u.s. food and drug administration

U.S. coronavirus cases crossed the 15 million mark on Tuesday as regulators moved a step closer to approving a COVID-19 vaccine and Britain started inoculating people, offering hope of slowing a pandemic that killed 15,000 Americans in the last week alone.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Dec. 7 praised Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci - both children of Turkish immigrants in Germany - for developing a vaccine against the novel coronavirus.

Speaking to German radio Metropol FM, Merkel said Şahin and Türeci, who are married, made a foundational contribution to science with their company BioNTech, alongside U.S. pharmaceutical firm Pfizer.

He said that he has "great faith" in the state regulators of Great Britain.
Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sparked controversy with an earlier statement that British health regulators had not researched the study data as carefully as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Former U.S. Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton said they were willing to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus on television in order to ease any public skepticism over the safety of new vaccines.

Fauci, a leading US epidemiologist, says that Britain was not as careful in the examination as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did in its review. "U.S. FDA performs research in the right way", Fauci said in an interview with Fox News.
"We are really examining the data very carefully to guarantee the American public that this is a safe and effective vaccine", he said.

The United States hopes to begin coronavirus vaccinations in early December, a top government health official said on Nov. 22, the latest positive news to emerge even as cases surge across the worst-hit nation and elsewhere around the globe.

As hundreds of scientists around the world have been scrambling to develop a vaccine to end the novel coronavirus pandemic, a prominent Turkish professor has said she expects more than one vaccine to be found for COVID-19.

Patients in Turkey receiving convalescent plasma therapy have been responding positively to COVID-19 treatment, according to a top Red Crescent official. 

"We are receiving positive signals from the doctors who are taking care of seriously ill people [undergoing immune plasma therapy], Dr. Kerem Kınık, head of the Turkish Red Crescent Society told Anadolu Agency.