Vaccination drive enters new phase
People line up to get 2nd, final doses; Brits face lockdown
The first Americans inoculated against COVID-19 began rolling up their sleeves for their second and final dose Monday, while Britain introduced another vaccine on the same day it imposed a new nationwide lockdown against the rapidly surging virus.
New York State, meanwhile, announced its first known case of the new and seemingly more contagious variant, detected in amanin his 60s in Saratoga Springs. Colorado, California and Florida previously reported cases of the mutant version that has been circulating in England.
The emergence of the variant has added more urgency to the worldwide race to vaccinate people against the scourge.
In Southern California, Helen Cordova, an intensive care nurse, got her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center along with other doctors and nurses, baring their arms the prescribed threeweeks after they received their first shot at the start of the U. S. vaccination campaign.
“I’m really excited because that means I’m just that much closer to having the immunity and being a little safer when I come to work and, you know, just being around my family,” Cordova said.
Over the weekend, U.S. government officials reported that vaccinations had accelerated significantly.
As of Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that nearly 4.6 million shots have been dispensed in the U.S ., after as low 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 COVID19 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 program began Dec. 8 with the shot developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.
Brian Pinker, an 82- yearold dialysis patient, received the first Oxford- AstraZeneca shot at Oxford University Hospital, saying in a statement: “I can now really look forward to celebrating my 48th wedding anniversary.”
The rollout came the same day Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a new lockdown for England until at least mid- February. Britain has recorded more than 50,000 new coronavirus infections a day over the past six days, and deaths have climbed past 75,000, one of the worst tolls in Europe.
Schools and colleges will be closed for face- to- face instruction. Nonessential stores and services like hairdressers will be closed, and restaurants can offer only takeout.
“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.
France’s cautious approach appears to have backfired, leaving just a few hundred people vaccinated after the first week and rekindling anger over the government’s handling of the pandemic. The slow rollout has been blamed on mismanagement, staffing shortages over the holidays and a complex consent policy designed to accommodate vaccine skepticism among the French.
“It’s a state scandal,” Jean
Rottner, president of the Grand- Est region of eastern France, said on France- 2 television. “Getting vaccinated is becoming more complicated than buying a car.
Health Minister Olivier Veran promised that by the end of Monday, several thousand people will have been vaccinated, with the tempo picking up through the week. But that would still leave France well behind its neighbors.
French media broadcast charts compared vaccine figures in various countries. In France, a nation of 67 million people, just 516 people were vaccinated in the first six days, according to the French Health Ministry. Germany’s first- week total surpassed 200,000, and Italy’ s was over 100,000.
Millions have been vaccinated in the U. S. and China.
The European Union likewise faced growing criticism about the slow rollout of COVID- 19 shots across the 27- nation bloc of 450 million inhabitants. EU Commission spokesman Eric Ma mer said the main problem“is an issue of production capacity, an issue that everybody is facing.”
The EU has sealed six vaccine contracts with a variety of manufacturers. But only the Pfizer- BioNTech vaccine has been approved for use so far across the EU. The EU’s drug regulators are expected to decide Wednesday whether to recommend authorizing the Moderna vaccine.
In the U.S ., Dr. Mysheika Roberts, health commissioner in Columbus, Ohio, said demand has been lower than expected among the people given top priority for the vaccine. For example, the city’s 2,000 emergency medical workers are all eligible for the vaccine, but the health department has vaccinated only 850 of them.
She said some people were hesitant to get the vaccine and wanted to see how others handled it. The vaccine also arrived the week of Christmas, anda lot of people were on vacation and didn’t want to be bothered during the holiday, she said.
“I think we all assumed that people would want this vaccine so badly, that when it became available, people would just come get it,” Roberts said.
Roberts noted there has been no effective mass marketing campaign explaining why people should get vaccinated.