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Health workers, the elderly and top politicians received some of the first injections across the block to assure the public that vaccines are safe.
Europe has launched a massive COVID vaccination campaign, with elderly patients and doctors lining up to take the first injections in hopes of ending the pandemic that has paralyzed economies and claimed more than 1.7 million lives in all the world.
The region of 450 million people has secured contracts with a variety of providers for more than two billion doses of vaccines and has set a goal for all adults to be vaccinated by 2021.
“It didn’t hurt at all,” said Mihaela Anghel, a nurse at the Matei Bals Institute in Bucharest, who was the first person to receive the vaccine in Romania.
“Open your eyes and get the vaccine.”
In Rome, Italy, five doctors and nurses dressed in white coats sat in a semicircle at the Spallanzani infectious disease hospital to receive their doses.
“The message is one of hope, trust and an invitation to share this choice,” said one of the recipients, Dr. Maria Rosaria Capobianchi, who heads the Spallanzani virology laboratory and was part of the team that isolated the virus in early 2000. February.
“There is no reason to worry.”
Domenico Arcuri, extraordinary commissioner for the epidemic, said it was significant that the first doses of the vaccine from Italy were administered in Spallanzani, where a Chinese couple visiting Wuhan tested positive in January and became Italy’s first confirmed cases.
World War II veteran Emilie Repikova receives a dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at the Military University Hospital in Prague [David W Cerny/Reuters]
The number of vaccinated in the early days with the Pfizer-BioNTech jab is largely symbolic and it will be months before enough people are deemed protected to foresee a return to normal from the pandemic.
Meanwhile, France and Spain have seen the first cases of a new variant of the virus that has spread rapidly through London and southern England.
The new variant has prompted European countries, the United States and China to impose new travel restrictions on people from Great Britain.
Germany’s BioNTech has said it is confident its coronavirus vaccine will work against the new UK variant, but added that more studies are needed to be completely sure.
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