News Analysis India

Tag: Pfizer-BioNotech

  • US President-elect Joe Biden Joins List Of World Leaders To Receive COVID-19 Vaccine On TV

    US President-elect Joe Biden received the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at a hospital in Newark, Delaware on Monday, December 21 (local time). The vaccination process was also broadcasted live on television across the 50 states. With just a month left for his White House inauguration, Biden took the opportunity to urge all Americans to get inoculated as soon as the vaccine becomes available to them.

    The 77-year-old also garnered accolades from Americans as he refused to count to three before receiving the shot. “I am ready,“ he said as instructed the health care professional to inject him with the vaccine. Biden praised the health care workers and said President Donald Trump’s administration “deserves some credit getting this off the ground.”

    The president-elect said that his wife Jill Biden had received her first dose earlier in the day. Biden’s running mate, Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff are expected to receive their first shots next week.

  • UPS, FedEx working side-by-side to ship to ship Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines in US

    Rival US companies UPS and FedEx are working side-by-side to ship the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, after it was approved for emergency use by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday.

    The two shipping companies said that they had put plans, which they had been working for months, into action after the coronavirus vaccine received emergency use authorisation, reported The New York Times.

    During a news conference on Saturday, General Gustave F Perna, the chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to bring a market, said that the boxes were being packed at Pfizer’s plant in Michigan, and would be shipped to UPS and FedEx distribution hubs, where they would be dispersed to 636 locations around the country.


    Perna specified that 145 sites would receive the vaccine on Monday, 425 on Tuesday and 66 on Wednesday.

    UPS said that the company expects to start transporting the Covid-19 vaccine as soon as Sunday morning when employees stationed at Pfizer’s facility in Michigan will affix special Bluetooth- and radio-enabled tracking tags to each shipment, reported The New York Times.

    “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for… We’ve been planning for months with daily calls, drilling down to really quite minute details,” said Wes Wheeler, president of the company’s health care division, in an interview on Saturday.

    “You have two fierce rivals here, and competitors, in FedEx and UPS, who literally are teaming up to get this delivered,” said Richard Smith, a FedEx executive, to the Senate’s Subcommittee on Transportation and Safety on Thursday.

  • WHO Says Govt Decisions In Coming Days Will Be ‘decisive’ Amid 1st Breakthrough

    World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday said that the decisions made by the governments and individuals in the coming days would be ‘decisive’. Tedros said that the decisions made by the leaders and citizens in the coming days will determine both the course of the virus in the short-term and also the future possibility. This came after, the UK on Wednesday became the first country to authorize the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine for emergency use on Wednesday.

     WHO’s epidemiology expert Maria Van Kerkhove while addressing a press conference on  Friday said that almost 100 per cent of Coronavirus patients develop antibodies no matter the course of the disease. Speaking further, Kerkhove said, ‘What we understand is 90 to 100 per cent of people who are infected with the virus do develop an antibody response, whether you have mild infection or asymptomatic infection all the way to severe infection.’ The epidemiology expert informed that WHO is still learning how long COVID-19 antibody lasts, how strong it is, how it relates to immunity from another infection and how long that lasts. 

    As the world continues to battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, the total number of positive cases recorded so far is 6,56,86,172. Out of these cases, 15,14,549 have succumbed to the infection. Currently, the worst-hit country by the pandemic is the United States with 1,42,17,106 cases. 

  • The UK first approved the Pfizer-BioNotech vaccine for use in the world.

    UK authorises Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, to be made available across the country from next week. A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said, “The Government has today accepted the recommendation from the independent Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to approve Pfizer/BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine for use.


    “This follows months of rigorous clinical trials and a thorough analysis of the data by experts at the MHRA who have concluded that the vaccine has met its strict standards of safety, quality and effectiveness.

    “The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) will shortly also publish its latest advice for the priority groups to receive the vaccine, including care home residents, health and care staff, the elderly and the clinically extremely vulnerable.