The United States approves the use of the Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19

Washington: The United States gave its approval to use the Pfizer / Bionic vaccine to combat the Covid-19 epidemic, paving the way for the start of a massive nationwide vaccination campaign, while outgoing President Donald Trump promised that the first dose would be would administer in “less than 24 hours.”

Under pressure from Trump to expedite the granting of the emergency authorization, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced late Friday in a letter that it had given its approval to use the vaccine.

Thus, the United States becomes the sixth country to approve the vaccine manufactured by the American-German company Pfizer / Biontech, after Great Britain, Canada, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Mexico. The European Medicines Agency is supposed to give its approval at the end of December.

On Friday, outgoing President Donald Trump welcomed the news in a short video clip on Twitter, saying, “Today our country has achieved a medical miracle.” “We have already begun to send the vaccine to all states,” he added, noting that “the first vaccines will be made in less than 24 hours.”

He said: “Rulers decide where vaccines should go in their states and who will get them first. “We want our senior citizens, caregivers and first responders to be the first to receive it,” he added.

Trump, who focused his entire strategy to fight the epidemic on rapidly developing a vaccine, had expressed his impatience with the US Food and Drug Administration and wrote in a tweet: “Get this damn vaccine now!”

The Washington Post reported Friday that the White House ordered the head of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to authorize the Pfizer-Bionic vaccine on the same day, that is, Friday, or to resign.

Regardless, the commission’s decision was expected by the weekend.

It’s only been three weeks since the manufacturers applied for a license for this vaccine, for which the United States had already purchased 100 million doses.

On Friday, the United States bought an additional 100 million doses of another vaccine, “Moderna,” thus doubling the number of prerequisite doses of this American biotech company.

The United States, the country most affected by the epidemic in the world, currently has record numbers of infections, with about 235,000 new cases in 24 hours on Friday, a figure that has never been recorded before.

Before the United States, Mexico agreed to market the Pfizer vaccine, and the vaccination campaign would begin in late December with the first batch of 250,000 doses that would be enough for 125,000 people with two doses.

For its part, Peru has temporarily stopped, as a precaution, clinical trials of a vaccine developed by the Chinese laboratory Sinopharm, after the discovery of neurological problems in a volunteer.

The experiments were due to end this week, after testing about 12,000 people. In case the results, which will not be known before mid-2021, are positive, the Peruvian government will buy about 20 million doses to vaccinate two-thirds of its population.

The emerging kurna virus has killed one million and 582,721 people in the world, with about seventy million confirmed infections, according to a balance prepared by Agence France-Presse.

On Friday, the death toll in Brazil surpassed the 180,000 mark.

China imposed a closure on a city in the north of the country and launched a large-scale test campaign in another city, both near the Russian border after a new Corona virus infection was detected in each of them.

In Dongning, a forty-year-old man working in the port was injured, while in Suifinhe a thirty-nine-year-old worker was injured in an import-export trade zone, authorities said.

In South Korea, which often comes up as an example of its crisis management, the number of injured is increasing, especially in the Seoul region, according to health authorities, who called for limiting meetings and interactions. ***

Europe is the region that recorded the highest number of new infections this week (an average of 236,700 per day). The epidemic, which has receded since mid-November, has again spread to high levels.

In France (about 57 thousand deaths) there is a “high risk” of the disease outbreak “in the coming weeks,” as the French Public Health Authority warned on Friday.

On Thursday night, the French government announced a cautious easing of the closure, starting on December 15, maintaining some restrictions such as curfews from eight at night every day, including December 31 (but not the Dec. 24). Cinemas, theaters and museums will be closed until January 7 at the earliest.

For his part, and in neighboring Belgium, a spokesman for the health authorities, the virologist Stephen van Gucht, warned this Friday that the epidemic “is at a very high and dangerous level.”

He said that new infections have not decreased in nearly two weeks and that “the burden on hospitals remains very great.”

In Switzerland, with injuries also increasing, new measures have been taken, including the closure of restaurants, bars, shops, sports and entertainment venues, museums and libraries, starting at 7pm.

On the other hand, Great Britain, the country most affected by the epidemic in Europe with 63,082 deaths, announced that it would reduce the quarantine period for foreign travelers or “contact cases” for a Covid-19 patient from 14 to 10 days .

The country launched a vaccination campaign against Covid-19 on Tuesday, after it was the first country to give approval for the Pfizer / Biontech vaccine.

For their part, the French laboratories Sanofi and the British “GlaxoSmithKline” (GSK) suffered a setback when they announced on Friday that their vaccine will not be ready before the end of 2021, after the results of the first clinical trials were below The expectations.

The two companies announced in a statement that the implementation of the program “is being delayed to improve the immune response in the elderly.”