The mass vaccination program against Covid-19 begins in several European countries

THE NATIONS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION have launched a coordinated effort to administer Covid-19 vaccines to adults among its 450 million citizens.

Vaccinations were administered Sunday morning to the most vulnerable people, health workers who care for them and some politicians to assure the public that the vaccines are safe.

The vaccines, developed by Germany’s BioNTech and US drugmaker Pfizer, began arriving in EU countries on Friday. The EU has witnessed some of the earliest and hardest hit virus hot spots in the world, including Italy and Spain.

Other EU countries, such as the Czech Republic, escaped the worst at first only to see their healthcare systems on the brink of collapse in the fall.

In all, the 27 nations of the EU have recorded at least 16 million coronavirus cases and more than 336,000 deaths, huge numbers that experts still agree to underestimate the true number of victims of the pandemic due to missing cases and limited evidence.

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, posted a video celebrating the launch of the vaccine, calling it “a moving moment of unity.”

Some EU immunizations started a day earlier in Germany, Hungary and Slovakia. The operator of a German nursing home where dozens of people were vaccinated on Saturday, including a 101-year-old woman, said that “every day we wait is one day too many.”

The campaign should ease the frustrations that were building up, especially in Germany, as the UK, Canada and the US started their inoculation programs with the same vaccine weeks earlier.

Each country decides for itself who will receive the first vaccines. Spain, France and Germany, among others, have pledged to give priority to the elderly and residents of nursing homes.

In Italy, which has the worst virus toll in Europe with more than 71,000 deaths, a nurse at Rome’s Spallanzani Hospital, the capital’s main infectious disease center, will be the first in the country to receive the vaccine, followed by another health personnel.

Poland is also prioritizing doctors, nurses and others on the front lines of the fight against the virus. The Central European nation was largely spared from the surge that hit Western Europe badly in the spring, but has been hit by high infections and daily deaths this fall.

EU leaders are counting on the launch of the vaccine to help the bloc project a sense of unity in a complex life-saving mission after it faced a difficult year in negotiating a post-Brexit trade deal with Britain.

German Health Minister Jens Spahn said: “Here is the good news at Christmas. This vaccine is the decisive key to ending this pandemic … it is the key to recovering our lives ”.

Among the politicians planning to get vaccinated against the virus on Sunday, as a way to promote wider acceptance of vaccines, are Slovak President Zuzana Caputova and Bulgarian Health Minister Kostadin Angelov.

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, which UK authorities say is much more easily spread, has prompted European countries, the US and China to impose new travel restrictions for UK people.

German pharmaceutical company BioNTech is confident that its coronavirus vaccine works against the new UK variant, but said more studies are needed to be completely sure.

The European Medicines Agency will consider approving a second coronavirus vaccine on January 6, this one from Moderna, which has already been approved for use in the United States.