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PARIS: Europe launches an unprecedented scale cross-border vaccination program on Sunday (December 27) as part of efforts to end a COVID-19 pandemic that has crippled economies and claimed more than 1.7 million of lives around the world.
The region of 450 million people has secured contracts with a variety of suppliers for more than 2 billion doses of vaccines and has set a goal for all adults to be inoculated by 2021.
While Europe has some of the best-resourced healthcare systems in the world, the scale of the effort means that some countries are turning to retired doctors for help, while others have relaxed the rules on who can administer injections.
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With polls pointing to high levels of vacillation in countries from France to Poland, European Union leaders from 27 countries are touting it as the best chance to get back to something like normal life next year.
“We are beginning to turn the page in a difficult year,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the Brussels-based European Commission who coordinates the program, said in a tweet.
“Vaccination is the lasting way out of the pandemic.”
After European governments were criticized for not working together to counter the spread of the virus in early 2020, the goal this time is to ensure that there is equal access to vaccines throughout the region.
But even then, Hungary was ahead of the official launch on Saturday by starting to give injections of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech to front-line workers in hospitals in the capital Budapest.
Hungarian soldiers carry the first shipment of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines to Del-Pest Central Hospital in Budapest, Hungary, on December 26, 2020 (Photo: Reuters / Szilard Koszticsak).
Countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Portugal and Spain plan to start mass vaccinations, starting with healthcare workers on Sunday. Outside the EU, Britain, Switzerland and Serbia have already started in recent weeks.
Pfizer-BioNTech injection distribution presents difficult challenges. The vaccine uses new mRNA technology and must be stored at ultra-low temperatures of around -80 degrees Celsius.
France, which received its first shipment of the two-dose vaccine on Saturday, will begin administering it in the Paris metropolitan area and in the Burgundy-Franche-Comté region.
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Germany, meanwhile, said trucks were on their way to deliver the vaccine to nursing homes, which are the first to receive the vaccine on Sunday.
Beyond the hospitals and residences, the sports halls and convention centers emptied by the closure measures will become places of mass vaccination.
In Italy, temporary solar-powered health pavilions will spring up in city squares across the country, designed to resemble five-petal spring flowers, a symbol of spring.
In Spain, the doses are being sent by air to its island territories and the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Portugal is establishing separate cold rooms for its Atlantic archipelagos of Azores and Madeira.
“A window of hope has been opened, without forgetting that there is a very difficult fight ahead,” Portuguese Health Minister Marta Temido told reporters.
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