“Russia is adopting an active policy of aggression, even with vaccines,” said Oleksandr Linchevsky, a former deputy health minister. “It is in Russia’s political interest that Ukraine receives vaccines from elsewhere as late as possible,” because she wants to fill the gap with her own vaccine.
Ukraine, with a population of 42 million, is scheduled to receive eight million doses of vaccines under the Covax program, which supplies low- and middle-income countries that would otherwise not have access to vaccines. But those doses are unlikely to arrive until at least March. Negotiations for Western shipments at the end of the year continue, Stepanov said.
Vaccines for covid19>
Answers to your vaccine questions
While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most are likely to put medical professionals and residents of long-term care institutions first. If you want to understand how this decision is being made, this article will help you.
Life will only return to normal when society as a whole obtains sufficient protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they will only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens, at most, within the first two months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to infection. An increasing number of vaccines against coronavirus are showing robust protection against disease. But it is also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they are infected, because they have only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists still do not know whether vaccines also block coronavirus transmission. For now, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid crowds indoors and so on. Once enough people are vaccinated, it will be very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we, as a society, achieve this goal, life may begin to approach something normal in the fall of 2021.
Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially be authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical tests that provided these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. This remains a possibility. We know that people naturally infected with the coronavirus can transmit it as long as they have no cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be studying this issue intensively as vaccines are launched. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to consider possible spreaders.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is given as an injection into the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection will not be different from the one you took before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines and none have reported serious health problems. But some of them experienced short-term discomfort, including pain and flu symptoms that usually last for a day. People may need to plan a day off from work or school after the second injection. Although these experiences are not pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system facing the vaccine and developing a potent response that will provide lasting immunity.
No. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use a genetic molecule to prepare the immune system. This molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse with a cell, allowing the molecule to slide inward. The cell uses mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any given time, each of our cells can contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce to make their own proteins. After these proteins are produced, our cells fragment the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules that our cells make can survive just a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is designed to resist the cell’s enzymes a little more, so that cells can produce extra proteins from the virus and stimulate a stronger immune response. But mRNA can only last a few days at most, before it is destroyed.
Before President Trump’s executive order banning vaccine exports from the United States, Ukraine was in talks with Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson to speed up delivery. Although negotiations continue, delivery times are being postponed.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has barely managed to contain his outrage that his country is long behind in the vaccine line, despite its precarious geopolitical situation.
Russia has supported a separatist war in two eastern Ukraine provinces for six years, while trying to open a wedge between Kiev and its western allies. Vaccine policy is playing in the Kremlin’s favor.
“We must be like political acrobats who manage to get on a priority list” for vaccines, Zelensky said in an interview last month. The American export ban, he said, “puts Ukraine at the end of the line”. In a year-end declaration to the Ukrainians, Zelensky wrote bitterly that, unfortunately, the “richest” countries would have the vaccines first.
In late December, Ukraine stepped up negotiations with Chinese supplier Sinovac Biotech, announcing on New Year’s Eve an order for 1.9 million doses for delivery in early February. This is hardly enough, but it is still a geopolitical victory for China, providing a measure of relief when Western countries look the other way.