Europe yesterday launched a massive COVID-19 vaccination drive, with pensioners and medics lining up to get the first shots to see off a pandemic that has crippled economies and claimed more than 1.7 million lives worldwide.
“Thank God,” 96-year-old Araceli Hidalgo said as she became the first person in Spain to receive a vaccine. “Let’s see if we can make this virus go away.”
She told staff at her care home in Guadalajara near Madrid that she had not felt a thing.
Photo: Reuters
In Italy, the first country in Europe to record significant numbers of infections, 29-year-old nurse Claudia Alivernini was one of three medical staff at the head of the queue for the shot developed by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE.
“It is the beginning of the end ... it was an exciting, historical moment,” she said at Rome’s Lazzaro Spallanzani Hospital.
The region of 450 million people has secured contracts with a range of suppliers for more than two billion vaccine doses and has set a goal for all adults to be inoculated next year.
While Europe has some of the best-resourced healthcare systems in the world, the sheer scale of the effort means some countries are calling on retired medics to help, while others have loosened rules for who is allowed to give the injections.
With surveys pointing to high levels of hesitancy toward the vaccine in countries from France to Poland, leaders of the 27-country EU are promoting it as the best chance of getting back to something like normal life next year.
“We are starting to turn the page on a difficult year,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, which is coordinating the program, wrote on Twitter. “Vaccination is the lasting way out of the pandemic.”
The goal is to ensure that there is equal access to vaccines across the region.
Yet even then, Hungary on Saturday jumped the gun on the official rollout by starting to administer shots to frontline workers at hospitals in Budapest.
Slovakia also went ahead with some inoculations of healthcare staff on Saturday.
In Germany, a small number of people at a care home for the elderly were also given the vaccine a day early, with a 101-year-old woman becoming the first person in the country to be inoculated.
“We don’t want to waste that one day that the vaccine loses shelf life. We want to use it right away,” Karsten Fischer, from the pandemic staff of the Harz district in Germany told local broadcaster MDR.
Additional reporting by AFP
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