Vaccine distribution is now underway in most of Europe, nearly three weeks after the United Kingdom started vaccinating its citizens. ABC News writes:
Germany, Hungary and Slovakia began giving out their first coronavirus vaccine shots on Saturday only hours after receiving their first shipments, upsetting the European Union’s plans for a coordinated rollout Sunday across the bloc’s 27 nations.
Inoculations in hard-hit Italy began yesterday. Doctors and nurses received the first vaccinations in the Lombardy region. Due to the aging population there and an early lack of PPE, half of the COVID deaths in all of Italy occured in Lombardy. The New York Times writes, “In all, nearly 10,000 doses were given on Sunday, and the Italian news media was filled with videos of people being given jabs in the nation’s hospitals, where frontline workers were given priority.”
The Associated Press says “France started its first coronavirus vaccinations Sunday at a nursing home northeast of Paris, in one of the country’s poorest regions, as part of a Europe-wide vaccination rollout.” French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted, “First stage of the vaccination campaign: the elderly living in communities as well as vulnerable health professionals. Let’s pass the message on to our ancestors, let’s protect them first.”
The European Union has secured contracts with a range of drugmakers including Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca, for a total of more than two billion doses and has set a goal for all adults to be inoculated next year.
But surveys have pointed to high levels of hesitancy towards inoculation in countries from France to Poland, with many used to vaccines taking decades to develop, not just months.
Watch more above from Sky News.
