Coronavirus: India approves two coronavirus vaccines
The two — one made by AstraZeneca and Oxford University and the other, developed in India by the company Bharat Biotech — were given the green light on Sunday for emergency use.
India plans to begin a vaccination campaign in the first three months of the year that it hopes will cover about one-quarter of the population by August. The first 30 million people inoculated will be health care providers, then police officers and other frontline workers.
But the Serum Institute, the Indian drug maker that is producing the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, has managed to make only about one-tenth of the 400 million doses it had committed to manufacturing before the end of the year.
India is ranked No. 2 in confirmed infections, behind the U.S. The pandemic has devastated the economy; unemployment is at a 45-year high. Education has been disrupted, leading to worries about the long-term effects on the country’s youth.
Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.
In other developments:

■ Taiwan has been successful against the coronavirus by holding fast to its entry restrictions and quarantines for much longer than many governments could.

■ Parts of England may face harsher restrictions in the coming weeks, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Sunday, as Britain confronts a surge in cases and hospitalizations linked to the more transmissible variant of the coronavirus.

■ The loss of smell and taste among some Covid-19 survivors is receiving new attention from scientists, who fear it may affect nutrition and mental health.
The New York Times