A fight over scarce vaccines
For months, wealthy countries have been clearing the world’s shelves of coronavirus vaccines, leaving poorer nations sidelined. But a fresh skirmish this week has pitted the rich against the rich — Britain versus the European Union — in the scramble for vials.
Stung by its slow progress on vaccinations, the E.U. threatened to tighten rules on shipments to Britain of shots made in Belgium. British lawmakers denounced the move as a blackmail campaign.
The squabbling could lead to longer waits for vaccines for poorer nations. The core of the problem is production delays at Belgian factories that make the Pfizer-BioNTech shots and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. The French drugmaker Sanofi said that it would help produce more than 100 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in an effort to meet strong demand in Europe.
Progress: Britain has so far given vaccines to 10 percent of its people, compared with about 2 percent of people in the E.U. Britain was the first country to authorize a fully tested coronavirus vaccine.
Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.
In other developments:

■ Hospitals and nursing homes that have reused scarce protective equipment appear to have helped spread a different set of germs: drug-resistant bacteria and fungi. There have been isolated outbreaks of drug-resistant infections in the U.S. as well as in India, Italy, Peru and France.

■ Britain tightened its international travel restrictions and will now require its citizens arriving from any of 22 high-risk countries to quarantine in hotels for 10 days at their own expense.

■ Moscow’s mayor lifted most of the city’s remaining restrictions, claiming that the pandemic was easing there. But Russia has been hit hard, and officials have faced questions over the true scale of its outbreak.

■ Thailand will aim to vaccinate 19 million people in a first phase of inoculations starting on Feb. 14, the prime minister said on Wednesday, according to Reuters.