Wednesday 24 / April / 2024
European Union countries, including France, Italy, Austria, Portugal and Spain, have launched mass inoculations on Sunday, with many states starting with health workers.
Vaccinations in the bloc are beginning following approval of the BioNTech-Pfizer jab by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
The first vaccine shipments arrived across the EU late Friday and early Saturday. Each member nation can take the lead on how to implement the rollout, and three member states — Germany, Hungary and Slovakia — started vaccinations a day early on Saturday.
Just hours after the vaccines arrived in Slovakia, authorities began administering their first doses on Saturday evening. Front-line medical staff in hospitals treating COVID-19 patients were among the first to get the vaccine. President Zuzana Caputova is scheduled to get vaccinated on Sunday.
Slovakia is the second EU country after Hungary that started the vaccination campaign immediately after the arrival of the first doses, upsetting plans for a coordinated rollout on Sunday of the first COVID shots across the 27-nation European Union.
Projecting a sense of unity
Germany said mobile teams were on their way to deliver the vaccine to care homes for the elderly, which are first in line to receive the vaccine on Sunday. Beyond hospitals and care homes, sports halls and convention centers emptied by lockdown measures will become venues for mass inoculations.
Germany, with a population of 83 million, has built up more than 400 vaccination centers to carry out the inoculations, including in venues like Berlin's former Tegel and Tempelhof airports and Hamburg's trade fair hall.
DW's Nina Haase said German health authorities received their first doses on Saturday, with each of the country's 16 states receiving some 10,000 initial doses.
"That is not nearly enough to cover even the elderly. There is a big sense of urgency," she said.
Vaccinations will be free and available to everyone from mid-2021, when the jabs for the priority groups are expected to have finished. There is no obligation to be inoculated.
Kick-off in France, Spain and Italy
France, which has been registering around 15,000 new infections per day, received its first shipment of the two-dose vaccine on Saturday. French authorities said they will first start administering the vaccine in the greater Paris area and in the Burgundy-Franche-Comte region.
In Italy, meanwhile, temporary solar-powered healthcare pavilions are set to spring up in town squares around the country, designed to look like five-petalled primrose flowers, a symbol of spring.
DW's Rome correspondent Seema Gupta said the Italian government has ordered 200 million doses that will be administered initially at 21 centers across the country.
"Eventually you are going to see a campaign about why it's important to do this vaccine, which is free and non-mandatory, but very much encouraged," she said.
In Spain, doses are being delivered by air to its island territories and the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. And Portugal is establishing separate cold storage units for its Atlantic archipelagos of Azores and Madeira.
The distribution of the BioNTech-Pfizer shot presents tough challenges, as the vaccine uses new mRNA technology and must be stored at ultra-low temperatures of around -80 degrees Celsius (-112°F). Still, its rollout helps the EU project a sense of unity in a complex lifesaving mission after the bloc faced challenges controlling the spread of the virus.
In all, EU nations have recorded at least 16 million coronavirus infections so far and more than 336,000 deaths — huge numbers that experts agree still understate the true toll of the pandemic due to missed cases and limited testing.
