Largest vaccine campaign in America underway Monday, with shots to prevent COVID

Americans on Monday began receiving the first COVID-19 vaccinations, with a New York doctor among the first to get the shot.  

The doctor, from Northwell LIJ Medical Center, on Long Island, was vaccinated at 9:23 a.m. during a live-streamed event with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, according to ABC News.

The vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech was approved Friday by the FDA on an emergency-use basis for people older than 16.

The vaccine campaign is the biggest since the polio vaccine effort in the 1950s.

This weekend, the first batches of more than 2.9 million dozes over the next several weeks began being shipped to the U.S. 

The discovery of the vaccine and approval process came extraodinary speed, roughly nine months since the start of the pandemic that has killed more than a million people worldwide. 

Other locations in Connecticut, New York, Iowa, Washington, D.C., and Michigan are also expected to administer vaccine doses on Monday, ABC News also reports.