BUDAPEST / PARIS / MADRID (Reuters) – Hungary and Slovakia invaded their EU countries by starting to vaccinate people against COVID-19 on Saturday, the day before launch in several other countries, including France and Spain, due to the increasing pandemic o continent.
In Germany, a small number of people in a retirement home were vaccinated on Saturday, the day before the country’s official vaccination campaign began.
Mass vaccination across the European Union, where almost 450 million people live, would be a crucial step in ending a pandemic that killed more than 1.7 million worldwide, affected economies and destroyed businesses and jobs.
Hungary administered the vaccine, jointly developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, to frontline staff in hospitals in Budapest, the capital, after receiving its first shipment of sufficient doses to inoculate 4,875 people. The first worker to receive the injection was Adrienne Kertesz, a doctor at Hospital Central Del-Pest.
Hungary reported 315,362 cases of COVID-19 with 8,951 deaths. More than 6,000 people are still hospitalized with COVID-19, straining the country’s central European care system.
“We are very happy with the arrival of the vaccine,” said Zsuzsa and Antal Takacs, a couple aged 68 and 75, while playing table tennis in a park in Budapest.
“We are going to be vaccinated because our daughter had a baby last month in France and we want to go and see them. We dare not travel before getting the vaccine, ”said Zsuzsa.
In Slovakia, Vladimir Krcmery, an infectious disease specialist and a member of the government’s Pandemic Commission, was the first person to receive the vaccine, followed by colleagues.
Countries like France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Portugal and Spain on Sunday are expected to start mass vaccinations, starting with healthcare professionals.
The distribution of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which was first launched in Britain earlier this month, presents difficult challenges. The vaccine uses new genetic mRNA technology, which means that it must be stored at ultra-low temperatures of around -80 degrees Celsius (-112 ° F).
NEW VARIANT IN FRANCE, SPAIN
France, which received its first shipment of the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Saturday, will begin administering it on Sunday in the Paris metropolitan area and in the Burgundy-Franche-Comte region.
“We have 19,500 doses in total, which is equivalent to 3,900 bottles. These doses will be stored in our freezer at minus 80 degrees (Celsius) and will then be distributed to different nursing homes and hospitals, ”said Franck Huet, head of pharmaceutical products for the Paris public hospital system.
The French government expects to vaccinate about 1 million people in nursing homes during January and February, and another 14 to 15 million in the general population between March and June.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved by the French medical regulator on Thursday.
France reported only 3,093 new coronavirus infections in the last 24 hours on Saturday, a sharp drop from more than 20,000 cases in each of the previous two days, numbers not seen since November 20. But the seven-day moving average of new daily cases, which balances the reporting of irregularities, is about a month.
France has a total of 2,550,864 confirmed COVID-19 cases, the fifth highest count in the world, while its number of COVID-19 deaths is 62,573, the seventh highest.
In a worrying development, the Ministry of Health said on Friday that a man recently arrived from London had tested positive for a new variant of the virus that has spread rapidly in southern England and is considered more infectious. Sweden also confirmed on Saturday that it had detected the first case of the new variant in a UK traveler.
In Spain, Madrid health officials said on Saturday they had confirmed four cases of the new variant of the virus, as the country received the first deliveries of the vaccine.
“Vaccination will begin tomorrow in Spain, in coordination with the rest of Europe,” wrote Health Minister Salvador Illa on Twitter. “This is the beginning of the end of the pandemic.”
The doses will be transported by air to the Spanish islands and the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, and by road to other regions of the country, where about 50 thousand people died of the disease.
‘WINDOW OF HOPE OPEN’
Germany, meanwhile, said trucks are on their way to deliver the vaccine to nursing homes, which are the first in line to receive the vaccine with the official start of the vaccination campaign on Sunday.
A small number of people in Germany, however, received the vaccine on Saturday, the first being a 101-year-old woman in a nursing home in Halberstadt, in the Harz mountains.
The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the country increased by 14,455 to 1,627,103, data from the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases showed on Saturday. More than 29,000 people died in total.
The federal government is planning to distribute more than 1.3 million doses of vaccine to local health officials by the end of this year and about 700,000 a week starting in January.
“There may be some hiccups at one point or another at the beginning, but this is normal when a logistically complex process begins,” said Health Minister Jensen Spahn.
In Portugal, a truck escorted by the police left the first batch of COVID-19 jabs in a warehouse in the central region of the country. From there, nearly 10,000 vaccines will be delivered to five major hospitals.
“It is a historic milestone for all of us, an important day after such a difficult year,” Health Minister Marta Temido told reporters outside the warehouse.
“A window of hope has opened, not forgetting that we have a very difficult fight ahead.”
Reporting by Anita Komuves in Budapest, Benoit Van Overstraeten in Paris and Isla Binnie in Madrid; Additional reporting by Yiming Woo and Sudip Kar-Gupta in Paris, Arno Schuetze in Frankfurt, Catarina Demony in Lisbon and Radovan Stoklasa in Nitra; Written by Pravin Char; Editing by Alexandra Hudson and Leslie Adler