Switzerland Today

Greetings from Bern!

It’s the end of an era today as Roger Federer dropped out of the official tennis rankings for the first time in 25 years. He plans to return for the Laver Cup in September and the Swiss Indoors in his hometown of Basel a month later, where some rumourmongers reckon the 41-year-old might announce his retirement.

Keystone / Juerg Mueller

In the news:  Roger Federer did not appear in the ATP weekly rankings this morning for the first time since September 1997. The Swiss tennis star has not played for 12 months after knee surgery.

• On September 22, 1997, a boy from Basel who had just turned 16 featured in the ATP rankingsExternal link for the first time – in joint 803rd place. Federer (pictured aged 16) would go on to top the list for 310 weeks, a record that was only surpassed last year by Novak Djokovic. Federer still holds the record for consecutive weeks spent at No 1 (237, four-and-a-half years).
• In other sporting news, the finalists are knownExternal link of the Swiss Bowl XXXVI, this year’s American football tournament. On Saturday the Bern Grizzlies, undefeated this year, will take on the Calanda Broncos, from Landquart in eastern Switzerland, who have won ten of the past 12 Swiss Bowls.
• Members of the Swiss public paid fines amounting to more than CHF936 million ($955 million) in 2019, newspaper Blick reported todayExternal link. Traffic fines account for more than half (58%) of this. “Living together requires rules – and Switzerland is full of them,” Blick noted.

Keystone / Georgios Kefalas

Switzerland is sitting on an estimated 38 million excess Covid-19 vaccine doses that expire at the end of the year. It’s not clear what’s going to happen to them.

More than two years after the start of the pandemic, Switzerland, like many wealthy countries, is awash with unused Covid-19 doses and hasn’t announced what it will do with them. It’s not known how many of these 38 million doses will be discarded, used in Switzerland or donated. The recent rise in new Covid-19 infections has not led to more vaccinations, official statistics showExternal link.

The supply glut of Covid-19 vaccines – not unique to Switzerland – raises the question why so many vaccines were procured without proper planning and what could have been done to avoid the subsequent wastage. Swiss NGO Public Eye suggests that the Swiss government has paid between CHF60 million ($61 million) and CHF150 million for its excess doses.

In this in-depth article, part of series from a cross-border investigative project called #followthedoses, Priti Patnaik searches for answers to these questions and examines what can be learnt for future pandemics.