The first Americans inoculated against COVID-19 began rolling up their sleeves for their second and final dose on Monday, while Britain introduced another vaccine on the same day that imposed a new national blockade against rapid rise of the virus.
Meanwhile, New York State announced its first known case of the new and seemingly most contagious variant, detected in a 60-year-old man in Saratoga Springs. Colorado, California and Florida have previously reported infections related to the mutant version that has been circulating in England.
The advent of the variant has added even more urgency to the world race to vaccinate people against the scourge.
In Southern California, intensive care nurse Helen Cordova received her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center along with other doctors and nurses, who uncovered her arms the three weeks prescribed after receiving the first. removed. The second round of shootings began in various parts of the country, with the death toll in the U.S. exceeding 352,000.
“I’m very excited because that means I’m a lot closer to having immunity and being a little safer when I come to work and, you know, being by my family’s side,” Córdoba said.
Over the weekend, U.S. government officials reported that vaccinations had accelerated significantly. As of Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said nearly 4.6 million shots had been fired in the U.S. after a slow and uneven start to the campaign, marked by confusion, logistical hurdles and a mosaic of approaches by state and local authorities.
Meanwhile, Britain became the first nation to start using the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, which increased its nationwide inoculation campaign amid high rates of infection attributed 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 his first Oxford-AstraZeneca shot at Oxford University Hospital, saying in a statement: “I can now wish to celebrate my 48th wedding anniversary.”
The deployment came on the same day that Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a new closure for England until at least mid-February. Britain has recorded more than 50,000 new coronavirus infections a day in the last six days and deaths have risen to over 75,000, one of the worst tolls in Europe.
Schools and colleges will generally remain closed for face-to-face instruction. Non-essential shops and services, such as hairdressers, will be closed, and restaurants can only offer takeaway food.
“As I speak to you tonight, our hospitals are under more pressure from COVID than at any time since the pandemic began,” Johnson said.
Elsewhere in the world, France and other parts of Europe have been the target of slow deployment and delayed vaccines.
France’s cautious approach seems to have been counterproductive, leaving only a few hundred people vaccinated after the first week and rekindling anger over the government’s management of the pandemic. The slow deployment has been attributed to mismanagement, staff shortages during 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, told France-2 television. “Getting vaccinated is getting more complicated than buying a car.”
Health Minister Olivier Veran promised that by the end of Monday several thousand people would be vaccinated, at a rate that would increase throughout the week. But this would still leave France far behind its neighbors.
The French media aired graphs comparing vaccine figures from 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. The German total in the first week exceeded 200,000 and that in Italy exceeded 100,000. Millions of people have been vaccinated in the US and China.
The European Union also faced growing criticism over the slow deployment of COVID-19 features in the 27 million 450 million population block. EU Commission spokesman Eric Mamer said the main problem “is a problem of production capacity, an issue that everyone faces”.
The EU has sealed six vaccine contracts with several manufacturers. But only the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been approved so far for use across the EU. EU drug regulators are expected to decide on Wednesday whether it is recommended to authorize the Modern vaccine.
In the United States, Dr. Mysheika Roberts, health commissioner in Columbus, Ohio, said demand has been lower than expected among people with the highest priority for the vaccine. For example, all of the city’s 2,000 emergency medical workers are eligible, but the health department has only vaccinated 850.
He said some people were hesitant to take the vaccine and wanted to see how others handled it. The vaccine also arrived on Christmas week and a lot of people were on vacation and didn’t want to bother during the holidays, he said.
“I think we all assumed that people would want this vaccine so badly that when it was available, people would just come and get it,” Roberts said.
Roberts noted that there has been no effective mass marketing campaign that explains why people should be vaccinated.
“From the president down, so many people have announced that we will have a vaccine and get it out. But a lot of those people who were talking about it now have shut up, “he said.” That might help if those same people were more vocal about it. “
Elsewhere in the world, Israel appears to be among the world leaders in the vaccination campaign, inoculating more than a million people, or about 12% of its population, in just over two weeks. The effort has been driven by a centralized, high-quality health system and by the country’s small concentrated population.
On Sunday, India, the second most populous country in the world, authorized its first two COVID-19 vaccines: the Oxford-AstraZeneca and another developed by an Indian company. The movement 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, second in the world behind the United States. It has also reported about 150,000 deaths.
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Associated Press writers from around the world contributed to this report.