美 모더나 백신 접종 시작...싱가포르, 아시아 첫 화이자 백신 받아
The number of vaccines available against COVID-19 is gradually increasing.
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden on Monday received his live on television to show its safety.
Meanwhile, Singapore took shipment to become the first country in Asia to receive the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.
Choi Jeong-yoon reports.
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden on Monday received their first doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine and did so live on television.
"The administration deserves some credit for getting us off the ground with Operation Warp Speed, and I also think that it's worth saying that this is great hope. I'm doing this to demonstrate that people should be prepared when it's available to take the vaccine."
On the same day, the U.S. became the first country in the world to roll out Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine... a week after Washington began administering the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
The U.S. aims to widen the initial push...distributing 5-point-9 million Moderna shots and the additional 2 million from Pfizer to over 4-thousand locations.
In Asia, Singapore received its first batch of Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine on Monday...the first in the continent to do so.
The government said it has secured enough doses to vaccinate everyone until next September and will be free for citizens and long-term residents.
Singapore has kept daily local infections to almost zero in recent months and will further ease restrictions starting next week.
Meanwhile, the emergence of a new, more transmissible strain of the novel coronavirus in the UK has led to an increasing number of countries banning flights from Britain.
Plans for stronger restrictions are underway in the UK to combat an alarming recent surge related to the new strain.
"I think it is likely that this will grow in numbers of the variant across the country and I think it's likely, therefore, that measures will need to be increased in some places, in due course, not reduced."
However, there is no evidence to suggest that the new strain is any more dangerous.
Experts also say it's unlikely that the mutated virus will change the effectiveness of current vaccine. But if it does, adjustments can be made.
Choi Jeong-yoon, Arirang News.
