US vaccine programme gets off to a slow start

A week into a massive inoculation campaign, millions of coronavirus vaccines are sitting unused in US hospitals and elsewhere, putting Washington’s target of 20 million vaccinations this month in doubt.

Only a million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine have been administered, about a third of the first shipment sent last week. The US will need to vaccinate two million people a day, including Christmas Day, to meet the government’s target of 20 million this year.

More than 9.5 million doses of different vaccines, including Moderna’s, have been sent to states, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

The slow pace has barely picked up from the first week, when 614,000 vaccines were administered, although nearly 2.9 million were shipped.

The first inoculations started slowly last Monday as hospitals navigated preparing the frozen drugs for use. They also had to find employees to run vaccination clinics and ensure proper social distancing before and after vaccination. Some hospitals said they gave only about 100 doses on the first day of vaccinations.

The Donald Trump administration promised to vaccinate 20 million by the end of the year but provided little funding to achieve that goal.

In the UK, the country’s National Health Service said more than 500,000 people received the vaccine – most of them over the age of 70.

However, millions are set to face tighter restrictions on movement and meeting as cases surge.

Across the Channel, French President Emmanuel Macron is set to leave isolation, saying he no longer has symptoms a week after testing positive for Covid-19.

While Europe started to ease travel blocks on people arriving from the UK over a new variant of Covid-19 that appears to spread significantly more, the World Health Organisation met to “discuss strategies for testing, reducing transmission and communicating risks”.

Scientists are still trying to agree on a plan to control Covid-19’s various strains.