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Less than a week after the European Union (EU) authorized the use of the vaccine from the Pfizer and BioNTech laboratories, countries such as Italy and Spain began on Sunday to vaccinate their population against the coronavirus, which has already infected at least 80 million people in the world and has claimed more than 1,758,000 lives.
“It does nothing, nothing (…) thank you very much,” said Araceli Hidalgo Sánchez, a 96-year-old petite woman, who became the first Spanish woman to receive the long-awaited injection, in a residence for the elderly in Guadalajara ( center).
After her, Mónica Tapias, a nursing assistant in this same residence, was the second Spanish to be vaccinated. “What we want is for the majority of people to get vaccinated,” he told the cameras.
The Spanish authorities hope to have vaccinated between 15 and 20 million people in June 2021, out of a population of 47 million.
Spain has been one of the countries in Europe hardest hit by the pandemic, with some 50,000 deaths and more than 1.8 million cases, according to figures from the Ministry of Health.
“Today Araceli and Mónica represent a new hopeful stage. A day for excitement and confidence ”, said on Twitter the president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, promising that the vaccination process will be“ fast, solvent and equitable ”.
Around the same time, in Italy, nurse Claudia Alivernini and Maria Rosaria Capobianchi, director of a virology laboratory at the Spallanzani hospital in Rome, were the first to receive the vaccine in the country.
It is “a small but fundamental gesture for all of us,” Alivernini said. “I mean it: let’s get vaccinated. For us, for our loved ones and for society ”, he added.
In Italy, widespread vaccination will begin on January 8, the date on which 470,000 doses per week will arrive in the country. Italy is the country of the European Union most affected by the pandemic, with more than 71,000 deaths, and had to decree important confinement measures before Christmas.
Thousands of kilometers away in Bucharest, the 26-year-old Romanian nurse Mihaela Anghel, the first to treat a patient with COVID-19 in February in the country, was the first vaccinated.
Germany, Hungary and Slovakia already vaccinated some people on Saturday. Europe is, numerically, the region most affected in the world by this pandemic and has already exceeded 25 million cases and 546,000 deaths.
In addition to the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, other vaccines are also expected to be licensed in Europe soon, such as those developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford.
“We believe that we have found the winning formula and how to achieve an efficacy that, with two doses, is as high as the others,” said Pascal Soriot, general manager of the Swedish-British laboratory AstraZeneca, whose immunizer had until now an efficacy of the 70%.
More cases of the new strain
Before the EU, many countries began to vaccinate against the coronavirus, starting with China, which gave the first injections in summer (boreal). In December, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Mexico, Costa Rica and Chile followed.
Parallel to vaccination, more and more countries are detecting cases of the new, possibly more contagious strain of coronavirus, initially discovered in the UK.
Canada, Italy, Sweden, Spain and Japan reported infections of this variant in the last hours, after France, Germany, Lebanon and Denmark.
According to a study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the London school of tropical medicine and hygiene, this new variant is between “50% to 74%” more contagious, so it is feared that 2021 will bring more hospitalizations and deaths from covid-19 than 2020 if the means are not put.
After confirming this mutation, which is only detected if the sequence of the virus genome is analyzed after a PCR test, many countries closed their doors to the United Kingdom and some maintain these restrictions on their air, sea or land connections.
This Sunday, Japan decided to prohibit any arrival of non-resident foreigners from Monday until the end of January.
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