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Brian Pinker, 82, will receive the University of Oxford / AstraZeneca COVID-19 COVID-19 vaccine on January 4th, 2021 from Nurse Sam Foster at Churchill Hospital in Oxford, South West England. –

STEVE PARSONS | AFP | Getty Images

LONDON – UK has started rolling out the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University. This is another step in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

The country’s National Health Service (NHS) is the first in the world to use the push after it was approved for use in the UK by the Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) last week. The NHS said 82-year-old Brian Pinker became the first person in the world to receive the bump on Monday morning.

The approval and use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine are seen as a boon in the race against Covid-19 as it is cheaper than the alternatives developed by Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna.

In addition, unlike other vaccines, it can be stored, transported, and handled under normal refrigeration conditions (2 to 8 degrees Celsius or 36 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit) for at least six months.

When the vaccine was approved last week, AstraZeneca stated its goal of “delivering millions of doses in the first quarter” under its contract with the UK government to deliver up to 100 million doses in total.

As a two-dose vaccine, according to the agreement, it could vaccinate up to 50 million people in the UK of around 66 million people.

In a statement on Monday, the UK government said there are now more than half a million doses available, “with an additional ten million doses to be delivered over the coming weeks and months once batches have been quality checked by the MHRA.”

The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine complements a Covid-19 vaccination program launched by the UK back in December, when the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine launched with two doses. According to the government, more than a million people in the UK have already been vaccinated with the Pfizer shot. It was announced on Monday that more than 730 vaccination sites have been set up across the UK and that hundreds more will be opening this week.

As with the Pfizer vaccine, the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot will be introduced first for priority groups, including residents and employees of nursing homes, people over 80 and health and care workers, and then for the rest of the population in order of age and risk, including those who are extremely clinically vulnerable.

“Decisive moment”

UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said: “This is a pivotal moment in our fight against this terrible virus and I hope it gives everyone renewed hope that the end of this pandemic is in sight”.

Another vaccine may not come early enough for the UK, which is grappling with an increase in infections, largely due to a mutation in the virus that is making it easier to spread. Britain has now registered over 2.6 million cases of the virus and over 75,000 deaths, according to a record by Johns Hopkins University.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Sunday that further restrictions on public life were likely as Covid-19 cases continue to rise.

On Monday, Hancock told Sky News that the UK cannot roll out the vaccine any faster than supply allows. However, experts agree that the UK needs to step up its vaccination program as soon as possible. Last week, a study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine concluded that the UK must vaccinate two million people a week to avoid a third wave of the coronavirus outbreak.

On Saturday, The Times newspaper anonymously quoted a “key member of the Oxford AstraZeneca team” as saying the drug company would increase production so that it would produce two million pounds each week by mid-January.

This goal is achievable, but challenging, says Dr. Andrew Freedman, Infectious Disease Reader at Cardiff University School of Medicine. He told CNBC on Monday that the speed of the rollout will depend on “the availability of the vaccine, vaccine production, but also its distribution and establishment of new vaccination centers and the recruitment of new vaccines”.

“It’s a goal, but it’s realistic and I think it can be achieved by the end of the month,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe.

The most vulnerable are first vaccinated with shots initially taken in hospitals before the bulk of the shipments are sent to hundreds of doctor’s offices and nursing homes later in the week.

Somewhat controversial, the MHRA, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) and the UK’s four chief medical officers agreed to move the gap between the first and second dose of coronavirus vaccines that are now being given to the public . The change in strategy was to get most people protected in no time.

The British Medical Association said the decision to postpone the post-dose of the Pfizer vaccine and to cancel appointments for patients who had already been given the second dose was “grossly unfair” for thousands of high-risk patients. However, experts like Freedman said that with a vaccine like the Oxford-AstraZeneca candidate, a longer gap between doses could increase the effectiveness of the sting.

The government last week insisted that “the priority should be to give as many people in risk groups as possible their first dose, rather than delivering the required two doses in as short a time as possible”.

“Everyone will continue to receive their second dose within 12 weeks of the first. The second dose completes the course and is important for longer term protection,” he added.

A passenger checks flight information on a board in the departure lounge of Madrid Barajas Airport.

Paul Hanna | Bloomberg | Getty Images

SINGAPORE – More than two decades of passenger traffic growth were erased in 2020, according to a new report.

“The pandemic and its aftermath have wiped out global passenger traffic growth by 21 years in just a few months, reducing traffic this year to 1999 levels,” said Cirium, a travel data and analytics company.

“Compared to the previous year, passenger traffic is expected to decrease by 67% in 2020,” said a press release.

In 2020, only 2.9 trillion passenger kilometers (RPKs) were registered worldwide, compared to 8.7 trillion in 2019. RPKs are used as a measure of air travel.

The aviation industry was hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic as countries closed their borders to contain the spread of the disease.

According to Cirium, the airlines operated 16.8 million flights from January 1 to December 20, 2020. This corresponds to a decrease of 33.2 million in the same period of 2019.

More than 40 airlines have completely ceased or ceased operations, and experts predict that more will fail in 2021, according to Cirium.

Road to recovery

The Asia-Pacific region and North America have “emerged fastest on the long road to recovery,” according to Cirium’s Airline Insights Review 2020 report.

This trend was reflected in Cirium’s list of the world’s busiest airports, which was dominated by airports in the United States and China.

David White, vice president of strategy at Cirium, admitted that big cities like New York, Beijing and Shanghai were missing from the list and told CNBC that airports like John F. Kennedy in New York were “disproportionately affected” in their international traffic normal times. “

“Airports like Minneapolis, O’Hare (Chicago), [Dallas-Fort Worth]”Atlanta and Charlotte now have significantly higher traffic than JFK because of the volume of domestic flights at these domestic hub airports,” he said. A similar pattern has been reported observed in some Chinese airports.

International flights were down 68% compared to 2019, while domestic travel was down 40%.

Cirium expects passenger demand for air travel to recover in 2024 or 2025, with domestic and leisure travel being the first segments to show a “sustained recovery”.

U.S. President Donald Trump waves as he boards Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, United States, on December 23, 2020.

Tom Brenner | Reuters

President Donald Trump said Sunday he would take part in protests in Washington DC on January 6, the day Congress confirms the vote of the electoral college and declares President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

The president shared a video clip on Twitter encouraging supporters to protest the November election results and saying he would be there.

Trump still refuses to endorse the race and continues to make unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud that have been consistently denied by state and federal courts as well as his own Department of Justice.

The joint session of Congress to count the votes is a routine process and marks the final step in confirming Biden as the winner.

A group of Republican senators and elected senators are pushing for Biden’s certification to be postponed Wednesday, which is unlikely to change the electoral college record, which Biden won between 306 and 232.

Protesters plan to gather at the Washington Monument, Freedom Plaza and the Capitol. The Proud Boys, a far-right group that promoted violence, have vowed to participate incognito.

The nation’s capital has become a battleground for violent protests in recent months. Thousands of Trump supporters gathered in November to protest the results of the DC presidential election. The demonstrations eventually turned violent and nearly two dozen people were arrested.

Protesters also clashed at rallies in Washington State and Washington DC in December over election results, racial injustice and pandemic restrictions. At least four people were stabbed to death after a pro-Trump rally in DC.

A member of the New York Army National Guard distributes health forms to travelers at LaGuardia Airport (LGA) in New York, United States on Thursday, December 24, 2020.

Angus Mordant | Bloomberg | Getty Images

U.S. air traffic reached its highest level since mid-March on Saturday, fearing that the increase in vacation travel will lead to another spike in Covid-19 cases and deaths in the coming weeks.

Even as the coronavirus raged across the country, 1,192,881 people passed airport security checks on Saturday, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

Air traffic is still declining significantly compared to previous years, but increased during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays despite warnings from health experts and elected officials to restrict travel and family gatherings.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday that the pandemic could likely worsen over the next few weeks as the US has a delayed influence from vacation travel after Christmas.

“This is what happens. It’s terrible, it’s unfortunate, but it was predictable,” said Fauci, one of the country’s top infectious disease experts, during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press.

December was the deadliest and most contagious month of the pandemic in the United States. According to the Johns Hopkins University, the country has an average of more than 2,600 deaths per day.

Three states have now also found cases of the new, more transmissible strain of coronavirus in people with no history of travel.

The general surgeon Dr. Jerome Adams on Sunday urged Americans to wear masks and social distancing to mitigate the projected surge in infections.

“What we do now is important,” Adams said during an interview on CNN. “If you’ve gathered outside of your household without a mask over the holidays, now is the time to take action.”

“You can still quarantine yourself. You can still get tested knowing that more than 50% of the spread is now in asymptomatic people,” he added.

A photographic illustration of pirated copies being illegally downloaded with the legal music service iTunes in the background in London, England.

Matthew Lloyd | Getty Images

2021 will be a completely different year for the cinema business. Hoping to find ways to make a profit from big budget blockbusters, new methods of film publishing have turned.

For Warner Bros., the pandemic led parent company AT&T to decide to release all films in theaters and on HBO Max on the same day. Universal, owned by Comcast, has chosen to sign contracts with individual theaters to reduce the time their films have to stay in theaters before they switch to premium video-on-demand.

Then there are those like Disney, who have largely postponed the majority of their films to 2021 and put a handful on their own streaming service.

But box office analysts won’t be the only ones watching closely how these films perform over the next year. Piracy experts are excited to see how these new publishing methods will affect illegal streaming.

“As a data science researcher, this is a dream,” said Brett Danaher, professor of entertainment analysis and data science at Chapman University. “It’s such a great experiment.”

Heading into 2021, piracy experts told CNBC that they have theories about how pirates will react to these different models, but aren’t entirely sure what will happen.

What we know about piracy

For one thing, piracy is difficult to track. Experts can track some downloads from major piracy websites, but once this file is downloaded it can be privately distributed and streamed to thousands of other viewers.

It’s also why experts make a range of claims that piracy could cost the US economy, rather than a fixed number. Last year, the Global Innovation Policy Center estimated that global online piracy cost the US economy between $ 29.9 billion and $ 71 billion in lost revenue each year.

But you can learn a lot from people who are pirates. Looking at the data, experts like Andy Chatterley, CEO and co-founder of MUSO, a global authority on digital piracy, can provide insights to media companies around the world.

For one thing, Chatterley noted that the bigger the buzz around a blockbuster, the more piracy it will see. Films with large marketing campaigns, pent-up inquiries from enthusiastic fans and a lot of media exposure lead to more illegal online downloads.

MUSO’s data also suggests that piracy will increase as higher quality versions of films become available on piracy sites. For example, “Bad Boys for Life” came out in theaters in January and saw a “pretty mild” amount of piracy, Chatterley said. However, when it became available on video-on-demand in mid-March, there was a huge surge in online piracy.

Conversely, Disney’s “Mulan,” which immediately went streaming, saw a massive spike and then a fall in overtime on its release day.

“The piracy was front loaded,” Chatterley said. “But the piracy wasn’t necessarily bigger or smaller.”

How to prevent illegal downloads

For companies like AT&T that release high quality versions of films on day one, there are a few ways to prevent piracy. For example, the film was released in theaters and on HBO Max internationally two weeks before the North American debut of “Wonder Woman 1984”.

This allowed audiences to see the film in theaters first before a high quality copy was released on piracy websites. This is especially important as HBO Max is currently only a domestic product.

“Of course there are people who always become pirates,” said Michael Smith, professor of information technology and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University. “The people you worry about are the people who would have legally bought your content but found it [piracy] is more convenient. “

People wearing masks walk past a billboard for the film ‘Wonder Woman 1984’. Photo taken on December 26th, 2020.

Simon Shin | SOPA pictures | LightRocket via Getty Images

Smith said the majority of pirates do this because they have no other legal way to consume a product. Had these viewers been given an easier legal route, they would have paid to watch the film.

While online piracy can have a negative financial impact on media companies, the data experts gathered can also help those companies determine what their audiences want to see. Data from groups like MUSO can tell companies which films or TV shows to buy or license domestically or in international locations.

For example, the European Union Intellectual Property Office found that “The Mummy” was disproportionately pirated in Spain and the TV show “South Park” was a popular illegal download in Finland.

This information tells Universal that “The Mummy” may be made more widely available in Spain and Viacom in order to sign a contract with a Finnish streaming service.

What could happen in 2021

As Danaher said, 2021 will be a big experiment for the industry when it comes to piracy. It is the first time that several different release strategies are carried out simultaneously and over a longer period of time.

While some titles are more popular than others, the data should include trends that show how people are consuming their entertainment.

As in the previous year, it will be difficult for experts to pinpoint a clear financial impact, especially since the pandemic is likely to have an impact on how people watch certain films. Those who cannot go to the theaters may opt for legal streaming when available, but choose illegal methods for big movies instead.

With premium video-on-demand becoming an option to buy sooner than usual, it may not be immediately clear whether on-demand buying or piracy is cannibalizing theater revenue.

“Unfortunately, I can’t tell you who will win the horse race,” said Danaher.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC.