mass vaccination drives after the World Health Organization, UNICEF and other partners sent teams to help get shots in arms. About 62 million doses were administered across the continent last month, with nations including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria significantly increasing their vaccination rates, the WHO said Thursday. The global partners are supporting campaigns in at least 10 priority countries to reach 100 million people by the end of April. (Kew, 3/17)

Samoa will go into lockdown from Saturday as it faces its first outbreak of COVID-19 after a woman who was about to leave the country tested positive. Although health authorities have so far found just a single case, it is the first time Samoa has found any unexplained cases in the community and likely points to an undetected outbreak that has been going on for days or even weeks. (Perry, 3/18)

The World Health Organization has verified at least “43 attacks on health care” — including assaults on patients, health-care workers, facilities or infrastructure — since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the agency’s director general, told reporters Wednesday. More than 300 health-care facilities are in combat zones or areas that Russia now controls, while 600 other facilities are within about six miles of the conflict line, he said. (Simon, Timsit and Jeong, 3/17)

A 68-year-old American man was killed in a Russian assault on the city of Chernihiv, a city northwest of Kyiv, the local authorities in the city reported on Thursday. The local police said the man, James Whitney Hill, was killed by heavy artillery attacks on unarmed civilians in the city. ... Mr. Hill, who went by the name Jimmy or Jim to friends, and his partner, Ira, who is Ukrainian, had traveled to Chernihiv in December so that she could be treated for multiple sclerosis, friends of Mr. Hill told a local news broadcaster in Idaho this month. They had become trapped at a regional hospital there. (Specia and Schwirtz, 3/17)

The crisis in Ukraine has unleashed a network of online mental health experts, some refashioning routine virtual care in response to the war; others providing psychological first aid for refugees or support for local therapists who suddenly find themselves on the front line of an evolving mental health crisis. “We all — many, many professionals around the world — have mobilized to work with what’s going on there, with extensive psychological trauma,” said Galina Itskovich, a Brooklyn-based developmental psychotherapist who has been working with parents and professionals in Ukraine for several years. “We have a grass-roots movement here, getting connected very quickly.” (Sellers, 3/18)

As the fight intensified in northern Ethiopia in June last year, three aid workers from Doctors Without Borders jumped into their four-wheel drive and raced across the battle-scarred landscape, searching for casualties. Hours later they vanished. The aid workers stopped answering their satellite phone. A tracking device showed their vehicle making a sudden U-turn, then stopping. Colleagues frantically tried to locate them. (Marks and Walsh, 3/17)