The first Americans inoculated with COVID-19 started rolling up their sleeves for their second and final dose on Monday, while Britain introduced another vaccine the same day it imposed a new national block against the rapidly growing virus.
Meanwhile, New York State has announced its first known case of the new and apparently more contagious variant, detected in a 60-year-old man in Saratoga Springs. Colorado, California and Florida have previously reported infections involving the mutant version circulating in England.
The emergence of the variant added even more urgency to the worldwide race to vaccinate people against the scourge.
In Southern California, intensive care nurse Helen Cordova received her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine at the Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center along with other doctors and nurses, who discovered the prescribed arms three weeks after receiving the first injection. The second round of gunfire began at various locations across the country, when the death toll in the U.S. exceeded 352,000.
“I am very excited because it means that I am much closer to having immunity and being a little safer when I come to work and, you know, just being close to my family,” said Cordova.
Over the weekend, US government officials reported that vaccinations increased significantly. On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said nearly 4.6 million vaccines were dispensed in the United States after a slow and irregular start to the campaign, marked by confusion, logistical obstacles and a patchwork of approaches by state and local authorities.
Meanwhile, Britain has become the first nation to start using the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, stepping up its nationwide inoculation campaign amid rising infection rates attributed to the new variant. . Britain’s vaccination program started on December 8 with the injection developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.
Brian Pinker, an 82-year-old dialysis patient, received his first Oxford-AstraZeneca injection at Oxford University Hospital, saying in a statement: “Now I can really hope to celebrate my 48th wedding anniversary.”
The launch took place on the same day that Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a new blockade for England until at least mid-February. Britain has recorded more than 50,000 new coronavirus infections per day for the past six days, and deaths have risen to 75,000, one of the worst deaths in Europe.
Schools and colleges will generally be closed for classroom teaching. Non-essential stores and services, such as hairdressers, will be closed and restaurants can only offer take-out food.
“As I speak to you tonight, our hospitals are under more pressure from COVID than at any time since the pandemic began,” said Johnson.
In other parts of the world, France and other parts of Europe are under attack due to the slow launch and vaccine delays.
France’s cautious approach appears to have backfired, leaving only a few hundred people vaccinated after the first week and reigniting anger over the government’s handling of the pandemic. The slow implementation was attributed to maladministration, lack of staff during the holidays and a complex consent policy designed to accommodate vaccine skepticism among the French.
“It is a state scandal,” Jean Rottner, president of the Grand-Est region in eastern France, told France-2 television. “Being vaccinated is becoming more complicated than buying a car.”
Health Minister Olivier Veran has promised that by the end of Monday, several thousand people will be vaccinated, with the pace accelerating throughout the week. But that would still leave France far behind its neighbors.
French media broadcast charts comparing vaccine numbers in several countries: In France, a nation of 67 million people, only 516 people were vaccinated in the first six days, according to the French Ministry of Health. Germany’s total in the first week exceeded 200,000 and Italy’s exceeded 100,000. Millions have been vaccinated in the United States and China.
The European Union also faced growing criticism about the slow implementation of COVID-19 shots in the 27-nation bloc of 450 million people. EU Commission spokesman Eric Mamer said the main problem “is a question of production capacity, an issue that everyone is facing”.
The EU has sealed six vaccine contracts with several manufacturers. But only the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been approved for use across the EU. EU drug regulators are due to decide on Wednesday whether to recommend the authorization of the Moderna vaccine.
In the US, Dr. Mysheika Roberts, health commissioner in Columbus, Ohio, said the demand has been less than expected among people who received the top priority for the vaccine. For example, the city’s 2,000 emergency medical workers are all eligible, but the health department vaccinated only 850 of them.
She said that some people were hesitant to get the vaccine and wanted to see how others dealt with it. The vaccine also arrived during Christmas week, and many people were on vacation and did not want to be disturbed during the holiday, she said.
“I think we all assumed that people would want this vaccine so much that, when it was available, people would just get it,” said Roberts.
Roberts noted that there was no effective mass marketing campaign explaining why people should be vaccinated.
“Since the president onwards, many people have been bragging about the fact that we are going to have a vaccine and distribute it. But many of the same people who were talking about it now were silent, ”she said. “It could help if those same people talk about it more.”
In other parts of the world, Israel appears to be among the world leaders in the vaccination campaign, inoculating more than 1 million people, or about 12% of its population, in just over two weeks. The effort was driven by a high quality centralized health system and the country’s small size and concentrated population.
On Sunday, India, the second most populous country in the world, authorized its first two COVID-19 vaccines – Oxford-AstraZeneca and another developed by an Indian company. The move paves the way for a huge inoculation program in the desperately poor nation of 1.4 billion people.
India has confirmed more than 10.3 million cases of the virus, the second in the world behind the USA. He also reported about 150,000 deaths.
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Associated Press writers around the world contributed to this report.