Emotional video shows crowds cheering Covid vaccine trucks

Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine being administered on Monday, as country’s death toll nears 300,000

Crowds cheered as trucks carrying Pfizer Covid vaccine shipments departed the pharmaceutical company’s plant in Michigan on Sunday.

Up to three million doses were transported across the United States overnight, with the first doses of Pfizer’s vaccine administered to the American public on Monday.

The milestone came as another pandemic marker - the country’s death toll - neared 300,000, which is still the world’s worst, and climbing.

A small crowd waited as trucks were loaded with Pfizer vaccines at the company’s factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan, as seen in a video shared on social media by the Detroit Free Press.

One person waved a banner with the words ‘Trump President’, while others clapped and cheered.

Three trucks were seen departing the Pfizer plant, from where the vaccine doses were transported to distribution centres for UPS and FedEx.

They were then dispatched to 636 locations across all 50 states, with all sites due to have the vaccines delivered by Wednesday.

Richard W. Smith, who oversees FedEX operations in the Americas, told the Associated Press that Sunday was "a historic day”.

Pfizer was not involved in the Trump administration’s vaccine development project, Operation Warp Speed, and was not funded by the federal government, despite the president’s remarks.

The pharmaceutical company, who instead partnered with the vaccine’s original developer, Germany’s BioNTech, has said it hopes to have shipped 40 million doses to Americans within the next month.

The US Food and Drug Administration granted Pfizer emergency authorisation for its drug on Friday and the CDC advisory panel recommended its use on Saturday.

On Monday, more than 16,256,00 people in the United States had contracted Covid-19, and almost 300,000 had lost their lives to the disease since the pandemic started, according to John Hopkins University.