South Korea administered the first coronavirus vaccines to residents and nursing home staff on Friday, kicking off a massive immunization campaign that health authorities hope will restore some normalcy by the end of the year.
Vaccination begins at a critical time for the country, which has seen the progress made against the pandemic disappear due to a winter rebound and is struggling to mitigate the economic impact of a health crisis that has destroyed jobs in the service sector.
“In the last year I felt a lot of anxiety, but now I feel safer after receiving the vaccine,” said Lee Gyeong-soon, a nursing home employee after receiving the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford in a public health center. in the north of the capital, Seoul.
The health authorities plan to administer the first of the two doses of the vaccine to some 344,000 residents and workers of health care centers and 55,000 first-line health workers by the end of March.
“We have taken this historic first step towards restoring normalcy,” Son Young-rae, a senior official with the Ministry of Health, said during a press conference.
The government has extended current social distancing measures for at least two more weeks, banning private gatherings of five or more people and eating indoors after 10 p.m. to create a safe environment for vaccination, he added.
Meanwhile, front-line doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals treating COVID-19 patients will start receiving the vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech starting Saturday. The doses, which were obtained through the United Nations-backed COVAX program, will arrive at Incheon International Airport on Friday and will be transported to five major hospitals.
On the other hand, in Hong Kong it started a program to vaccinate its 7.5 million residents against the coronavirus for free.
People over 60 and health workers are among the 2.4 million people who will have priority access to receive the drug in community centers and outpatient clinics throughout the territory. Places for the first two weeks of the program have been sold out, the government said. At the moment, the vaccine from Sinovac, a Chinese biopharmaceutical company, will be administered.
Japan noted that vaccines to protect the country’s 36 million elderly people will arrive at local government offices by the end of June. Those over 65 are expected to receive the drug after health workers, of whom more than 21,000 already have the first dose of the vaccine within a week of the start of the campaign.
China approved two other COVID-19 vaccines. CanSino Biologics’ is the first of those developed in the country that is single-dose and, according to the firm, has an efficiency of 65.28% at 28 days after inoculation.
The other was created in a subsidiary of the state Sinopharm, the Wuhan Institute of Biology, which explained that the drug is 72.51% effective.
Chinese regulators had already approved a vaccine from Sinovac and another from Sinopharm’s Beijing subsidiary, which have been in use for weeks. The two firms said they will be able to produce 1,000 annual doses of the drug by the end of this year.
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