‘Kicking Covid’s ass’: Why 2021 will be the year of the vaccine

The rollout is under way but the politics of distribution is only just getting started, reports Borzou Daragahi

A resident at a German nursing home receives the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on 27 December (AP)

If you were asked in December of 2019 to sketch out what would likely happen in 2020, you might have predicted that the US presidential election campaign and the Olympics in Japan would dominate the news and our attention. There were worries about the effects of climate change, the growing misuse of social media, and whether tensions over the increasing polarisation between rich and poor would explode.

But few people could imagine that the mysterious contagion that was just then gathering steam in the Wuhan province of China would mushroom into a global pandemic that would change life as we know it – halting air traffic, shuttering schools and business, and sending the world economy into a tailspin.

Any attempt to grapple with what 2021 might look like should keep in mind that rapid cataclysmic change and unexpected disruptions are becoming increasingly normal – that once-in-a-lifetime political and environmental calamities are now unfolding annually.