An 82-year-old in Britain became the first person in the world to receive the clinically authorized, fully tested coronavirus vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, adding another shot to the global inoculation effort.
The 82-year-old, Brian Pinker, a retired maintenance manager, was injected with the first dose of the vaccine at a hospital in Oxford, where he is a dialysis patient. Mr. Pinker said he was proud to receive the vaccine linked to his hometown.
Prof. Andrew Pollard, who was the lead investigator on the trial, also received the shot on Monday. “It was an incredibly proud moment for me to have received the actual vaccine that the University of Oxford and the AstraZeneca teams have worked so hard to make available to the U.K. and the world,” he said.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca shot is expected to become one of the dominant forms of inoculation because it is cheaper and easier to store than the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. After the health regulator in Britain became the first to grant emergency authorization to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine last week, India followed suit and many other countries are counting on the shots to help tamp down the pandemic.
Although Britain was the first to authorize and administer the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot — as it was with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine early last month — the country is in the grip of a severe surge in coronavirus cases.
A new strain of the virus has pummeled the country, with 54,990 new cases and 454 deaths recorded on Sunday, taking the total number of people killed by the virus in Britain to more than 75,000.
Scotland’s leader, Nicola Sturgeon, announced that a new lockdown will go into effect at midnight on Monday and will remain in place until at least the end of the month. People will be ordered to stay home unless for essential reasons, such as for caregiving responsibilities or exercise, and most students will return to remote learning.
The new variant of the coronavirus accounts for almost half of new infections in Scotland, Ms. Sturgeon said, as the country recorded 1,905 new cases on Monday. “I am more concerned about the situation we face now than I have been at any time since March last year,” she said.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing calls to implement a new national lockdown in England and for all schools to be closed. Mr. Johnson on Monday said there was “no question” the British government would announce stricter measures “in due course.”
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