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On Sunday, December 27, the first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine were administered in Italy. The doses – 9,750 – had arrived in Italy two days earlier amid much attention and with an escort from the carabinieri during the journey of the truck that transported them to Rome. It was the first delivery of vaccines to Italy, although in a very small quantity and defined as “symbolic” by the commissioner for the coronavirus emergency, Domenico Arcuri. In the following days, as expected, the other 470,000 planned doses of vaccine also arrived in Italy and the vaccination campaign began throughout the country.
A week after the first vaccinations, at the time of publication of this article, there are just over 84,000 people vaccinated in Italy, with large differences between regions: the newspapers and many commentators have described it as too low and a symptom that the vaccination campaign was not prepared in the right way.
The first thing to keep in mind is that after the delivery of the first 9,750 doses of the vaccine, the others arrived in Italy a few days late due to bad weather. 360,000 doses arrived on December 30 and another 110,000 doses arrived the next day. The transport of the doses, in this first phase, was entrusted directly to the producing company, Pfizer, which with its trucks distributed the doses in the approximately 300 administration centers that were identified in early December by the autonomous regions and provinces. .
– Read also: How the vaccination will start in Italy
The regions received doses of the vaccine in a number roughly proportional to the number of inhabitants. According to data released by the government, Lombardy received 80,595 doses of the vaccine, Sicily 46,510, Lazio 45,805, Emilia-Romagna 43,875, Piedmont 40,885, Veneto 38,900, Campania 33,870 and Tuscany 27,920, just to mention the most populated regions. The autonomous regions and provinces of Trento and Bolzano have started administering the doses at different rates, and again according to government data (which is updated several times a day), Lazio, one of the regions below, has already administered 35 7% of the doses received (17,374 in total), while Lombardy, one of the regions further back, administered 3% (2,416 in total).
These differences between regions – which are being discussed a lot these days – are due to the fact that each region has great autonomy in the management of its health services: each one has made its own different plan for the distribution of the vaccine, according to its needs. . . In Lombardy, for example, the vaccination campaign will begin in a generalized way from Monday, January 4, after the holidays: the Councilor for Health Giulio Gallera explained that the delivery of the vaccines was initially scheduled for January 4, which The vaccination plan was designed to begin that day and that the region has decided not to ask health personnel to stop vacations to bring vaccines one or two days before.
In the first phase of vaccinations, which mainly concerns RSA health personnel and guests, Gallera said that some 6,000 people will be vaccinated a day in Lombardy. However, this number could increase: the head of the vaccination program of the region Giacomo Lucchini said that in Lombardy around 10/13 thousand people could be vaccinated a day and that by the end of February those vaccinated should be 340,000.
Many regions could find themselves in similar situations to Lombardy and the number of vaccinations carried out daily is likely to increase everywhere as of January 4. Rather, based on the data collected so far, the number of vaccinations carried out is already increasing throughout Italy: 22,800 people were vaccinated on Thursday 31, another 10,000 people were vaccinated on Friday, January 1 and on Saturday, January 2, at least 25,000 people were vaccinated. To understand how things are really going, we will have to wait a few more days: Commissioner Arcuri explained that the national goal for the first phase of vaccination is to vaccinate around 65,000 people a day.
For the moment, therefore, it seems early to say that things are going badly and in other European countries the distribution of vaccines has also started slowly. According to data compiled by Our World in Data, as of January 2, 352 doses of the vaccine had been administered in France, 6,000 in Austria and 1,800 in Ireland, to name a few. There were also problems and slowdowns in Spain, and in Germany, where 188,000 doses of the vaccine were administered, there were still complaints and in Europe it is Denmark that has vaccinated the largest number of people in relation to the population: about 33,000 in just under 6 million inhabitants, more than 0.5% of the population.
Despite this, there are still several legitimate doubts about how the vaccination campaign will be managed in the coming months in Italy. The first phase, which concerns health personnel, should be the easiest to organize because the number of people to be vaccinated will be lower and because most doctors and nurses already go to the hospitals where they will receive the vaccine every day. However, there is still little information on how the vaccination campaign will work for the rest of the population: not only will there be major logistical problems to address (starting with the identification of places to be vaccinated), but it will also be necessary to understand if and how many doses the vaccine will arrive. For now, the only vaccine approved for use in the European Union is that of Pfizer-BioNTech, the approval of Moderna’s vaccine should arrive in early January, while it is not yet known when the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine will be approved. . .
– Read also: AstraZeneca’s Troubled Vaccine History
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