India kicked off one of the world’s largest coronavirus vaccination drives Saturday as the pandemic spread at a record pace and global Covid-19 deaths surged past two million.
Authorities say they are drawing on their experience with elections and child immunisation programmes for the drive, which is a daunting task in an enormous, impoverished nation with often shoddy transport infrastructure and one of the world’s worst-funded healthcare systems. The vaccines will also have high security, so that doses do not end up being sold on India’s large black market for medicines.
US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer said shipments of its vaccines would slow for a period in late January. It promised that there would be “a significant increase” in shipments in March, and the European Commission said all vaccines ordered by the bloc for the first quarter would be delivered on time. Fears are also growing that a new strain of the virus found in Brazil could be more contagious, just like the variants recently found in Britain and South Africa.
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