The first Americans to be vaccinated against COVID-19 began rolling up their sleeves for their second and final dose on Monday, while Britain introduced a new vaccine on the same day, introducing a new nationwide lockdown against the rapidly emerging virus.
The state of New York has meanwhile announced its first known case of the new and seemingly more contagious variant, which was detected in a man in his 60s in Saratoga Springs. Colorado, California and Florida have previously reported infections over the mutant version spread in England.
The rise of the variant has added to the global race to vaccinate people against the plague even more urgently.
In Southern California, intensive care nurse Helen Cordova received her second dose of Pfizer vaccine at the Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center, along with other doctors and nurses, who exposed their arms three weeks after receiving their first shot. The second round of shootings began in various parts of the country when the US death toll exceeded 352,000.
“I’m very excited because it means I’m just so much closer to having immunity and a little safer when I get to work, and you know, I’m just in my family,” Cordova said. .
Over the weekend, U.S. government officials reported that vaccinations had accelerated significantly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that nearly 4.6 million shots were fired in the U.S. after a slow and uneven start to the campaign, marked by confusion, logistical barriers and a patchwork of approaches by the state and local authorities.
Britain has meanwhile become the first nation to start developing the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, pushing up the nationwide vaccination campaign amid rising infection rates given to the new variant. Britain’s vaccination program began on December 8 with the shot developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.
Brian Pinker, an 82-year-old dialysis patient, received the first shot of Oxford-AstraZeneca at Oxford Hospital and said in a statement: “I can now really look forward to celebrating my 48th wedding anniversary.”
The launch came the same day that Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a new exclusion for England until at least mid-February. Britain has recorded more than 50,000 new coronavirus infections in the past six days, and deaths have risen to more than 75,000, one of the worst tolls in Europe.
Schools and colleges will generally be closed for face-to-face teaching. Non-essential shops and services such as hairdressers will be closed, and restaurants can only pick up.
“As I speak to you tonight, our hospitals are under pressure from COVID more than ever before since the onset of the pandemic,” Johnson said.
Elsewhere around the world, France and other parts of Europe have come under fire due to the slow onset and delays of vaccines.
France’s cautious approach seems to have backfired, and after the first week only a few hundred people were vaccinated and the anger over the government’s handling of the pandemic flared up again. The slow rollout was blamed on mismanagement, staff shortages during the holidays and a complicated consent policy designed to accommodate vaccine skepticism among the French.
“This is a state scandal,” Jean Rottner, president of the Grand-Est region in eastern France, said on France 2 television. “Getting vaccinated becomes more complicated than buying a car.”
Health Minister Olivier Veran has promised that thousands of people would be vaccinated by the end of Monday. But it will still leave France well behind its neighbors.
French media have broadcast maps comparing vaccine figures in different countries: In France, a country of 67 million people, only 516 people were vaccinated in the first six days, according to the French Ministry of Health. Germany’s first week total exceeded 200,000, and Italy more than 100,000. Millions have been vaccinated in the US and China.
The European Union has also come under increasing criticism over the slow rollout of COVID-19 shots across the 27-nation bloc of 450 million inhabitants. EU Commission spokesman Eric Mamer said the biggest problem was ” a matter of production capacity, an issue that everyone faces. ”
The EU has concluded six vaccine contracts with a variety of manufacturers. But only the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has so far been approved across the EU. EU drug regulators are expected to decide on Wednesday whether to recommend the authorization of the Moderna vaccine.
In the USA, dr. Mysheika Roberts, health commissioner in Columbus, Ohio, said demand was lower than expected among the people getting the highest entity for the vaccine. The city’s 2,000 emergency medical workers, for example, are all eligible, but the health department has vaccinated only 850 of them.
She said some people are reluctant to get the vaccine, and want to see how others handle it. The vaccine also came the week of Christmas, and many people were on vacation and did not want to be bothered during the holidays, she said.
“I think we’ve all assumed that people want this vaccine so badly, that people will only get it to get it,” Roberts said.
Roberts noted that there was no effective mass marketing campaign explaining why people should be vaccinated.
‘From the president down, so many people have argued that we are going to take a vaccine and remove the vaccine. “But so many of the same people who talked about it have now become silent,” she said. “It might help if the same people talk more about it.”
Elsewhere worldwide, it appears that Israel is among the world leaders in the vaccination campaign and more than 1 million people, or about 12% of its population, are vaccinated in just over two weeks. The effort has been reinforced by a high-quality centralized health care system and the small and concentrated population of the country.
On Sunday, India, the second most populous country in the world, approved its first two COVID-19 vaccines – the Oxford-AstraZeneca one and the other developed by an Indian company. The move paves the way for a major vaccination program in the desperately poor country of 1.4 billion people.
India has confirmed more than 10.3 million cases of the virus, second in the world behind the US. About 150,000 deaths have also been reported.
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Associated Press writers around the world contributed to this report.