Covid-19 cases down but pandemic still ongoing - EMA

THE HAGUE - Covid-19 cases and death rates have been falling in Europe in recent weeks but the pandemic "is still ongoing", the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on Tuesday, urging countries to roll out booster programs before the winter.

EMA head of vaccine strategy Marco Cavaleri indicated that as "autumn approaches we need to prepare for a new wave of infections in line with the trend shown by the virus in the past two years." 

The EMA did not give exact figures.

Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden, in an interview aired by CBS on Sunday, said the pandemic was over in the United States.

"The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with Covid. We're still doing a lot of work on it... but the pandemic is over," Biden told the CBS news program 60 Minutes.

The Amsterdam-based EMA however said it still considered the pandemic as ongoing on the continent.

The EMA last week approved the first vaccine - an adaptive version of Pfizer/BioNTech's Comirnaty - to specifically target the highly infectious BA.4 and BA.5 types of the coronavirus' Omicron variant.

The vaccine also targets "the original strain of SARS-CoV-2" and comes 11 days after the drug watchdog approved vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna against the Omicron BA.1 variant.