Covid-19 Live Updates: India Starts Vaccinating Its 1.3 Billion People - The New York Times

In the United States, President-elect Joe Biden warned that “things will get worse before they get better.”.

PUNE, India — India on Saturday began one of the most ambitious and complex initiatives in its history: the nationwide rollout of coronavirus vaccines to 1.3 billion people, an undertaking that will stretch from the perilous reaches of the Himalayas to the dense jungles of the country’s southern tip.

The campaign is unfolding in a country that has reported more than 10.5 million coronavirus infections, the second-largest caseload after the United States, and 152,093 deaths, the world’s third-highest tally.

About 300,000 people were set to receive the vaccines on Saturday alone, followed by millions more health care and frontline workers by spring.

At Kamala Nehru Hospital in Pune, a city of about 3.1 million southeast of Mumbai, 100 long-stemmed red roses were stacked neatly on a table beside a bottle of hand sanitizer, one for each person registered to receive the Covishield vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University and manufactured by the Pune-based Serum Institute of India.

Rajashree Patil, one of the health workers who received the Covishield vaccine at Kamala Nehru Hospital, said she was both excited and nervous.

Rajashree Patil at Kamala Nehru Hospital in Pune, India, survived Covid-19 in May and was excited and apprehensive to be among the first to receive a dose of Covishield, one of two vaccines made in India.

Another doctor who received the Covishield jab at that hospital, the anesthesiologist Usha Devi Bharmal, said that she had wanted to get a shot to dispel people’s fears about coronavirus vaccines.

India’s rollout, among the first in a major developing country, comes as millions of people in the United States, Britain, Israel, Canada and the European Union have received at least one dose.

“I think we are going to see in six to eight weeks major transmission in this country, like we’re seeing in England,” said Dr.

He said he would create mobile vaccine clinics and widely — and equitably — expand access to the shots across the country.

As of Friday, the variant first discovered in Britain had been detected in more than 70 cases from 13 states — most recently in Oregon — but the actual numbers are likely to be much higher, said Dr.

Biden said.

But the vaccine rollout in the United States has been a dismal failure thus far.

The second thing we’re going to change, if we’re getting more people vaccinated, then we need more vaccination sites.

That’s where we’re going to harness the full resources of the federal government to establish thousands of community vaccination centers.

The third change we’re going to make is we’re going to fully activate the pharmacies across the country to get the vaccination into more arms as quickly as possible.

The fourth thing we’re going to do is we’re going to use the full strength of the federal government to ramp up supply of the vaccines.

As I said before, we’ll use the Defense Production Act to work with private industry to accelerate the making of materials needed to supply and administer the vaccine.

We’re going to make sure state and local officials know how much supply they’ll be getting, and when they can expect to get it so they can plan.

But his plan is colliding with a sobering reality: With only two federally authorized vaccines, supplies will be scarce for the next several months, frustrating some state and local health officials who had hoped that the release of a federal stockpile of vaccine doses announced this week could alleviate that shortage.

Biden said.

The president-elect said he would invoke the Defense Production Act, if necessary, to build up vaccine supply.

Biden said his plan “won’t mean that everyone in these groups will get vaccinated immediately, because supply is not where it needs to be.” But, he added, it will mean that as doses become available, “we’ll reach more people who need them.”.

The Biden team promised to ramp up vaccination in pharmacies and build mobile vaccination clinics to get vaccine to hard-to-reach and underserved rural and urban communities, emphasizing equity in distribution.

Biden called for states to expand the vaccine eligibility groups to people 65 or older.

Biden unveiled the vaccine distribution plan one day after proposing a $1.9 trillion spending package in response to the economic downturn and the pandemic, including $20 billion for a “national vaccine program.” The president-elect has said repeatedly that he intends to get “100 million Covid vaccine shots into the arms of the American people” by his 100th day in office.

“Around the globe, the closing of national borders and severe disruptions to international travel obliged hundreds of thousands of people to cancel or delay plans of moving abroad,” the department said in the report.

Before the Covid-19 disruptions, the report said, the number of international migrants “had grown robustly over the past two decades,” reaching a total of 281 million in 2020, roughly equal to the population of Indonesia

In another barometer of the collapse in travel caused by the pandemic, the civil aviation agency of the United Nations said in a report Friday that the number of airline passengers fell by 60 percent in 2020 — 1.8 billion passengers compared with 4.5 billion in 2019

The report, by the International Civil Aviation Organization, said the reduction had taken air travel totals back to 2003 levels