UK's David Attenborough receives COVID-19 vaccine

[January 13, 2021]  LONDON (Reuters) - British naturalist David Attenborough, 94, has received a vaccination against COVID-19, his spokesman said on Tuesday, the latest well-known British figure to have received a shot as a mass inoculation programme is rolled out.

Attenborough, the world's most influential wildlife broadcaster, joins Britain's other most famous nonagenarians, Queen Elizabeth and her husband Philip, in having the vaccine. The royal pair were vaccinated on Saturday.

With a highly transmissible new variant of the virus surging across Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has shuttered the economy and is rushing out vaccines in a bid to stem the spread of the pandemic.

The government plans to vaccinate the elderly, the vulnerable and frontline workers - around 15 million people - by mid-February, to ease a new strict lockdown imposed after a spike in cases to daily records.

(Reporting by Sarah Young, editing by Ed Osmond)

[© 2021 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.]

Copyright 2021 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.  Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content