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The U.S. State Department has ordered all non-emergency government staff and their family members in Shanghai to leave as Covid surges and told U.S. citizens to reconsider travel to China, according to an announcement dated April 11. “Reconsider travel to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) due to arbitrary enforcement of local laws and COVID-19-related restrictions,” the State Department said. “Do not travel to the PRC’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), Jilin province, and Shanghai municipality due to COVID-19-related restrictions, including the risk of parents and children being separated,” the statement said. “Reconsider travel to the PRC’s Hong Kong SAR due to arbitrary enforcement of local laws.” (Cheng, 4/11)

South African scientists have discovered two new sublineages of the Omicron coronavirus variant, said Tulio de Oliveira, who runs gene-sequencing institutions in the country. The lineages have been named BA.4 and BA.5, he said by text message and in a series of tweets. Still, de Oliveira said, the lineages have not caused a spike in infections in South Africa and have been found in samples from a number of countries. (Sguazzin, 4/12)

The U.N. official spearheading global vaccination efforts against the coronavirus said Monday the number of countries where 10% or less of the population has been vaccinated dropped from 34 to 18 since January and called for accelerated progress to end the pandemic. Assistant Secretary-General Ted Chaiban told the U.N. Security Council that with over 6 million lives lost to COVID-19 and just over 1 million new coronavirus infections reported to the World Health Organization in the last 24 hours, it is urgent to increase vaccinations in countries where it wasn’t possible to boost rates in 2021. (Lederer, 4/12)

The specter of particulates has forced another recall—this time on Moderna’s massively successful COVID-19 vaccine Spikevax—and the latest pull isn’t contract manufacturer Rovi’s first brush with contamination, either. Moderna on Friday said it was recalling one Spikevax lot in Europe. The batch contains 764,900 doses made by CDMO Rovi that were deployed across Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden between Jan. 13 and Jan. 14. Moderna yanked the shots because of a “foreign body” found in one vial of the batch made at Rovi’s site in Spain, the partners said in a release. (Kansteiner, 4/11)

Germany’s health ministry said Monday that the country may have to discard 3 million doses of expired COVID-19 vaccine by the end of June. Ministry spokesman Hanno Kautz told reporters in Berlin that “not many doses” have been destroyed so far, though he couldn’t give an exact figure. (4/11)