UK’s Queen Elizabeth II ‘to wait in line’ for COVID-19 vaccine
London, Dec 6: The UK’s Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip will not get preferential treatment, but will instead “wait in line” during the first wave of the Covid-19 vaccines reserved for the over-80s and care home residents, a media report said citing sources.
The Daily Mail report on Saturday came after the UK on December 2 approved the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on independent advice of its medicines regulator.
The vaccine will be made available across the UK from next week.
Care home residents, health and care staff, the elderly and the clinically extremely vulnerable will receive the vaccine on priority basis.
Operation Courageous, the country’s biggest ever mass vaccination programme, will swing into action on Tuesday with most of the 50 hospitals that have received the vaccine by then giving injections.
The sources told the Daily Mail that the Queen, 94, and the Duke of Edinburgh, 99, will be eligible for the vaccine within weeks and “have already accepted the offer on the advice of their doctors”.
“Public health experts believe that if the couple go public about the jab, it could go a long way to combating misinformation spread by conspiracy theorists which, it is feared, could lead to a substantial proportion of the population refusing the vaccine,” the newspaper report said. (IANS)
Chinese court tells Dutch collector to return Buddha statue
Beijing, Dec 6: A Chinese court has ordered a Dutch art collector to hand over a Buddha statue in the latest twist in a 3-year-old legal battle with villagers who say it was stolen from a temple.
Residents of Yangchun, a village in the southeastern province of Fujian, say the statue is a 1,000-year-old relic that holds the mummified remains of a monk and disappeared in 1995.
The collector says he bought the object in Hong Kong in 1996 but denied it was the stolen statue. The ruling Communist Party is stepping up efforts to retrieve Chinese art and artifacts that are believed to be stolen and in foreign hands.
The Sanming Intermediate People’s Court on Friday ordered the collector, Oscar van Overeem, to return the statue within 30 days, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Two committees representing villagers sued in a Dutch court in 2017, but judges ruled the following year they didn’t count as legal entities that could make a claim. Friday’s ruling found the temple and its relics were collectively owned by the villages of Yangchun and Dongpu, giving residents the right as a group to demand the statue’s return, according to Xinhua. (AP)