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MADRID / ROME (Reuters) -Europe on Sunday launched a massive vaccination campaign against COVID-19 with retirees and doctors lining up to receive the first vaccines to curb a pandemic that has paralyzed economies and has claimed more than 1.7 millions of lives around the world.
“Thank God,” said Araceli Hidalgo, 96, as she became the first person in Spain to receive a vaccine. He told staff at his residence in Guadalajara, near Madrid, that he had felt nothing. “Let’s see if we can make this virus go away.”
In Italy, the first country in Europe to register a significant number of infections, 29-year-old nurse Claudia Alivernini was one of three medical staff to lead the injection queue developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.
“It is the beginning of the end … it was an exciting historical moment,” he said at the Spallanzani hospital in Rome.
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.
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.
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 starting to turn the page in a difficult year,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission who coordinates the program, said in a tweet.
“Vaccination is the lasting way out of the pandemic.”
JUMP THE GUN
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 to front-line workers in hospitals in the capital Budapest.
Slovakia also went ahead with some vaccinations for health workers on Saturday and in Germany, a small number of people in a nursing home were also vaccinated a day earlier.
“We don’t want to waste that day when the vaccine loses its shelf life. We want to use it immediately,” Karsten Fischer of the Harz district pandemic staff in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt told local broadcaster MDR. .
Pfizer / BioNTech injection distribution presents tough challenges. The vaccine uses new mRNA technology and must be stored at ultra-low temperatures of approximately -70 degrees Celsius (-112 ° F).
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 care pavilions designed to look like five-petal spring flowers, a symbol of spring, sprang up in city squares.
Pedro Pires waited for an injection with other nurses at the Santa María de Lisboa hospital at the end of a 10-hour night shift. “It has been exhausting … a lot of work,” he told Reuters.
“I am happy to be able to see my great-grandchildren,” said Branka Anicic, a resident of a nursing home in Zagreb and the first person to receive a vaccine in Croatia.
NEW VARIANT
The vaccination campaign is even more urgent due to concerns about a new variant of the virus linked to a rapid spread of cases in Britain. In recent days, Sweden and France have also detected cases of the variant.
So far, scientists say there is no evidence to suggest that vaccines are less effective against it.
In Spain, the doses were 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 Madeira and the Azores.
In France, a 78-year-old former domestic worker, who gave her name as Mauricette, said she was moved when she received the first vaccination outside of tests conducted in the country. The staff surrounding her at the Rene-Muret hospital in the Paris suburb of Sevran broke into applause.
In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis was at the head of the queue. In Austria, three women and two men over the age of 80 were vaccinated at the Vienna Medical University, Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz observed.
“We are at war, but our weapon has arrived and it is in these little vials,” said the head of the Bulgarian anti-virus task force, General Ventsislav Mutafchiiski, after being vaccinated in Sofia.
Outside the EU, Britain, Switzerland and Serbia have already started vaccinating their citizens in recent weeks.
(Additional reporting from Catarina Demony in Lisbon, Silke Koltrowitz in Vienna, Robert Muller in Prague, Tsvetelia Tsolova in Sofia and Igor Ilic in Zagreb; written by Mark John and Andrew Heavens; edited by David Clarke)
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