Vaccination push as Britain shuts
The vaccination drive against the coronavirus is entering a new phase.
The first Americans inoculated against Covid-19 began rolling up their sleeves for their second and final dose yesterday, while Britain introduced another vaccine on the same day it imposed a new nationwide lockdown against the rapidly surging virus.
The emergence of the variant has added even more urgency to the worldwide race to vaccinate people against the scourge.
In Southern California, nurse Helen Cordova got her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Centre along with other doctors and nurses, who bared their arms the prescribed three weeks after they received their first shot. The second round of shots began in various locations around the country as the US death toll surpassed 352,000.
Over the weekend, US government officials reported that vaccinations had accelerated significantly. As of yesterday, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said nearly 4.6 million shots had been dispensed in the US, after a slow and uneven start to the campaign, marked by confusion, logistical hurdles and a patchwork of approaches by state and local authorities.
Britain, meanwhile, became the first nation to start using the Covid-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, ramping up its nationwide inoculation campaign amid soaring infection rates blamed on the new variant. Britain’s vaccination programme began December 8 with the shot developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.
Brian Pinker, an 82-year-old dialysis patient, received the first Oxford-AstraZeneca shot at Oxford University Hospital.
The rollout came the same day Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a new lockdown, the third for Britain, until at least midFebruary. Britain has recorded more than 50,000 new coronavirus infections a day over the past six days, and deaths have climbed past 75,000.
‘‘As I speak to you tonight, our hospitals are under more pressure from Covid than at any time since the start of the pandemic,’’ Johnson said.
France and other parts of Europe have come under fire over slow vaccine rollouts and delays.
In Israel, more than 1 million people, or roughly 12 per cent of its population, have been inoculated in just over two weeks.
Hoping to spur a halting vaccination effort that has only given about 44,000 shots since the third week of December, Mexico approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine for emergency use yesterday. Previously, the Pfizer vaccine was the only one approved for use.
On Sunday, India, the world’s second-most populous country, authorised two Covid-19 vaccines – the Oxford-AstraZeneca one and another developed by an Indian company. The move paves the way for a huge inoculation programme in the nation of 1.4 billion people. India has confirmed more than 10.3 million cases of the virus, second in the world behind the US. –