Covid-19 Live Updates: The World Watches as Russia and Britain Lead the Way in Mass Vaccinations

20 min readDec 5, 2020

The stricken Midwest gets a reprieve in case numbers. Tennessee asks the National Guard to help its strained hospitals. Hawaii is inviting mainlanders who want to work remotely.

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With Covid-19 hospitalizations at a high, Tennessee asks the National Guard for help.

Here’s what you need to know:

Mass vaccinations are beginning. They’re not all the same.
Russia begins a mass vaccination campaign in Moscow, with a vaccine that is not fully tested.
The U.S. debate over which group should get vaccine priority is getting heated.
Britain’s vaccine rollout gives Boris Johnson a chance to improve his reputation, and other news around the world.
The Midwest, after being consumed by the coronavirus for months, is showing signs of progress.
The virus is devastating the U.S., and leaving an uneven toll.
Once a model for how to contain the virus, New Rochelle now mourns its return.
Hawaii hopes its pandemic-battered economy will get a boost from mainlanders working remotely.

Mass vaccinations are beginning. They’re not all the same.

Containers of the Chinese company Sinovac’s Covid-19 vaccine arrived in Brazil last month.Credit…Nelson Almeida/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Across the world, mass vaccination campaigns are beginning, or just about to.

Russia began its campaign on Saturday. The United Kingdom will start its campaign on Tuesday. The United States hopes to start large-scale vaccinations this month, as does Turkey. Hundreds of thousands of people have already been vaccinated in China, and thousands in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere.

But the mass vaccination efforts differ in one profound way: Some rely on a vaccine that has completed human trials — and some do not.

The vaccines that have, like the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine approved in Britain and expected to be approved shortly in the United States, have more evidence of efficacy and safety. Those that have not — the Russian and Chinese vaccines — carry uncertainties that vaccine experts say should be settled before being given to millions of healthy people.

For one thing, researchers want to be assured that if people get Covid-19, despite having been vaccinated, they develop a milder form of the disease rather than an enhanced one.

The race for a coronavirus vaccine has been a global undertaking from the start. When Chinese scientists shared the genome of the virus on Jan. 10, researchers around the world leapt to begin designing vaccines.

In March, the first clinical trials of coronavirus vaccines in humans were launched by Moderna in the United States and Sinovac in China. More vaccine makers joined the effort, including in India, Thailand and Cuba. Today there are 13 vaccines in final, Phase 3 human trials and a total of 58 vaccines being tested on people. Dozens more are in preclinical tests.

The vaccines vary in how they prompt the body’s immune response. Moderna and Pfizer use a relatively new technology, creating genetic molecules encased in oily bubbles. The Sputnik vaccine uses adenoviruses to shuttle in genes. China’s Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines contain dead coronaviruses.

No one has ever created a licensed human vaccine for any coronavirus before, and the world has been eagerly waiting to see what works best and most safely. Vaccine skepticism exists in countries like the United States and Brazil anyway, and Covid vaccines are open to much more, given the speed of their development and the nationalistic rivalries involved.

As governments around the world jockeyed to place advance orders, without knowing which vaccine — if any — would turn out to work, global health experts began warning that vaccine nationalism would undermine the worldwide fight against a virus that respects no borders.

The United States used its Operation Warp Speed program to make purchases from six vaccine makers. Russia and China have promoted their vaccines to a number of developing countries, using them as a medical form of soft diplomacy.

Last month, the first results of Phase 3 clinical trials for four vaccines came to light, showing high efficacy rates for Sputnik V and the vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca. The news was heartening. But researchers are still waiting in most cases for something more than company news releases to dig their teeth into.

In some cases, the initial announcements have left them confused.

The announcement about the Sputnik V vaccine claimed an efficacy rate of 91.4 percent based on the first 39 cases of Covid-19 in the trial — a relatively small number to base such big conclusions on. But the announcement also claimed that an analysis of an unspecified number of volunteers three weeks after the second dose revealed an efficacy rate of 95 percent.

While China has five vaccines in Phase 3 clinical trials, there has been no announcement about whether any are safe and effective. That has not stopped the Chinese government from getting a nationwide vaccination program ready and planning to approve a staggering 600 million doses for sale by the end of the year.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is scrutinizing the raw data from the vaccine trials by Pfizer and BioNTech, and the companies will provide more detailed public documents in advance of a meeting on Thursday of a special F.D.A. panel of experts. The panel is expected to turn to the Moderna vaccine after that. Full scientific reports are expected to start appearing in medical journals shortly.

— Carl Zimmer

VACCINE BASICS

We created graphic explanations of how two vaccines work: Moderna’s and the Pfizer/BioNTech candidate.

Russia begins a mass vaccination campaign in Moscow, with a vaccine that is not fully tested.

The scene at one of Moscow’s 70 vaccinations sites on Saturday. Credit…Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Healthcare workers began vaccinating thousands of people in Moscow against the coronavirus on Saturday, a campaign that will expand nationally next week despite relying on a vaccine that has not been fully proven to be safe and effective.

Doctors, health-care workers, social workers, and teachers — all judged to run the highest risk of exposure to the virus — are receiving the vaccine in 70 locations across the city, and are to receive a second 21 days later.

Russia drew widespread criticism when it registered its Sputnik V vaccine for emergency use in August, before beginning a clinical trial to measure its efficacy. But President Vladimir Putin boasted that it was the first vaccine in the world to receive government approval.

Last month, the makers of the Sputnik vaccine from a clinical trial, but the vaccine had been tested on a small and unspecified number of people. The final trial has also yet to be completed.

Still, in Moscow, vaccination is now open to workers between the ages of 18 and 60 who face high risks of exposure. Pregnant women and people suffering from a cold or chronic conditions are barred from receiving it.

On Friday, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that 5,000 people had registered to get the vaccine, and Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova cautioned those receiving it to avoid public places and reduce their intake of medicine and alcohol within the first 42 days after the first jab, because it could suppress the immune system, Reuters reported.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Russia has recorded nearly 2.4 million cases, the fourth largest number in the world, and more than 41,000 deaths. Moscow, with around 13 million people, has been the epicenter of the country’s outbreak.

— Elian Peltier

Covid-19 Live Updates: The World Watches as Russia and Britain Lead the Way in Mass Vaccinations

The stricken Midwest gets a reprieve in case numbers. Tennessee asks the National Guard to help its strained hospitals. Hawaii is inviting mainlanders who want to work remotely.

Here’s what you need to know:

Mass vaccinations are beginning. They’re not all the same.

Russia begins a mass vaccination campaign in Moscow, with a vaccine that is not fully tested.

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Written by pakhi