Today, Wednesday, the vaccination campaign with the "Pfizer-BioNTech" vaccine against the Coronavirus was launched in Qatar.
While Britain detected a new, faster-spreading strain, a team from the World Health Organization is preparing to leave for the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus first appeared, in order to investigate the conditions of its emergence.
And Qatar announced that the first vaccine shipment that it recently received will be dedicated to immunizing the elderly, people with chronic diseases and some medical teams who deal with Corona patients on a daily basis.
The head of the National Strategic Group to Address Coronavirus, Dr. Abdul Latif Al-Khal, said that he hopes that this launch will be the beginning of a comprehensive and effective national campaign to vaccinate most of the population of the State of Qatar in the coming weeks.
He reiterated that vaccination is safe and effective, and does not mean dispensing with the preventive measures currently in place until the end of the vaccination campaign.
In the same race, the transfer and distribution of the vaccine began in Europe today, Wednesday, and it is expected to start administering it to the population on December 27.
Three refrigerated trucks set off from the Pfizer drug production plant in north-eastern Belgium between the hours of nine and ten.
The operation - which used the logistical means of the Belgian shipping company "HSs" - came amid tight security measures, and the media was not allowed to approach the site.
On Monday, the European Commission announced that it was authorizing the distribution of the "Pfizer-Biontech" vaccine in the European Union, hours after it received the green light from the European Medicines Agency.
The European Union had previously announced that the first vaccinations would start between the 27th and 29th of this month in all member states.
The distribution process - which will intensify in January and continue throughout 2021 - will take place according to the population of each country.
In France, the Supreme Health Authority will issue its opinion on the vaccine Thursday, and the vaccination campaign will start Sunday.
Bad news from Britain,
while the world is expecting the vaccine, bad news continues from Britain, as the authorities announced today, Wednesday, the discovery of a second mutated version of the Corona virus, faster transmission than the recently announced strain, and caused panic in various European countries.
The authorities said that the second mutated strain came from South Africa, and called on all those who arrived from there to quarantine themselves.
British Health Minister Matt Hancock said, "The two cases of infection with the new strain of the virus were in contact with infected people who came from South Africa."
He stressed that the new strain of Coronavirus is of great concern and is highly transmissible.
Before this strain, Britain had discovered a rapidly spreading mutated strain of Corona;
This prompted the authorities to tighten isolation measures before starting to ease them today, Wednesday.
On Wednesday, the British authorities announced the registration of 39,237 cases of corona during the past 24 hours, which is the highest daily toll ever since the virus began spreading.
This brings the total number of injuries in Britain to two million and 149 thousand and 551, while the deaths amounted to 69 thousand and 51 deaths.
It is noteworthy that 40 countries around the world suspended flights to Britain.
To Wuhan
In the same context, a team from the World Health Organization is preparing to leave for Wuhan, China, to investigate the causes of the emergence of the new Corona virus.
Fabian Lindertz of the Robert Koch Institute, which is Germany's central body for disease control, said:
"The meetings we have had so far with our Chinese colleagues are very fruitful and good."
"My impression at this moment is that the Chinese - not only in government but also at the grassroots level, are very interested in knowing what happened," he added.
Lindertz, 48, is an expert in zoonotic and infectious diseases that cross barriers between organisms, and he is among 10 prominent scientists that the World Health Organization has assigned them to try to know the origin of the emerging corona virus and how it is transmitted from animal to human.
A year after the detection of the first group of infected people in Wuhan, the team of scientists will head to China for the first time on a mission that is expected to take 5 to 6 weeks, accompanied by Peter bin Mubarak, an expert in food safety and animal diseases at the World Health Organization.
"It is not a matter of creating a guilty state or a guilty authority," Lendertz noted.
"This is about understanding what happened, to avoid it from happening again in the future, and to reduce the risks," he added.
Lindertz said that viruses are transmitted from animals to humans every year and all over the world, noting that in the case of the Corona virus, "it was just a misfortune that it was a virulent virus."
"We start in Wuhan because the most accurate data is available there, and from there we track the paths to where they lead us," he added.
It is noteworthy that the outgoing US President Donald Trump accused China of covering up the first outbreak of the epidemic, considering the World Health Organization a "puppet" in Beijing's hands.
It is noteworthy that the new Corona virus has so far infected more than 78 million around the world, of whom more than 1.7 million have died, while 49.7 million have recovered.