2021 Notebook: The COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccine rollout

THE BACKGROUND: The year started with a lot of promise. The world had vaccines.

And even as the planet reached 2 million dead by the middle of the month of January, people in many of the hard-hit countries, including the United States and Britain, began rolling up their sleeves and receiving the life-saving shots.

The rollouts were rocky at times — production problems delayed deliveries and rich countries received the lion’s share of the vaccines. But cases began to fall sharply in February, raising hope that a return to normal was near.

Then came delta. A highly transmissible variant of the virus swept across the globe as too many people remained unprotected. Some never had access, others, beset by rampant misinformation about the vaccines, refused to get the shots. Cases and deaths skyrocketed. Despite having vaccines, more people died in 2021 from COVID-19 than in 2020, the first full year of the pandemic. Many thousands of those deaths could have been prevented.

And even as the delta surge slows, we have a new variant: omicron, perhaps even more transmissible.

Here, some Associated Press journalists involved in the coverage reflect on the story and their own experiences.

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LAURAN NEERGAARD, medical writer, Washington, D.C.:

The year started with an immense sense of hope because the vaccines were just beginning to roll out. Not only did one vaccine work, several different kinds worked and they worked incredibly well. It was a huge scientific achievement. And at first the story was about demand, how many people desperately wanted to get their shots while multiple companies were struggling to increase supplies of different vaccines made in different ways in different countries.

The surprise amid all of this hope was how quickly misinformation turned into its own...