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PARIS: Hungary and Slovakia got ahead of their neighboring EU countries when they began vaccinating people against COVID-19 on Saturday (December 26), a day before launches in several other countries, including France and Spain, as the pandemic spreads across the continent.
In Germany, a small number of people in a nursing home were vaccinated on Saturday, the day before the official start of the country’s vaccination campaign.
Mass vaccination across the European Union, home to nearly 450 million people, would be a crucial step in ending a pandemic that has killed more than 1.7 million worldwide, crippled economies and destroyed businesses and jobs. .
Hungary administered the vaccine, jointly developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, to front-line workers in hospitals in the capital Budapest, after receiving its first shipment of enough doses to inoculate 4,875 people. The first worker to receive the vaccine was Adrienne Kertesz, a doctor at Hospital Central Del-Pest.
Hungary has reported 315,362 COVID-19 cases with 8,951 deaths. More than 6,000 people are still hospitalized with COVID-19, putting the central European country’s care system to the test.
“We are very happy that the vaccine is here,” said Zsuzsa and Antal Takacs, a 68- and 75-year-old couple, as they played table tennis in a park in Budapest.
“We will receive the vaccine because our daughter had a baby in France last month and we want to go see them. We do not dare to travel before receiving the vaccine,” Zsuzsa said.
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In Slovakia, Vladimir Krcmery, an infectious disease specialist and member of the government’s Pandemic Commission, was the first person to receive the vaccine, followed by his colleagues.
Countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Portugal and Spain will begin mass vaccinations on Sunday, starting with health workers.
Distribution of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which was first launched in Britain earlier this month, presents difficult challenges. The vaccine uses a new genetic mRNA technology, which means that it must be stored at ultra-low temperatures of around -80 degrees Celsius.
NEW VARIANT IN FRANCE, SPAIN
France, which received its first shipment of the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Saturday, will begin administering it in the Paris metropolitan area and the Burgundy-Franche-Comté region on Sunday.
“We have 19,500 doses in total, which equates to 3,900 vials. These doses will be stored in our freezer at minus 80 degrees (Celsius) and then distributed to different nursing homes and hospitals,” said Franck Huet, head of pharmaceuticals. for the Paris public hospital system.
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The French government expects to vaccinate around 1 million people in nursing homes during January and February, and then another 14 to 15 million in the general population between March and June.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved by the French medical regulator on Thursday.
France reported only 3,093 new coronavirus infections in the last 24 hours on Saturday, well below the more than 20,000 cases in each of the previous two days, figures not seen since Nov.20. But the seven-day moving average of new daily cases, which equals the reporting of irregularities, is around a one-month high.
France has a total of 2,550,864 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the fifth highest count in the world, while its death toll from COVID-19 is 62,573, the seventh highest.
In a concerning development, the Health Ministry said on Friday that a man who recently arrived from London had tested positive for a new variant of the virus that has been spreading rapidly in southern England and is believed to be more infectious. Sweden also confirmed this Saturday that it has detected the first case of the new variant in a traveler from the United Kingdom.
In Spain, Madrid health authorities said on Saturday that they had confirmed four cases of the new variant of the virus, as the country received its first deliveries of the vaccine.
“The vaccination will begin tomorrow in Spain, coordinated with the rest of Europe,” Health Minister Salvador Illa wrote on Twitter. “This is the beginning of the end of the pandemic.”
The doses will be brought by air to the Spanish islands and the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, and by road to other regions of the country, where a total of some 50,000 people have died from the disease.
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‘THE WINDOW OF HOPE HAS BEEN OPENED’
Germany, meanwhile, said trucks were on their way to deliver the vaccine to nursing homes, which are the first to receive the vaccine with the official start of the vaccination campaign on Sunday.
However, a small number of people in Germany received the vaccine on Saturday, and the first was a 101-year-old woman in a nursing home in Halberstadt in the Harz mountain range.
The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country rose by 14,455 to 1,627,103, data from the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases showed on Saturday. More than 29,000 people have died, in all.
The federal government plans to distribute more than 1.3 million doses of vaccines to local health authorities by the end of this year and about 700,000 a week starting in January.
“There may be some setbacks at one point or another in the beginning, but that is quite normal when such a logistically complex process begins,” said Health Minister Jensen Spahn.
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In Portugal, a truck escorted by police left the first batch of COVID-19 hits at a warehouse in the country’s central region. From there, the nearly 10,000 vaccines will be delivered to five large hospitals.
“It is a historic milestone for all of us, an important day after such a difficult year,” Health Minister Marta Temido told reporters outside the warehouse.
“A window of hope has been opened, without forgetting that there is a very difficult fight ahead.”
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