The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Vaccine shots, Brexit stutters and a frosty reception for the royals

issue 12 December 2020

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The Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine began, rather slowly, to be given to some old people in hospital and health workers. Margaret Keenan, 90, was the first outside clinical trials to receive it. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 6 December, total deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for the coronavirus) had stood at 61,014, including 2,771 in the past week; the number for the week before was 3,617. Rita Ora, the singer, a week after apologising for entertaining 30 people at a birthday party on the ‘spur of the moment’, remembered to apologise for not having gone into quarantine at the time, after returning from Egypt. England’s cricket tour of South Africa was abandoned after a South Africa player and two hotel staff tested positive for coronavirus. A ton of cocaine was found hidden at the London Gateway port at Thurrock, on the Thames, in banana pulp from Colombia bound for Antwerp.

Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, booked a ticket for Brussels to have dinner with Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, after talks on trading relations with the European Union dragged on with a special kind of tedium bestowed by lack of information combined with unreliable briefing.

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