Europe launches Covid-19 mass vaccination program as countries rush to contain the new variant

Europe launches Covid-19 mass vaccination program as countries rush to contain the new variant

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The pilot, Samy Kramer, invited people on his Instagram account to follow his flight, in a two-seater plane, on the FlightRadar24 website.

The air traffic tracking website reported that the flight took off from Friedrichshafen, near Lake Constance in southern Germany, on December 23, and lasted an hour and 44 minutes.

The European Union (EU) officially started its vaccination campaign against Covid-19 on Sunday, days after the approval of the Pfizer / BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on 21 December.

“The … vaccine has been delivered to all EU countries,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, on Twitter on Saturday.

The Commission declared 27, 28 and 29 December “EU vaccination days”, which von der Leyen said was “a touching moment of unity”. She added that: “Vaccination is the long-term way out of the pandemic.”

The first people to receive doses of the vaccine were, in large part, elderly or medical professionals.

In France, a 78-year-old woman named Mauricette was the first to receive the vaccine, according to a tweet from Aurélien Rousseau, director general of the health agency in the Ile-de-France region. Mauricette, a former domestic worker, received the vaccine at a public hospital in Greater Paris.

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Italy – once the European epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic – also administered its first doses of the vaccine on Sunday.

Professor Maria Rosaria Capobianchi, a virologist at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases Lazzaro Spallanzani, was one of the first to receive him. Capobianchi is part of the team that isolated the virus for the first time in Italy.

Also among the first group to receive the injection were a doctor and a nurse.

Dr. Alessandra D’Abramo was working at the institute when the first two Italian patients with coronavirus – a Chinese couple – were hospitalized there on January 30.

“This is a great day because after a long time of hard work on the ward, now is a day of hope and I am very proud of it,” she told CNN shortly after receiving the injection. “The vaccine is approved by the FDA, EMA and AIFA – the Italian [regulator] – so I think it’s safe and effective, “she added.

A 96-year-old resident of a nursing home was the first to receive the vaccine in Spain. Araceli Rosario Hidalgo, born in 1924, received her dose on Sunday in a nursing home in Guadalajara, near Madrid.

The second person in the country to receive the vaccine was an employee from the same household, nursing assistant Mónica Tapias.

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The Czech Republic took a different approach – its first dose of the vaccine was administered to the country’s prime minister, Andrej Babiš, while the second dose was administered to war veteran Emilia Řepíková.

Babiš has been criticized in recent months, after coronavirus cases have increased in the country.
The PM initially was reluctant to impose stricter rules on the population, citing the need to protect the country’s economy, but the decision caused the virus to spread widely. Eventually, restrictions were applied and Babiš apologized.

Although the EU officially launched its vaccination program on Sunday, some countries started vaccinating people the day before – doses were administered on Saturday in Germany and Slovakia.

The vaccine is launched at a time when European governments are rushing to contain the spread of a new variant of Covid-19 that was first detected in the United Kingdom.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is continuing its review of other promising candidate vaccines, including those from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, and Johnson & Johnson.

CNN’s Barbie Nadeau, Nicola Ruotolo, Atika Shubert, Ya Chun Wang and Niamh Kennedy contributed to this report.

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