The UK has become the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for use.

It has been given the go-ahead by the health regulator MHRA and will be rolled out from early next week. Studies have shown the jab is 95% effective and works in all age groups. The government has secured 40 million doses of the vaccine, which needs to be refrigerated at -70C (-94F). Ten million doses are expected in the UK by the end of the year and patients need two each. Care home residents and their carers will be first in line to be vaccinated, the government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has confirmed. Studies have shown the jab is 95% effective and works in all age groups. The government has secured 40 million doses of the vaccine, which needs to be refrigerated at -70C (-94F). Ten million doses are expected in the UK by the end of the year and patients need two each. Care home residents and their carers will be first in line to be vaccinated, the government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has confirmed. Speaking to Sky News this morning, health secretary Matt Hancock said the approval of the vaccine is “fantastic news”. He added: “The MHRA – the fiercely independent regulator – has clinically authorised the vaccine for rollout. “The NHS stands ready to make that happen so from early next week we will start the programme of vaccinating people against COVID-19 here in this country. “As we know from earlier announcements, this vaccine is effective, the MHRA have approved it as clinically safe and we have a vaccine, so it’s very good news.”

© Other How COVID-19 vaccines ordered by the UK compare Mr Hancock added there would be “three modes of delivery” of the vaccine. “The first is hospitals themselves, which of course we’ve got facilities like this,” he said. “50 hospitals across the country are already set up and waiting to receive the vaccine as soon as it’s approved, so that can now happen. “Also vaccination centres, which will be big centres where people can go to get vaccinated. They are being set up now.” Mr Hancock said the military are involved in the logistics of the vaccine rollout and 800,000 jabs are being brought from Belgium. An effective vaccine is seen as the main weapon in fighting the pandemic, which has claimed more than 1.4 million lives worldwide. Pfizer and BioNTech reported final trial results on 18 November that showed its vaccine was 95% effective in preventing COVID-19, with no major safety concerns. Sky News’ science correspondent Thomas Moore said: “It’s going to be tricky to rollout but nevertheless this is really good news. “It’s two doses per person so that’s an awful lot of people who could be vaccinated. “Because it needs to be stored at -70C (-94F), it’s going to be shipped in dry ice to hospital centres that have these special cryo-freezers.”

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s treasury secretary nominee Janet Yellen said on Tuesday the country is facing a historic crisis from the pandemic and the subsequent economic fallout.

This past week, millions of Americans joined together in total defiance of all public health advice for another round of infecting and killing their loved ones, while ensuring that the nation’s medical professionals will face several more months of risky, grueling, emotionally draining labor trying to keep a country full of heedless jerks and credulous conspiracy-mongers alive. Many doctors, nurses, and hospital staff are increasingly hopeless and disillusioned. Gone are the 7’oclock cheers and “Thank you essential workers” signs in every window. That fleeting solidarity has been replaced by a cold, selfish indifference to the staggering and seemingly pointless sacrifices these heroic workers continue to make on our behalf. And many of them are wondering how much longer they can keep it up. Never has this been more clear than it was over the long Thanksgiving weekend. While many Americans did the sensible — if heart-wrenching — thing and stayed home or limited their gatherings to small, pre-existing “pods,” more than 8 million people traveled through airports the day before Thanksgiving. In one poll, 40 percent of respondents told researchers they were planning on attending a large, in-person gathering. All of this while a record 90,000 people were already hospitalized with COVID-19, and public health professionals begged people to stay home so as not to exacerbate the problem. How can people do this, knowing that their actions risk their own lives and the lives of others? It would be one thing if the incredible, worldwide scientific effort to create a vaccine for this terrible virus was failing and there was no hope on the bleak horizon. But it looks like multiple vaccines will be deployed beginning next month, with the possibility of a return to some kind of normalcy by the end of next year. The end of this thing is now tantalizingly in sight. This is not to minimize what people have been through, or the misery that awaits those who hunker down for the winter, still cruelly shorn of nearly all social contact and ordinary joys. But the reality is that many Americans are now consciously choosing to spread death and suffering over finding the strength to endure for a few more months. And they aren’t just harming themselves: They are putting unimaginable strain on the country’s health-care system, as burned out doctors, nurses, and staff ask themselves why they are martyring themselves on behalf of such a venal society. One viral immunologist told me that, “I feel upset with these folks because this is inevitably going to cause more death and harm and not just to them but others who did stay home and followed guidelines.” He added that much of the blame rests with national and state political leaders determined to play down the gravity of the problem so they could rush economic re-openings. A palliative medical counselor said that the staff at her facility “is wonderful but furious when it is the patients’ reckless behavior that puts them in the ICU for COVID.” Fury gives way to exhaustion and resignation. “They still provide superhuman care,” she says, “but it’s only human to be frustrated.” Health-care workers are not in the army. No one is forcing them to suit up and plunge themselves into another 16-hour shift of watching a deadly virus suffocate people to death. There is no law that says they must carry on even when COVID patients show up convinced the whole thing was a plot designed to harm President Trump’s re-election prospects. Health-care providers know perfectly well that a lot of the patients they are treating scoffed at the danger and shrugged off expert guidelines and did whatever they wanted anyway.

The nation’s top infectious disease expert said Sunday that the U.S. may see “surge upon a surge” of the coronavirus in the weeks after Thanksgiving, and he does not expect current recommendations around social distancing to be relaxed before Christmas. Meanwhile, in a major reversal, New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio said the nation’s largest school system will reopen to in-person learning and increase the number of days a week many children attend class. The announcement came just 11 days after the Democratic mayor said schools would shut down because of rising COVID-19 cases. “We feel confident that we can keep schools safe,” he said. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told ABC’s “This Week” that the level of infection in the U.S. would not “all of a sudden turn around.” “So clearly in the next few weeks, we’re going to have the same sort of thing. And perhaps even two or three weeks down the line … we may see a surge upon a surge,” he said. Fauci addressed the school issue, saying that spread “among children and from children is not really very big at all, not like one would have suspected. So let’s try to get the kids back, but let’s try to mitigate the things that maintain and just push the kind of community spread that we’re trying to avoid,” he said. Fauci also appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he made similar remarks, adding that it’s “not too late” for people traveling home after Thanksgiving to help curb the virus by wearing masks, staying distant from others and avoiding large groups of people.

Ten corona vaccine candidates are now in late-stage trials. The world is already celebrating what could be the breakthrough in fighting COVID-19. Pharmaceutical companies are also cheering. The public sector has invested billions more in development. but it’s the private sector that will rake in the cash. Under existing agreements, they control the price and get the profits. Pharma firms say development is expensive

The excitement and enthusiasm for a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2020 is both palpable and understandable. We all hope for a rapid end to the pandemic and an effective vaccine would be a surefire solution. But there are risks that come with a fast-tracked vaccine delivered end of this year, not the least of which are the risks related to the safety of the vaccine itself.

Telescoping testing timelines and approvals may expose all of us to unnecessary dangers related to the vaccine. While preclinical trials to evaluate the potential safety and efficacy of vaccine candidates are likely to include tens of thousands of patients, it is still unclear whether that number will be large enough and a trial will last long enough to evaluate safety for a drug that would be administered to so many.

The US alone plans to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people with the first successful candidate. One serious adverse event per thousand of a vaccine given to 100 million people means harm to 100,000 otherwise healthy people. Aside from questions of safety that attend any vaccine, there are good reasons to be especially cautious for COVID-19. Some vaccines worsen the consequences of infection rather than protect, a phenomenon called antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). ADE has been observed in previous attempts to develop coronavirus vaccines. To add to the concern, antibodies typical of ADE are present in the blood of some COVID-19 patients. Such concerns are real. As recently as 2016, Dengavxia, intended to protect children from the dengue virus, increased hospitalizations for children who received the vaccine. Questions also arise around the efficacy of a potential vaccine. The little we know of the current generation of COVID-19 vaccines raises serious questions regarding their ability to protect people from infection. We know all the candidates tested to date in non-human primates failed to protect any of the monkeys from infection of the nasal passages, the primary route of human infection. Failure to protect entirely from infection fits with all we know about attempts to protect monkeys from two other deadly coronaviruses, those that cause SARS and MERS. As many of the most serious COVID symptoms do not appear until late in the disease course, sometimes four to five weeks following exposure, there is a possibility that we will not have sufficient time to judge efficacy of a new vaccine, even by the lower standard of symptom amelioration. An effective COVID-19 vaccine also faces several hurdles beyond our control. The older we get the poorer our ability to respond to vaccines. Resistance to vaccination begins early at age 30 and becomes progressively more profound with time. That is especially troubling as those over 60 are the population most at risk. Vaccination of the elderly may sometimes succeed by administering repeated doses and by increasing the potency of the vaccine with powerful adjuvants. But these adjuvants can be especially risky for the very old.

It seems a folly then to rush our way towards a vaccine in 2020 if it is likely to have only limited benefit to the population most in need and may put otherwise healthy people at risk. The risk goes far beyond the dangers a COVID vaccine alone may hold.

Public support for vaccines in general is already an issue. Trust in other lifesaving vaccines will be eroded even further if a COVID vaccine goes wrong and many more people—children especially—will be at risk if vaccination rates fall. Yes, we are all increasingly longing for an end to the outbreak. But a safe vaccine, effective for all those at risk, is worth the wait, especially when we have other solutions in hand. We already know from the experience of countries in Asia that the epidemic can be stopped in its tracks with basic public health measures: widespread testing, contact tracing, and mandatory controlled quarantine—not necessarily in a dismal public health facility as many imagine, but in our own homes with virtual supervision or in a hotel environment. These efforts alone could bring new infections down to almost zero within just weeks.

There is no doubt we need an urgent end to the pandemic. Economies around the world are crashing. Governments are piling up trillions of dollars in debt. And, in the US alone, tens of millions are without work or income. But there are still costs that are too great, even when compared to such numbers. When we have solutions to the pandemic in hand we cannot risk the potential lives lost of rushing a COVID vaccine to market.

Please view the above 8 minute video.it graphs the spreading plague

An increase in cases of COVID-19 has sent San Francisco into the purple level of California’s color-coded reopening plan, officials announced on November 28. As a result, the county must now join most of the rest of the state’s limited stay-at-home order, which requires that “non-essential work, movement, and gatherings,” including outdoor dining, cease between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. from November 30 until December 21. This isn’t a surprise to city and county health officials, who warned on November 20 that the region was on track to move from the red (“substantial risk” of COVID-19 exposure) to the most restrictive, purple tier (“widespread risk”) in coming days. Counties that enter the purple tier, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on November 19, must follow a state-mandated shelter-in-place order “designed to reduce opportunities for disease transmission,” including the weeks-long curfew. “Activities conducted during 10 PM to 5 AM are often non-essential and more likely related to social activities and gatherings that have a higher likelihood of leading to reduced inhibition and reduced likelihood for adherence to safety measures like wearing a face covering and maintaining physical distance,” the state said in a statement regarding the curfew, which now applies to 99.1 percent of the state’s population, including every county in the Bay Area but Marin (which, as of publication time, remains red). You can see a full list of tier assignments here.

According to the announcement of the shutdown from the city, customers must leave restaurants by 10 p.m., but restaurants may remain open for takeout or delivery. Other non-essential businesses must close and gatherings must cease, but businesses like grocery and convenience stores may remain open, with a capacity limit of 50 percent.