The mass inoculation campaign that began in Britain on Tuesday has little precedent in modern medicine.
Britain’s National Health Service began delivering shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Tuesday, opening a public health campaign with little precedent in modern medicine and making Britons the first people in the world to receive an authorized, fully tested vaccine. Here’s a guide to some of the basics. Britain’s drug regulator is seen as a bellwether agency, and its decisions often have influence abroad. In the case of the Pfizer vaccine, the agency has said that it did not cut any corners, and undertook the same laborious process of vetting the quality, efficacy and manufacturing protocols of the vaccine — except faster than usual. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the United States’s top infectious disease expert, said last week that the British had not reviewed the vaccine “as carefully” as the United States was. But he walked back those comments the next day, saying: “I have a great deal of confidence in what the U.K. does, both scientifically and from a regulator standpoint.” Doctors and nurses, certain people over 80 and nursing home workers. Some doctors and nurses have received invitations in recent days to sign up for appointments, with the first shots intended for those at the highest risk of severe illness. The government has indicated that people over 80 who already have visits with doctors scheduled for this week, or who are being discharged from certain hospitals, will also be among the first to receive shots. Nursing home residents, who had been designated the top priority by a government advisory body, will be vaccinated in the coming weeks once health officials start distributing doses beyond hospitals. They said they were not able to do so right away because of the ultracold storage requirements of the Pfizer vaccine. The vaccine must be transported at South Pole-like temperatures, though Pfizer has said that it can be stored for five days in a normal refrigerator before being used. British health officials released images on Monday of a small, wallet-size vaccination card. It will hold a record of the date of someone’s first and second dose of the vaccine, which are supposed to be roughly a month apart.
