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Today, Wednesday, the vaccination campaign with the “Pfizer-BioNTech” vaccine against the Coronavirus was launched in Qatar. As Britain detected a new strain that spreads more rapidly, a team from the World Health Organization is preparing to leave for the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus first appeared, to investigate the conditions of its appearance.
And Qatar announced that the first shipment of vaccine it recently received will be dedicated to immunizing the elderly, chronically ill people and some medical teams who deal with Corona patients on a daily basis.
The head of the National Strategic Group to Address Coronavirus, Dr. Abdul Latif Al-Khal, said that he hopes this launch will be the beginning of a comprehensive and effective national campaign to vaccinate the majority of the population of the State of Qatar in the next few weeks.
He reiterated that vaccination is safe and effective, and does not mean dispensing with the preventive measures currently in force until the end of the vaccination campaign.
In the same race, on Wednesday the transfer and distribution of the vaccine began in Europe, and it is expected to begin administering it to the population on December 27.
Three refrigerated trucks left Pfizer’s drug production plant in northeast Belgium between 9:00 and 10:00.
The operation – which used the logistical means of the Belgian shipping company “HSs” – took place amid strict security measures, and the media were not allowed to approach the site.
On Monday, the European Commission announced that it was authorizing the distribution of the “Pfizer-Biontech” vaccine in the European Union, hours after receiving the green light from the European Medicines Agency.
The European Union had previously announced that the first vaccinations would begin between 27 and 29 of this month in all member states. The distribution process – which will intensify in January and will continue throughout 2021 – will be carried out according to the population of each country.
In France, the Supreme Health Authority will issue its opinion on the vaccine on Thursday and the vaccination campaign will start on Sunday.
Bad news from Britain
While the world awaits the vaccine, the bad news from Great Britain continues, as the authorities announced on Wednesday the discovery of a second mutated version of the Coronavirus, with faster transmission than the recently announced strain, and caused panic in several European countries.
Authorities said the second mutated strain came from South Africa and asked everyone arriving from there to self-quarantine.
British Health Minister Matt Hancock said: “The two cases of infection with the new strain of the virus were in contact with infected people who came from South Africa.”
He stressed that the new strain of Coronavirus is of great concern and is highly transmittable.
Before this strain, Britain had discovered a rapidly spreading mutated strain of Corona; This prompted authorities to tighten isolation measures before beginning to ease them on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, British authorities announced the record of 39,237 corona cases during the last 24 hours, which is the highest daily figure since the virus began to spread.
This brings the total number of injured in Britain to 2,149,551, while fatalities reached 69,151 deaths.
Notably, 40 countries around the world suspended flights to Great Britain.
To Wuhan
In the same context, a team from the World Health Organization is preparing to leave for Wuhan, China, to investigate the causes of the appearance of the new Corona virus.
Fabian Lindertz from the Robert Koch Institute, which is Germany’s central body for disease control, said: “The meetings we have had so far with our Chinese colleagues are very fruitful and good.”
“My impression at the moment is that the Chinese, not only in government but also at the popular level, are very interested in knowing what happened,” he added.
Lindertz, 48, is an expert in zoonotic and infectious diseases that cross barriers between organisms, and is among the top 10 scientists assigned to them by the World Health Organization to try to understand the origin of the emerging coronavirus and how it is transmitted from animal to human.
A year after the detection of the first group of infected people in Wuhan, the team of scientists will head to China for the first time on a mission that is expected to take 5-6 weeks, accompanied by Peter bin Mubarak, an expert on food safety and Animal diseases of the World Health Organization.
“This is not about creating a guilty state or guilty authority,” Lendertz said. “It’s about understanding what happened, preventing it from happening again in the future and reducing risks,” he added.
Lindertz said viruses are transmitted from animals to humans every year and around the world, noting that in the case of the Corona virus, “it was a disgrace that it was a virulent virus.”
“We started in Wuhan because the most accurate data is available there, and from there we trace the paths where they lead us,” he added.
Notably, the outgoing US president, Donald Trump, accused China of covering up the first outbreak of the epidemic, considering the World Health Organization a “puppet” in the hands of Beijing.
It should be noted that the new Corona virus has so far infected more than 78 million worldwide, of which more than 1.7 million have died, while 49.7 million have recovered.
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