Britain became the first country to grant emergency approval on Wednesday to the coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, smashing all speed records to see a potentially life-saving shot invented, tested, and approved in less than a year.
British officials said a mass immunization program would begin almost immediately, with the distribution of the first 800,000 doses to begin next week in a remarkable rollout of an entirely new kind of vaccine, built with a few bits of RNA, that must be stored and shipped at Antarctic temperatures.