BERLIN – From nursing homes in France to hospitals in Poland, elderly Europeans and the workers who care for them rolled up their sleeves on Sunday to receive coronavirus vaccines in a campaign to protect more than 450 million people across the European Union.
The inoculations offered a rare rest while the continent struggled with one of its most precarious moments since the coronavirus pandemic began.
Despite national blockades, movement restrictions, closing restaurants and canceling Christmas parties, the virus has been haunting Europe in the dark winter months. The spread of a more contagious variant of the virus in Britain has given so much alarm that much of continental Europe has rushed to close its borders to travelers from the country, effectively quarantining the nation as a whole.
In Germany, a retirement home in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt chose not to wait for Sunday’s planned launch of the vaccination campaign across the European Union, inoculating a 101-year-old woman and dozens of other residents and staff on Saturday, hours after the dose arrives. People were also vaccinated on Saturday in Hungary and Slovakia.
Earlier on Sunday, dozens of minivans carrying refrigerators filled with dry ice to keep doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine from rising above minus 70 degrees Celsius spread to nursing homes across the German capital as part of the wave of immunizations. The launch comes at a time when Europe’s largest nation is facing its deadliest period since the pandemic began.
With nearly 1,000 deaths recorded in Germany every day in the week before Christmas, a crematorium in the eastern state of Saxony operated 24 hours a day, during the holiday, to keep pace.
“I have never seen this so bad before,” said Eveline Müller, the installation’s director, in the city of Görlitz.
More than 350,000 people in the 27 nations that make up the European Union have died of Covid-19 since the first fatality 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.
Although doctors have learned how to better care for patients with Covid-19, effective medical treatment is still difficult to find. Therefore, the rapid development of vaccines is being hailed not only as a remarkable scientific achievement, but also as the hope of a world outside its axis.
However, the joy that received the news of successful vaccine candidates in November was subdued, as launches in Britain and the United States emphasized future challenges.
Meanwhile, vaccination campaigns in Russia and China are using products that have not overcome the same regulatory obstacles as those created by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, vaccines are currently being launched in the West.
Mexico became the first country in Latin America to begin inoculating its population on Friday. And regulators in India are expected to soon approve the use of a vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.
In the new year, the greatest inoculation effort in human history should be in full swing. But the scarcity of supplies, logistical obstacles, misinformation, public skepticism and the enormous scale of the effort guarantee that it will be an arduous fight against a virus that is constantly evolving.
Although experts say there is no indication that any known variant will make vaccines less effective in individuals, they say more studies are needed. And the higher the infection rate, the greater the urgency to vaccinate people.
The new variant is spreading in Britain with such ferocity that there is a growing debate about giving more people a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine – offering about 50 percent effectiveness in preventing diseases – rather than giving fewer people or two doses needed for protection levels estimated at 95 percent.
Still, the vaccine’s launch across 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. “Vaccine # COVID19 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 slogan aims to shake the undecided.
For Italians – whose suffering at the start of the pandemic served as a warning to the world, and whose current death toll is again among the worst in Europe – a 29-year-old nurse stepped forward to take the first shot.
“It’s the beginning of the end,” said nurse Claudia Alivernini, after receiving her morning vaccine at Rome’s Spallanzani hospital.
“We, health workers, believe in science, we believe in this vaccine, it is important to be vaccinated, for us, for those close to us, for our loved ones, the community and our patients,” he said.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte celebrated the moment.
“Today, Italy wakes up. It’s #VaccineDay, ”he wrote on Twitter. “This date will remain with us forever.”
For some countries, early vaccinations offer a chance for redemption from failures during the first wave of the pandemic.
In the spring, when the virus invaded nursing homes in France, the crisis remained in the shadows until the deaths reached a scale that could no longer be ignored. There was, therefore, a 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 vaccination campaign was also scheduled to start at an asylum in the city of Guadalajara.
The member states of the European Union showed solidarity by waiting for the bloc’s regulatory council, the European Medical Association, to approve the vaccine before starting coordinated national campaigns. But how that will happen in individual countries is likely to be disparate.
All EU member states have national health systems, so people will be vaccinated free of charge. But just as hospitals in poorer member states, such as Bulgaria and Romania, have been overwhelmed with the latest wave of the virus, networks in these countries will face challenges in delivering vaccines.
While each nation is determining how to carry out 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 professionals and older citizens.
Most member states have said they expect the vaccine to reach the general public in the spring, and a return to some sense of normalcy could hardly occur anytime soon.
In October, France was one of the first nations in Europe to introduce a second blockade and, although it began to lift restrictions, the reopening did not come as fast as many expected.
Museums, theaters and cinemas, which were initially due to reopen on December 15, remain closed, and there is a curfew from 8 pm to 6 am across the country. The lights in the trees along the Champs-Élysées in Paris still shine every night, but no holiday shoppers or tourists are there to revel in its brilliance.
Chairs stacked in empty bars, restaurants and cafes are reminders of the absence that marked 2020.
Nathalie and Adrien Delgado, a Parisian couple in their 50s, said they would be vaccinated as soon as possible. “It’s an act of citizenship,” said Delgado, who was celebrating Christmas in Paris with the couple’s two children, instead of visiting his mother. “It’s not even for me, but it’s the only way to stop the virus.”
Others were not so sure.
Sandra Frutuoso, a 27-year-old domestic worker who also canceled plans to visit her family in Portugal, said she feared that the disease – her husband was infected and has recovered – but that she would not get vaccinated “before too long”.
“They created it very fast,” she said. “I’m concerned that the side effects may be worse than Covid himself for someone my age.”
Germans’ willingness to be immunized has also declined in recent months, and the government expects acceptance to grow as vaccines are launched.
Asked last week how long it would take for life to return to normal, Ugur Sahin, co-founder of BioNTech, warned that even with immunization, the virus would last the rest of the decade.
“We need a new definition of ‘normal’,” he told reporters, although he added that, with enough vaccinations, the blockages could end as early as next year.
“This year we will not have an impact on infection numbers,” said Sahin, “but we have to make sure that next year we will have enough vaccines to make it normal.”
Melissa Eddy reported from Berlin, and Marc Santora from London. The report was contributed by Aurelien Breeden from Paris, Niki Kitsantonis from London, Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome, Raphael Minder Madrid and Monika Pronczuk of Brussels.