The U.K. will focus on giving as many people as possible a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, even if this delays administering a second one, the government said Tuesday, despite a lack of data about the extent of the immunity conferred by a single dose.

A vaccine made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE was the first to be authorized in the West. It is now being unrolled globally after emergency authorizations by various regulators on the basis of a successful monthslong trial that involved giving two shots to more than 20,000 volunteers. The second injection was administered 21 days after the first.

While the trial data shows that the vaccine conferred immunity to over 50% of the participants after the first dose, marketing only one shot would require a new study in which only one dose would be administered to another set of volunteers, said BioNTech Chief Executive Uğur Şahin.

France has inoculated more than 45,000 people in more than two weeks since European regulators authorized the first coronavirus vaccine, made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE. Belgium launched mass vaccinations on Tuesday, while the Netherlands gave its first inoculations on Wednesday. Vaccinations in Italy stalled over the holidays and have recently started to pick up.

The U.S. has vaccinated more than five million people, the U.K. more than one million and Germany around 417,000. Israel has inoculated at least 16% of its population with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

“We lacked that kind of flexibility in our approach,” Mr. Rutte said. Dutch health-care workers started being inoculated as of Wednesday morning, with the government planning to increase vaccination to more than 60,000 a week.

Dr. Zanon, who until the end of December was the medical director at a hospital in Como in Italy’s hard-hit Lombardy region, says when the pandemic arrived he didn’t have enough doctors and nurses. Intensive-care unit beds were scarce and there wasn’t a large network of local clinics to help take the strain. With money tight, technology used in the hospital had also fallen behind.

Per capita private and public spending on health care, adjusted for inflation, fell by 2.6% in Italy between 2009 and 2019, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In Greece, it plunged by almost a third. Health-care costs tend to rise faster than overall inflation, because of the rising health-care needs of aging populations as well as technological advances, so even keeping spending constant often requires cutting something, such as staff or services offered.

“There’s no doubt that if southern European countries had kept up with spending in recent years, their health-care systems would have had more capacity to respond to the pandemic and deaths would have been lower,” said Gavino Maciocco, a doctor and professor of public health at the University of Florence. “If you spend less, you will have worse outcomes for patients.”

The landlocked Alpine nation of 8.5 million people is unusual in providing its people a say on important policy moves by offering referendums if enough people sign a petition for a vote. Last year, Swiss voted on increasing the stock of low-cost housing, tax allowances for children and hunting wolves

Now, the country is set for a referendum on whether to remove the government’s legal authority to order lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions after campaigners submitted a petition of some 86,000 signatures this week—higher than the 50,000 required—triggering a nationwide vote to repeal last year’s Covid-19 Act.

An opinion poll by the country’s Sotomo Research Institute also found that 55% of respondents worried that curfews and other measures impinged on their individual freedoms

BERLIN—As U.S. authorities debate whether to keep schools open, a consensus is emerging in Europe that children are a considerable factor in the spread of Covid-19—and more countries are shutting schools for the first time since the spring.

In the U.S., measures have varied widely, with many districts extending remote learning recently while others moved to reopen classrooms despite record levels of infections and deaths related to Covid-19.

In Austria, a nationwide survey by universities and medical institutes found that children under 10 showed a similar rate of infection to those between 11 and 14, and that the children in general were getting infected as often as teachers, said Michael Wagner, a microbiologist at the University of Vienna who oversees the study.

Today, China is embarked on another campaign to re-educate its young people. The message is more blatantly nationalistic than anything in recent decades, with President Xi Jinping’s image often at the center. And it is far more sophisticated than anything Beijing has attempted in the past.

Pan Borui, a 19-year-old freshman at a Beijing college, got hooked last year on the cartoons, which he said will “shape the thinking of the next generation of Chinese.” He said he knew they were made with party support, but said most Chinese still considered them very accurate and more accessible than traditional news reports.

Beijing’s ambitions are laid out in a document published by the State Council, China’s cabinet, in November 2019, which said “patriotism is the most natural and simple emotion of the Chinese.

The upshot is a world more reliant on China for growth than ever before. For 2020, China’s economy is expected to account for 16.8% of global gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, according to forecasts by Moody’s Analytics. That’s up from 14.2% in 2016, before the U.S. and China entered a trade war. The U.S. is expected to make up 22.2%, virtually unchanged from 22.3% in 2016.

The gains are a testament to China’s success in containing Covid-19 and getting its businesses humming again. The country’s stimulus programs, which were smaller as a portion of the overall economy than in the U.S., focused on restoring factory production and keeping small businesses from going bust, with relatively little direct support for consumers.

A November survey by HSBC Holdings PLC of more than 1,100 global corporations found that 75%, including 70% of U.S. companies, expect to increase their supply-chain footprint in China over the next two years

After a public-health push that focused on overdose prevention sites, methadone clinics and counseling services, the number of deaths from opioid overdoses finally began to fall in Canada last year.

As cities across Canada locked down, the number of overdose deaths surged, putting the country on track to lose the gains it made last year. Unlike in the U.S., where opioid-related deaths have continued to rise, deaths in Canada fell 13% in 2019, to 3,799. This year they could surpass the record 4,372 deaths reported in 2018, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The overdose death toll in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, reached 28 in October, the most in a single-month on record, according to city statistics. As of October, 206 died in 2020, compared with 141 for all of last year.

While Canada was quick to order vaccines and approved the use of the shot developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE in early December—two days before the U.S. authorized it—the nation has fallen behind several of its developed-country peers in administering vaccinations.

Just over 0.5% of the population of the U.S.’s northern neighbor was vaccinated as of Wednesday. By comparison, the U.S. had vaccinated 1.6% of its population by that date, and Israel had inoculated more than 18%, according to Our World in Data, a nonprofit research project at the University of Oxford. The U.K. had vaccinated about 1.9% of its population by Jan. 3, the latest date for which vaccination numbers were available.

The rollout has been incredibly slow and painful to watch,” said Samir Sinha, a medical doctor and the director of geriatrics at Sinai Health System and the University Health Network in Toronto. “Especially when you see different jurisdictions handling it differently and struggling to get it efficiently into peoples’ arms.”

Indonesia became the first country outside China to give emergency use approval to a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Chinese drugmaker Sinovac Biotech Ltd., despite findings that place the candidate’s efficacy among the lowest for new coronavirus vaccines

Indonesia’s food and drug agency said Monday that a late-stage clinical trial in the large city of Bandung showed Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine to be 65.3% effective. That compares to clinical trial results out of Brazil last week showing the vaccine had an efficacy rate of 78%.

A rate of 65% exceeds the 50% threshold that the World Health Organization and many regulatory authorities consider necessary for widespread use. Western vaccines developed by Moderna Inc. and jointly by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE have reported their vaccines to be more than 90% effective; another developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC was at least 62% effective, according to the team.

The North is developing military drones, a nuclear-powered submarine and surveillance satellites, Mr. Kim said. Missiles will get smaller and lighter. Others will fly farther.

At a Thursday night military parade celebrating the Workers’ Party meeting, the North put a host of military hardware on display, including a submarine-launched ballistic missile that state media touted as the “world’s most powerful weapon.”

Pyongyang has been on relatively good behavior, having held off on nuclear tests and ICBM launches for more than three years. The Kim regime was waiting to see if Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Kim met three times, would win re-election and deliver on his promise to quickly broker a denuclearization deal during his second term.

A new variant of the coronavirus is driving a powerful second wave of infections in South Africa. The variant has already spread to other countries and raised concerns over how it will respond to Covid-19 vaccines.

he discovery and spread of the South African variant has coincided with a powerful surge in infections in the country. New daily cases and deaths have already surpassed those seen in the first wave, which peaked in July, and infections are still going up. South African researchers say they also believe that the new variant is more transmissible, since it has quickly crowded out other versions of the virus circulating in the country.

So far, laboratories in at least 14 countries—including Canada, France, Germany and China--have found the variant in coronavirus tests, although mostly in people who had recently traveled to South Africa. Researchers in the U.K., Botswana and Zambia say they have found cases of local transmission of the variant in their countries.

Ugandans voted on Thursday amid heightened security and an internet shutdown after a hotly contested and violent race in which a youthful rapper-turned-lawmaker is attempting to unseat one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders.

Some 18 million voters cast ballots at around 35,000 polling stations across the coffee- and oil-producing country to decide a presidential election that has sparked the worst political clashes in decades. Dozens of military trucks mounted with machine guns patrolled the uncharacteristically quiet streets of the capital, Kampala. State television warned voters not to wear clothing in colors that denoted partisanship, to “avoid trouble.”

Incumbent President Yoweri Museveni has easily won previous contests since assuming power in 1986, but his winning streak appears to be in jeopardy in the face of a challenge from Bobi Wine, a 38-year-old musician.

One started in Washington when Richard Nixon was president, the others when Ronald Reagan was. They have seen it all: wars, recessions, control by one party and then another, terrorist attacks, and, now, a pandemic.

They are, respectively, President-elect Joe Biden ; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ; Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer ; and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. They have known one another for decades, so there will be no surprises. They will be overseeing a Washington where the Senate is perfectly divided between the two parties and the House nearly so—a power alignment that, at least in theory, ought to draw them all a bit closer together near the political center.

; Mr. Biden will attempt to be the establishment unifier, and hope that is what the nation wants. His best hope may be to build a personal popularity that overcomes other structural obstacles, yet many Americans wonder whether he is too old or insufficiently in command of the party around him to do so.

Upon being sworn in as vice president Wednesday, Kamala Harris will have to balance multiple roles: as a counselor to President-elect Joe Biden, the Senate tiebreaker and the potential standard-bearer for the Democratic Party whose current leaders are in their 70s or 80s.

While Mr. Biden, 78, is in good health, he will be the oldest president to be sworn into office, putting the role of Ms. Harris, 56, as next in the line of succession and as a party leader into greater focus. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader from New York, is 70, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of California, is 80.

Ms. Harris, who officially resigned from her Senate seat Monday, is expected to model her vice presidency after Mr. Biden’s, according to her aides. The president-elect also started his tenure, after serving in the Senate, in the midst of an economic crisis in 2009. Mr. Biden came to be seen as a loyal ally to President Barack Obama and led congressional negotiations on key legislation though sometimes exasperated Mr. Obama and his aides by straying from the administration’s message.

Every new president and Congress face their own particular set of challenges, which tend at the outset to feel both unique and daunting—though sometimes they actually aren’t as new and momentous as they seem.

On top of that, Mr. Biden also will be taking office on the steps of a Capitol still bearing the scars left by a mob of Trump supporters set on stopping him from taking office.

Mr. Biden will take office with the health and economic threats posed by the global pandemic still raging, and destined to pose a cloud over at least his first year in power. “There’s nothing that can be done anywhere in the government-policy area that comes close to the impact on the economy and the country of getting the pandemic under control,” says Josh Bolten, president of the Business Roundtable.

Janet Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for Treasury secretary, plans to tell lawmakers that the U.S. risks a longer, more painful recession unless Congress approves more aid and urge them to “act big” to shore up the recovery.

“Economists don’t always agree, but I think there is a consensus now: Without further action, we risk a longer, more painful recession now—and long-term scarring of the economy later,” Ms. Yellen will say. “Over the next few months, we are going to need more aid to distribute the vaccine; to reopen schools; to help states keep firefighters and teachers on the job.”

Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, unveiled last week, provides for another round of direct stimulus payments, extended and enhanced jobless benefits, funding for schools and first responders and the creation of a nationwide vaccination program. It also includes longstanding Democratic priorities, such as raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and expanding paid leave for workers.

President Trump was expected to issue as many as 100 pardons and commutations on his final full day in office, but on Monday was leaning against some of the more controversial proposed grants of clemency at the urging of his advisers, said people familiar with the discussions.

The coming round of pardons, expected Tuesday, has been the talk of Washington in recent days, as allies on Capitol Hill and close to the White House have traded tips on how soon the list might come and who might be on it. Mr. Trump is also working to firm up his defense team for his second impeachment trial as he heads into his last full day of the presidency.

In recent months, the president had discussed the prospect of pardoning himself, other members of his family—including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka Trump —as well as his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. But Mr. Trump has been leaning away from those pardons in recent days as advisers have counseled him that they would be unnecessary, the person familiar with the conversations said, while noting that Mr. Trump has been known to suddenly reverse course.

When President-elect Joe Biden’s advisers wrote his climate plan, they often had one small audience in mind: the U.S. Senate.

The Democratic control is still narrow—both parties have 50 Senate seats and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris breaks ties—and that is likely to limit how far Mr. Biden and fellow Democrats can reach.

Mr. Biden, as a candidate, had called for $2 trillion in spending on projects to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions that most scientists implicate in climate change.

ASHINGTON—The Justice Department early Saturday executed Dustin Higgs, the 13th and final federal inmate to die before President Trump leaves office and President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the death penalty, is sworn in.

In separate opinions, Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the condemned were put to death leaving unresolved claims regarding their mental capacity, exculpatory evidence, the risk of excruciating pain from lethal injection and other legal issues.

Justice Breyer previously has expressed doubts that the death penalty, as practiced today, can be squared with the Eighth Amendment protection from cruel and unusual punishments. He wrote Friday that the Trump-era executions compounded those concerns, calling “into question the constitutionality of the death penalty itself.”