On December 8, 90-year-old British woman Margaret Keenan, resplendent in her Christmas T-shirt, received the Western world’s first Covid vaccination — a chink of light at the end of the tunnel for humanity after a devastating pandemic year.
Six months on, nearly one billion Covid jabs — both first and second shots — have been administered globally.
The unprecedented inoculation drive is seen as the world’s ticket out of the coronavirus disaster, despite concerns about rare side effects, worries over supply, and a glaring inequality between rich and poor.
With new Covid variants sparking a worrying fresh spike of cases and uncertainty over the vaccines’ effectiveness against them, the planet is now racing to inoculate as many people as possible before being overwhelmed by yet another wave of a pandemic that has already killed three million people.
“A year ago I felt myself a young man, now I am an old man’’, said Laszlo Cservak, a 75-year-old Hungarian, after his first jab near the River Danube.
“I horribly miss not going to the pool or gym and travelling, so I came here to get liberated and my old life back’’, added Cservak,
reflecting the Covid weariness felt by billions worldwide.
In the darkest days of the pandemic, the idea of rapidly creating, manufacturing and authorising even one effective vaccine against Covid looked far off.
But the world’s scientists, aided by billions in public funding, worked around the clock to develop several viable vaccines — the first
ones using cutting-edge mRNA technology that hacks into human cells and effectively turns them into vaccine-making factories.
“Normally, it takes five to 10 years to produce a new vaccine’’, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament in February.
“We did it in 10 months. This is a huge scientific success.”
With clinical trials showing efficacy of up to 95 per cent, attention turned to the logistical nightmare of producing, storing, delivering and administering the vaccine — in theory to everyone on Earth who wanted it.
Roll-out was sluggish in many countries, but faced with a life-or-death race against time, some deployed creative logistical solutions, turning cathedrals, iconic sports stadiums, and theme parks into emergency vaccination centres.
France turned a velodrome into a vaccino-drome. Venice created the vaccination
vaporetto. Hard-hit Britain deployed tens of thousands of vaccine volunteers, dubbed the “jabs army”.
World leaders from US President Joe Biden, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and Pope Francis rolled up their sleeves to take the shot — although not always in front of the cameras — in a bid to counter public scepticism.
Biden told the world “there’s nothing to worry about” as he received his shot live on TV.
The few countries that rolled out a vaccine quickly have seen cases and deaths fall, with a return to something of a normal life. — AFP
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