美 모더나 백신 접종 시작...싱가포르, 아시아 첫 화이자 백신 받아<br /><br />The number of vaccines available against COVID-19 is gradually increasing.<br />U.S. President-elect Joe Biden on Monday received his live on television to show its safety.<br />Meanwhile, Singapore took shipment to become the first country in Asia to receive the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.<br />Choi Jeong-yoon reports.<br />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.<br />"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."<br />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.<br />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.<br />In Asia, Singapore received its first batch of Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine on Monday...the first in the continent to do so.<br />The government said it has secured enough doses to vaccinate everyone until next September and will be free for citizens and long-term residents.<br />Singapore has kept daily local infections to almost zero in recent months and will further ease restrictions starting next week.<br />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.<br />Plans for stronger restrictions are underway in the UK to combat an alarming recent surge related to the new strain.<br />"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."<br />However, there is no evidence to suggest that the new strain is any more dangerous.<br />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.<br />Choi Jeong-yoon, Arirang News.<br />
