The United Kingdom began administering the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine outside clinical trials, with Margaret Keenan, aged 90, receiving the first dose at University Hospital Coventry.
The vaccine used messenger RNA, a technology that had never before been deployed at scale, and moved from genetic sequence to authorisation in under a year. Regulators in the United States, the European Union and elsewhere followed within weeks.
Distribution was highly uneven. Many African countries had vaccinated only a small fraction of their populations a year later, exposing weaknesses in global manufacturing capacity and in the COVAX allocation mechanism.
