The first Americans inoculated against COVID-19 began to roll up their sleeves for the second and final dose on Monday, while the United Kingdom introduced another vaccine on the same day that it imposed a new nationwide 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 from Saratoga Springs. Colorado, California and Florida have previously reported infections involving the mutant version circulating in England.
The emergence of the variant has added even more urgency to the global race to vaccinate people against the scourge.
In Southern California, intensive care nurse Helen Cordova received her second dose of Pfizer vaccine at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center along with other doctors and nurses, who stripped her prescribed arms three weeks after receiving the first shot. . The second round of shootings began in various locations across the country, as the death toll in the United States exceeded 352,000.
“I’m very excited, because that means I’m much closer to having immunity and being a little safer when I come to work, and, you know, I’m just around my family,” Cordova said.
Over the weekend, US 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 distributed in the United States after a slow and uneven start to the campaign, marked by confusion, logistical obstacles and a mix of state authorities’ approaches. and local.
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom became the first nation to start using the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, intensifying its national inoculation campaign, amid rising infection rates attributed to the new variant. The UK vaccination program began on December 8 with the shooting 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: “Now I can look forward to celebrating my 48th birthday. wedding “.
The launch took place on the same day, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a new blockade for England until at least mid-February. The UK has recorded more than 50,000 new coronavirus infections a day in the last six days, and deaths have exceeded 75,000, one of the worst taxes in Europe.
In general, schools and colleges will be closed for face-to-face training. Non-essential shops and services, such as hairdressers, will be closed, and restaurants can only offer dining products.
“As I speak to you tonight, our hospitals are under more pressure from COVID than at any time since the beginning of the pandemic,” Johnson said.
Elsewhere in the world, France and other parts of Europe have been set on fire due to slow vaccine launches and delays.
France’s cautious approach seems to have turned upside down, leaving only a few hundred people vaccinated after the first week and rekindling anger over the government’s handling of the pandemic. The slow launch was blamed on mismanagement, a shortage of staff 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. “Vaccination becomes more complicated than buying a car.”
The Minister of Health, Olivier Veran, promised that by the end of Monday, several thousand people will be vaccinated, the pace increasing during the week. But that would leave France far behind its neighbors.
The French press released diagrams comparing vaccine figures from different 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 that of Italy was over 100,000. Millions have been vaccinated in the US and China.
The European Union has also faced growing criticism of the slow launch of COVID-19 photographs in the 27-nation bloc of 450 million people. European Commission spokesman Eric Mamer said the main problem “is a problem of production capacity, a problem that everyone is facing”.
The EU has concluded six vaccination contracts with a variety of producers. But only the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been approved for use so far across the EU. EU drug regulators are expected to decide on Wednesday whether to recommend the authorization of the Moderna vaccine.
In the United States, Dr. Mysheika Roberts, health commissioner in Columbus, Ohio, said demand was lower than expected among people given the highest priority for the vaccine. For example, 2,000 emergency medical workers in the city are all eligible, but the health department has vaccinated only 850 of them.
She said some people were reluctant to receive the vaccine and wanted to see how others treated it. The vaccine arrived in the week of Christmas and many people were on vacation and did not want to be disturbed during the holidays, she said.
“I think we all assumed that people would like this vaccine so badly that when it becomes available, people will just come and get it,” Roberts said.
Roberts noted that there was no effective mass marketing campaign to explain why people should be vaccinated.
“From the president down, so many people have promoted that we will have a vaccine and we will get this vaccine. But so many of the same people who were talking about it now are silent, “she said. “That might help if the same people were more vocal about it.”
Elsewhere in the world, Israel appears to be among the world’s 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 stimulated by a high-quality centralized health system, as well as a small size and a concentrated population of the country.
On Sunday, India, the second most populous country in the world, authorized its first two COVID-19 vaccines – one Oxford-AstraZeneca and another developed by an Indian company. The movement paves the way for a huge inoculation program in the desperate poor nation of 1.4 billion people.
India has confirmed more than 10.3 million cases of the virus, the second largest in the world behind the United States. It also reported about 150,000 deaths.
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Associated Press writers around the world contributed to this report.