Britain had plenty to boast about last week after becoming the first western country to approve a coronavirus vaccine. Yesterday it was Russia’s turn to engage in some viral one- upmanship. Moscow opened 70 “vaccination stations” offering its locally produced Sputnik V vaccine to limited numbers of medical staff, social workers and teachers — beating Britain to the launch of a mass immunisation programme by at least three days.
The first British recipients of a different vaccine, produced in Belgium by German-Turkish scientists using technology pioneered by a Hungarian biochemist and distributed by the US drug giant Pfizer, will be asked to bare their arms on Tuesday at the earliest.
The coronavirus landscape is shifting: a year of misery and loss has a chance of
