Three COVID-19 vaccines have now been approved for use in the UK, as the government seeks to hit its target of offering a jab to all of the most vulnerable people by mid-February.
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On 8 December 2020 in Coventry, UK, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan became the first person to receive a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine the first coronavirus vaccine to be approved for emergency use in the west. (Moderna and the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines were made available soon after.) At last, there was a glimmer of hope that an end was in sight to the worst pandemic for more than a century.
If we could get at least 70 per cent of a country’s population to have a vaccine, we could attain the much sought-after ‘herd immunity’ and hope for a return to some kind of normality. But despite both Pfizer and Moderna reporting their vaccines to have a 95 per cent efficacy with no serious safety concerns, the most recent Ipsos-World Economic Forum survey shows that vaccine confidence has dropped in many countries, most significantly in South Africa, Russia and France where as few as 40 per cent of those asked said they intended to get vaccinated.
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