A 78-year-old former French cleaner, a 96-year-old Spanish woman in a nursing home and a 29-year-old Italian nurse became some of the first people in the EU to receive the BioNTech / Pfizer vaccine against coronavirus, as a new and the most infectious strain of the virus spreads across the block.
In coordinated actions on Sunday, countries like France, Germany, Italy and Spain started vaccinating older people, at risk, and first-line medical and care teams, while warning that in the immediate future restrictions would likely be stricter than relaxed .
France launched its vaccination program on Sunday morning with elderly patients and medical staff in Sevran, near Paris – the first to receive the injection was Mauricette, a 78-year-old retired cleaning lady – to be followed by a geriatric ward in Dijon, in Burgundy, in the afternoon.
Others vaccinated on Sunday include Araceli Rosario Hidalgo, 96, admitted to a nursing home in Guadalajara, who became the first to receive the injection in Spain, and Claudia Alivernini, a nurse based in Rome, the first person in Italy to receive the jab.
Araceli Rosario Hidalgo, 96 years old in an asylum in Guadalajara, was the first person to receive the injection in Spain © Pepe Zamora / POOL / AFP / Getty Images
In Germany, Edith Kwoizalla, a 101-year-old woman, had already been vaccinated on Saturday in the state of Saxony-Anhalt – leading the national health ministry to complain that the decision by regional authorities to start jabs the day before was hampering – coordinated implementation the EU.
The vaccination campaign began after the EU drug regulator approved the BioNTech / Pfizer vaccine, the first Covid-19 vaccine to get the green light on Monday. UK and US regulators have also authorized the vaccine and started its launch this month.
The EU has ordered 300 million doses of the BioNTech / Pfizer vaccine – enough for 150 million people, as two doses are needed for each person, as well as hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines yet to be approved, including those made by AstraZeneca, Sanofi- GSK, Johnson & Johnson, CureVac and Moderna.
“If you had told me six months ago that it would happen so fast, I would not have believed it,” Olivier Véran, France’s health minister, told Le Journal du Dimanche. But he also warned that the French government cannot rule out a third national blockade to reduce infections and urged people not to celebrate New Year’s Eve. German authorities issued similar warnings, urging citizens to avoid the tradition of firing fireworks to avoid large crowds in the streets and congestion in hospitals with wounded people.
France, like Germany and Italy, has already detected a case of the new highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus that has spread to parts of southern England and has prompted several countries to restrict or ban travel with the United Kingdom. Spain said on Saturday it had identified four cases, all coming from Britain.
The new variant has also been detected in other countries, including Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided on a third national blockade starting on Sunday night. Israeli residents will be restricted to less than a kilometer from their homes, but schools until the fourth grade and after the tenth grade will remain open.
There is still no definitive evidence that the new vaccines offer protection against the new variant. But experts say it is highly likely that this will happen, since the part of the virus that the jabs target, called the protein spike, has probably not changed.
However, the scientists also warned that vaccination campaigns and blockages are likely to inflict “evolutionary pressure” on the virus in the long term, meaning that adjustments to highly effective vaccines are still needed. Health officials have already calculated that vaccination campaigns are likely to be needed annually to provide lasting protection against future outbreaks.
Questions also remain about how many citizens will accept vaccination. France is among the most skeptical countries in the world about vaccines. In a 2018 study, one in three disagreed that vaccines were safe, the highest proportion of any country. In Germany, according to a YouGov survey, about two-thirds of people are willing to get the vaccine, while about 19% are against vaccination and another 16% are undecided. Of those who said they would like to be vaccinated, 33 percent said they would get the vaccine after waiting to see the impact on the first vaccinees.
But Jens Spahn, health minister, touted the vaccine as a national achievement. “The vaccine was developed by BioNTech, a German company,” he said. “This vaccine, made in Germany, is a hope for us and the world.”
Additional reporting by Donato Paolo Mancini, Davide Ghiglione in Rome and Mehul Srivastava in Tel Aviv
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