A 101-year-old woman in a nursing home in eastern Germany became the first to receive the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine on Saturday, the day before the European Union’s planned immunization campaign, an ambitious effort to eventually inoculate more than 450 million of people in the 27 nations of the European Union against coronavirus.
Vaccination also started in Hungary, where photos showed health workers being shot at the Central Southern Pest Hospital in Budapest. Slovakian authorities also started administering their first doses on Saturday, Reuters reported.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the executive branch of the European Union, released a video before the official launch on Sunday, calling the campaign “an exciting time for unity”.
Approximately two-thirds of all Germans are willing to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to a survey by YouGov for the German news agency DPA, but more than half of respondents said they were concerned about possible side effects.
Doses for Europe are being produced at BioNTech’s manufacturing facilities in Germany and at Pfizer’s facility in Puurs, Belgium, according to the two companies, and countries across the block have begun to receive their first deliveries.
In Germany, all 16 states received 9,750 doses of the vaccine on Saturday. Each state must send them to regional immunization centers and then teams of drivers must distribute them to nursing homes and care centers for the elderly across the country.
Karsten Fischer, responsible for managing the pandemic response in the Harz district of Saxony-Anhalt, said the logistics in his region made it possible to start vaccination within hours of receiving the doses, and he saw no reason to wait.
“We didn’t want to miss a day, as the vaccine’s stability decreases over time,” Fischer told public broadcaster MDR “We wanted to start administering immediately.”
The first inoculation was administered in the city of Halberstadt, to Edith Kwoizalla, 101; 40 other residents and 11 members of the nursing home staff also received doses, reported the MDR.
“Every day we wait for is another day,” Tobias Krüger, the director of the house, told reporters.
East German states were hardest hit by the second wave of the virus. More than 1.6 million people have been infected in the country and more than 29,400 have died, many of them older citizens, especially those living in nursing homes.
Residents of nursing homes and their caregivers, as well as emergency medical staff and individuals aged 80 and over, are among the first to be vaccinated in Germany, based on a plan that was developed by leaders, medical consultants and board members. of Ethics. Government officials do not plan to receive vaccines before their peers, Jens Spahn, the country’s health minister, said on Saturday.
“We have deliberately said that we will start offering the vaccine to the most fragile,” said Spahn. “If a time comes when it makes sense, say, to increase confidence, each of us is ready to be vaccinated.”