LONDON – Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, 94, and her husband, Prince Philip, 99, received coronavirus vaccines, Buckingham Palace officials said on Saturday.
The royal family rarely comments on the health of the monarch or his family, but said the announcement was made to avoid inaccuracies or speculation.
“The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh received the Covid-19 vaccines today,” said a spokesman for Buckingham Palace in a statement.
The pandemic has hit the UK.
It has the highest death toll in Europe – just over 81,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University data – and is in the midst of severe social restrictions as hospitals say they are overburdened.
The emergence in the UK of a more contagious mutant strain of Covid-19 has also led to an increase in cases.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson stepped up vaccination efforts this week, with the elderly and vulnerable among the priority groups. On Tuesday, Johnson said he ended up 1.3 million people across the UK have been vaccinated.
It is not known which vaccine the queen and her husband received.
The inoculation of British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, done in collaboration with the University of Oxford, UK, received regulatory approval in December, while the UK gained global headlines when it became the first western country to launch the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the beginning the same month.
On Friday, UK regulators approved a third vaccine, from Moderna, but said it would not be available until spring.
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Last year, Queen Elizabeth urged her subjects to show the same “quiet and good-natured resolution” that characterized previous generations, in a rare television speech designed to gather the nation’s spirits.
The royal family was not immune to the virus, with the queen’s son and heir to the throne, Prince Charles, testing positive for Covid-19 in March last year, but made a quick recovery.
Charles’s son, Prince William and his wife, Kate, have been defending the National Health Service. Kate, who celebrated her 39th birthday on Friday tweeted your support for those on the front lines.
The life of royalty has attracted renewed interest recently, as many blocked viewers have tuned in to the fourth season of Netflix’s “The Crown” series.
For the first time, the series introduced Princess Diana, causing a stir as British politicians urged Netflix to make it clear that the show is fiction.
