BUDAPEST / PARIS / MADRID (Reuters) – Hungary and Slovakia stole a march from their fellow EU countries when they started vaccinating people against COVID-19 on Saturday, a day prior to the rollout in several other countries, including France and Spain, while the pandemic intensifies. the continent.
In Germany, a small number of people were vaccinated in a retirement home on Saturday, one day before the official start of the country’s vaccination campaign.
Mass vaccination in the European Union, home to nearly 450 million people, would be a critical step towards an end to a pandemic that killed more than 1.7 million people worldwide, paralyzed economies, and has left businesses and jobs destroyed.
Hungary has administered the vaccine, jointly developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, to front-line workers in hospitals in Budapest, the capital, after receiving the first shipment of doses sufficient to inoculate 4,875 people. The first employee to get the shot was Adrienne Kertesz, a doctor at Del-Pest Central Hospital.
Hungary has reported 315,362 COVID-19 cases with 8,951 deaths. More than 6,000 people are still in hospital with COVID-19, which puts a strain on the Central European country’s healthcare system.
“We are very happy that the vaccine is out,” said Zsuzsa and Antal Takacs, a 68- and 75-year-old couple, while playing table tennis in a park in Budapest.
“We will get the vaccination because our daughter gave birth to a baby in France last month and we want to see them. We don’t dare to travel until we get the vaccine, ”said Zsuzsa.
In Slovakia, Vladimir Krcmery, an infectious disease specialist and member of the government’s Pandemic Commission, was the first to receive the vaccine, followed by colleagues.
Countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Portugal and Spain will start mass vaccinations on Sunday, starting with health workers.
Distribution of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, which was first rolled out in the UK earlier this month, poses major challenges. The vaccine uses new genetic mRNA technology, which means it must be stored at ultra-low temperatures of about -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 its administration on Sunday in the Paris region and Burgundy-Franche-Comte region.
“We have a total of 19,500 doses, which equates to 3,900 bottles. These doses will be stored in our freezer at minus 80 degrees (Celsius) and then distributed to various nursing homes and hospitals, ”said Franck Huet, chief of pharmaceuticals for the public hospital system in Paris.
The French government hopes to vaccinate about 1 million people in nursing homes in January and February, and then another 14 million 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 past 24 hours on Saturday, a sharp drop from the more than 20,000 cases on each of the previous two days, figures not seen since November 20. But the seven-day moving average of daily new cases, which compensates for irregularities reporting, is about a month high.
France has a total of 2,550,864 confirmed COVID-19 cases, the fifth highest in the world, while the COVID-19 death toll stands at 62,573, the seventh highest.
In a worrying development, the Health Department said Friday that a man who had recently arrived from London had tested positive for a new variant of the virus that is spreading rapidly in southern England and is believed to be more contagious. Sweden also confirmed on Saturday that it has discovered the first case of the new variant in a traveler from the United Kingdom.
In Spain, Madrid health authorities said they had confirmed four cases of the new variant of the virus as the country received the first deliveries of the vaccine.
“The vaccination will start tomorrow in Spain, in coordination with the rest of Europe,” Health Minister Salvador Illa wrote on Twitter. “This is the beginning of the end of the pandemic.”
The doses will be delivered 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 a total of about 50,000 people have died from the disease.
‘WINDOW OF HOPE IS OPEN’
Germany, meanwhile, said trucks were on the way to deliver the vaccine to care homes for the elderly, who will be first in line to receive the vaccine with the official start of the vaccination campaign on Sunday.
However, a small number of people in Germany received the vaccine Saturday, with the first being a 101-year-old woman in a nursing home in Halberstadt in the Harz.
The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country rose by 14,455 to 1,627,103, data from the Robert Koch Institute of Infectious Diseases showed. In total, more than 29,000 people died.
The federal government plans to provide more than 1.3 million vaccine doses to local health authorities by the end of this year and about 700,000 per week as of January.
“There may be a few hiccups at some point in the beginning, but that’s quite normal when such a logistically complex process begins,” said Health Minister Jensen Spahn.
In Portugal, a truck accompanied by the police dropped the first batch of COVID-19 jabs at a warehouse in the central region of the country. From there, the nearly 10,000 admissions are delivered to five large 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 now opened, without forgetting that a very difficult fight is 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; Adaptation by Alexandra Hudson and Leslie Adler