Earth has remained habitable for billions of years ‘because of luck’



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The telegraph

Three vaccine deployment scenarios: the good, the bad and the ugly

The great vaccine rollout has started. How it unfolds will define the year ahead and how quickly life in Britain and the world will return to normal. So far, five vaccines have received emergency approval. In the west, the Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca plans are now hugging people. The Sputnik V vaccine is used in Russia, Bolivia and Belarus. And in China, where authorities have been inoculating key workers with soldiers since the summer, Sinopharm gained widespread approval last week. It’s tempting to think it’ll be easy from here. Western pandemic plans have always relied (too much as it turned out) on the rapid deployment of vaccines and antivirals. We may have struggled with non-pharmaceutical interventions, according to some logic, but the great vaccine race is unfolding here. No wonder our politicians see the light at the end of the tunnel. But the earth is home to 7.8 billion people and almost everyone wants a chance. To end the pandemic and prevent the virus from constantly rebounding, nations are going to have to come together and vaccinate the majority of the world’s citizens. So expect to see a lot more graphics below in 2021. Currently, Israel is leading the pack. It launched a mass vaccination campaign less than two weeks ago and has already reached 10% of its population. In the UK – a much bigger country – we are approaching 2% coverage. But for the world as a whole, that figure is less than 0.1%.

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