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BERLIN – From nursing homes in France to hospitals in Poland, older Europeans and the workers who care for them rolled up their sleeves on Sunday for coronavirus vaccine injections in a campaign to protect more than 450 million people across the European Union.
Vaccines offered a rare respite as the continent struggles through one of its most precarious moments since the coronavirus pandemic began.
Despite national closures, movement restrictions, restaurant closures, and Christmas party cancellations, the virus has stalked Europe in the dark winter months. The spread of a more contagious variant of the virus in Britain has caused such alarm that much of continental Europe was quick to close its borders to travelers from the country, driving the nation as a whole into quarantine.
In Germany, a nursing home in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt decided not to wait for Sunday’s planned launch of the vaccination campaign across the European Union, where a 101-year-old woman and dozens of other residents were inoculated and staff members on Saturday. hours after the doses arrived. People were also vaccinated on Saturday in Hungary and Slovakia.
Early Sunday morning, dozens of minivans carrying coolers filled with dry ice to keep doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine from exceeding minus 70 degrees Celsius were deployed to nursing homes in the German capital as part of the wave of immunizations. . The launch comes as Europe’s largest nation is facing its deadliest period since the start of the pandemic.
With nearly 1,000 deaths recorded in Germany every day in the week before Christmas, a crematorium in the eastern state of Saxony operated around the clock, during the holidays, to keep up.
“I’ve never had to see it so bad before,” said Eveline Müller, director of the facility, in the city of Görlitz.
More than 350,000 people in the 27 nations that make up the European Union have died from Covid-19 since the first death was recorded in France on February 15. And for many countries, the worst days have come in recent weeks. In Poland, November was the deadliest month since the end of World War II.
While doctors have learned how to better care for Covid-19 patients, effective medical treatment remains elusive. Therefore, the rapid development of vaccines is being hailed not only as a remarkable scientific achievement, but also as the hope that the world will slip off its axis.
However, the joy at the news of successful vaccine candidates in November has dimmed as launches in Britain and the United States have underscored future challenges.
Meanwhile, vaccination campaigns in Russia and China use products that have not overcome the same regulatory hurdles as those created by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, the vaccines currently being rolled out in the West.
Mexico became the first country in Latin America to begin inoculating its population on Friday. And Indian regulators are expected to soon approve the use of a vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.
By the new year, the largest inoculation effort in human history is expected to be in full swing. But supply shortages, logistical hurdles, misinformation, public skepticism and the scale of the effort ensure that it will be an uphill fight against a constantly evolving virus.
While experts said there was no indication that any known variant made the vaccines less effective in individuals, they said more studies were needed. And the higher the infection rate, the greater the urgency to vaccinate people.
The new variant is spreading in Britain with such fierceness that there is growing debate about whether to give more people a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which is about 50 percent effective in preventing disease, rather than giving to a smaller number of people two doses required for levels of protection estimated at 95 percent.
Still, the launch of the vaccine in Europe was celebrated.
“Today, we are starting to turn the page in a difficult year”, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, wrote on Twitter. “The # COVID19 vaccine has been delivered to all EU countries.”
The Greeks are calling their vaccination campaign “Operation Freedom”. As in much of Europe, skepticism about coronavirus vaccines runs deep, and the tagline is intended to convince undecided people.
For Italians, whose suffering at the start of the pandemic served as a warning to the world and whose current death toll is once again among the worst in Europe, a 29-year-old nurse stepped up to take the first shot.
“It’s the beginning of the end,” said nurse Claudia Alivernini, after receiving her morning vaccination at the Spallanzani hospital in Rome.
“Health workers believe in science, we believe in this vaccine, it is important to be vaccinated, by ourselves, by those who are close, by our loved ones, the community and our patients,” he said.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte celebrated the moment.
“Today Italy wakes up again. It’s #VaccineDay, ”he wrote on Twitter. “This date will stay with us forever.”
For some countries, early vaccines offer an opportunity for redemption for failures during the first wave of the pandemic.
In the spring, when the virus swept through nursing homes in France, the crisis remained in the shadows until deaths reached a scale that could no longer be ignored. Thus, there was symbolic resonance when nursing home residents were chosen to receive the first vaccines in the country.
In Spain, where more than 16,000 people died in nursing homes in the first three months of the pandemic, the inoculation campaign was also scheduled to begin in a nursing home in the city of Guadalajara.
The member states of the European Union showed solidarity by waiting for the bloc’s regulatory board, the European Medical Association, to approve the vaccine before beginning coordinated national campaigns. But the way they develop in individual countries is likely to be uneven.
All EU member states have national health care systems, so people will get vaccinated for free. But just as hospitals in poorer member states like Bulgaria and Romania were overwhelmed by the latest wave of the virus, networks in those countries will face challenges in vaccine distribution.
While each nation is determining how to conduct its campaign, in general the first phase will focus on those most at risk of exposure and those most likely to have serious health problems: health workers and senior citizens. age.
Most member states have said they expect the vaccine to reach the general public in spring, and that a return to normal could hardly come too soon.
In October, France was one of the first nations in Europe to introduce a second blockade, and although it has begun to lift restrictions, the reopening has not come as quickly as many had hoped.
Museums, theaters and cinemas, which were initially expected to reopen on December 15, remain closed and there is a curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. across the country. The tree lights along the Champs Elysees in Paris still shine every night, but there are no tourists or Christmas shoppers to enjoy their glow.
The chairs stacked in empty bars, restaurants and cafes are reminders of the absence that has marked 2020.
Nathalie and Adrien Delgado, a Parisian couple in their 50s, said they would get vaccinated as soon as possible. “It’s an act of citizenship,” said Ms. Delgado, who was celebrating Christmas in Paris with the couple’s two children instead of visiting their mother. “It is not even for me, but it is the only way to stop the virus.”
Others weren’t so sure.
Sandra Frutuoso, a 27-year-old housekeeper who had also canceled plans to visit her family in Portugal, said she feared the disease (her husband was infected and has since recovered) but would not get vaccinated “before a long time. “.
“They created it too fast,” he said. “I am concerned that the side effects could be worse than Covid itself for someone my age.”
The willingness of Germans to get vaccinated has also waned in recent months, and the government expects acceptance to increase as vaccines are released.
When asked last week how long it might take before life could return to normal, Ugur Sahin, co-founder of BioNTech, warned that even with immunization, the virus would persist for the rest of the decade.
“We need a new definition of ‘normal,'” he told reporters, although he added that with enough vaccines, the lockdowns could end next year.
“This year we will not have an impact on the number of infections,” Sahin said, “but we have to be sure that next year we have enough vaccines to make it normal.”
Melissa eddy reported from Berlin, and Marc santora From london. The reports were contributed by Aurelien Breeden from Paris, Niki Kitsantonis From london, Elisabetta povoledo from Rome, Raphael minder from Madrid and Monika pronczuk from Brussels.
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