COVID-19 Vaccine Development

Residents of two long-term care homes in Quebec will be the first to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in that province. Francine Dupuis of the Montreal regional health agency says health care workers have been ready to administer the doses at Maimonides Geriatric Centre since Friday.

Analysis of contracts countries are signing with vaccine makers for advance booking of candidates shows that the deals are still fluid, changing in a matter of days with some companies gaining and some losing orders given that most candidates are still in trial stage.

Singapore has approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s novel coronavirus vaccine and expects delivery of the first shots by the end of December, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said on Monday.
The city-state of 5.7 million people expects to have enough vaccines for everyone by the third quarter of 2021 and will make it free for citizens and long-term residents, Lee said.

Bahrain said Sunday it approved the use of a Chinese coronavirus vaccine, following its earlier approval of a vaccine made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.

Hospital systems nationwide should expect the first shipments of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine to arrive Monday, Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed, said during a media briefing Saturday.

The United States became the third highly developed Western country — after Britain and Canada — to approve the vaccine.

But the three countries have very different health care systems. And they face different challenges in the race to get the vaccine to millions of people.

The Hong Kong government weighed scientific, logistical, business and even political factors before choosing the manufacturers to supply millions of Covid-19 vaccine shots to the city’s residents, according to health experts and an insider close to the selection process.

As the race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine concludes, a new one begins: the race to ensure that enough people are vaccinated to end the pandemic.

Pfizer Inc. is packing boxes with thousands of its Covid-19 vaccines for shipment around the U.S., as hospitals gear up to give shots while also confronting the surging pandemic.

Trucks carrying the fragile cargo at minus-94 degrees Fahrenheit will start rolling out of Pfizer plants in Michigan and Wisconsin on Sunday. Doses are scheduled to start arriving at hospitals on Monday.

Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director John Nkengasong warned “it will be extremely terrible to see” wealthy nations obtaining vaccines and African countries missing out, as he called on for an extraordinary United Nations session to discuss this “moral issue” and avoid a “North-South distrust in respect to vaccines, which is a common good”.