The first Americans vaccinated against COVID-19 started rolling up their sleeves on Monday for their second and final dose, while Britain introduced another vaccine the same day it imposed another nationwide lockdown against the rapidly rising virus .
New York State, meanwhile, announced the first known case of the new and seemingly more contagious variant, discovered in a man in his 60s in Saratoga Springs. Colorado, California and Florida have previously reported infections related to the mutated version circulating in England.
The emergence of the variant has made the global race to vaccinate people against the pest even more urgent.
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 bared their arms for the prescribed three weeks after they had their first injection got. The second series of shots began at various locations around the country when the US death toll exceeded 352,000.
“I’m really excited because that means I’m just that much closer to immunity and a little bit safer when I come to work and, you know, just be with my family,” said Cordova.
Last weekend, US government officials reported that vaccinations had accelerated significantly. On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said nearly 4.6 million shots had been fired in the US after a slow and uneven start to the campaign characterized by confusion, logistical hurdles and a patchwork of approaches by state and local authorities .
Britain, meanwhile, became the first country to use the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, ramping up the nationwide vaccination campaign amid rising infection rates 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 the first admission of Oxford-AstraZeneca at Oxford University Hospital and said in a statement, “I can now really look forward to my 48th wedding anniversary.”
The rollout came the same day that Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a new lockdown for England, until at least mid-February. Britain registered more than 50,000 new coronavirus infections per day in the past six days and the number of deaths has soared to over 75,000, one of the worst tolls in Europe.
Schools and colleges will generally be closed to face-to-face instruction. Non-essential stores and services such as hairdressers will be closed and restaurants can only offer takeout.
“As I speak to you tonight, our hospitals are under more pressure from COVID than ever since the start of the pandemic,” Johnson said.
Elsewhere in the world, France and other parts of Europe have come under fire for slow roll-out and delays of vaccines.
France’s cautious approach seems to have backfired, causing only a few hundred people to be vaccinated after the first week and rekindling anger over the government’s handling of the pandemic. The slow rollout is due to mismanagement, staff shortages during the holidays and a complex consent policy designed to address vaccine skepticism among the French.
“It’s a state scandal,” said Jean Rottner, president of the Grand-Est region of eastern France, on France-2 television. “Vaccination is getting more and more complicated than buying a car.”
Health Minister Olivier Veran promised several thousand people would have been vaccinated by the end of Monday, with the pace increasing through the week. But that would still leave France far behind.
According to the French Ministry of Health, in France, a country of 67 million people, charts broadcast by the French media were vaccinated in the first six days. The total for the first week in Germany exceeded 200,000 and that of Italy more than 100,000. Millions of people have been vaccinated in the US and China.
The European Union has also faced increasing criticism over the slow rollout of COVID-19 recordings in the 27-country block of 450 million inhabitants. European Commission spokesman Eric Mamer said the main problem is “a question of production capacity, a problem that everyone faces”.
The EU has signed six vaccine contracts with different manufacturers. But so far only the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine has been approved for use across the EU. EU drug regulators are expected to decide on Wednesday whether to recommend approving the Moderna vaccine.
In the US, Dr. Mysheika Roberts, health commissioner in Columbus, Ohio, said demand was lower than expected among the people who were given top priority for the vaccine. For example, the city’s 2,000 medical workers are all eligible, but the health department has only vaccinated 850.
She said some people were hesitant about getting the vaccine and wanted to see how others coped with it. The vaccine also arrived the week of Christmas, and many people were on vacation and didn’t want to be bothered during the holidays, she said.
“I think we all assumed that people would want this vaccine so badly that when it became available, people would just come and get it,” said Roberts.
Roberts noted that there hasn’t been an effective mass marketing campaign explaining why people should get vaccinated.
So many people have been praising since the president that we will get a vaccine and get this vaccine out. But so many of those same people who talked about it have now become silent, ”she said. “That could help if those same people talked about it more.”
Elsewhere around the world, Israel appears to be one of the world leaders in the vaccination campaign, vaccinating more than 1 million people or about 12% of the population in just over two weeks. The effort has been fueled by a high-quality, centralized health system and the country’s small size and concentrated population.
On Sunday, India, the world’s second-most populous country, approved the first two COVID-19 vaccines: the Oxford AstraZeneca and another developed by an Indian company. The move paves the way for a massive immunization 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 after the US. It has also reported about 150,000 deaths.
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Associated Press writers around the world contributed to this report.