Germany and Hungary began administering their first coronavirus vaccine shots on Saturday only hours after receiving their first shipments, upsetting the European Union’s plans for a coordinated rollout on Sunday across the bloc’s 27 nations.
“Every day that we wait is one day too many,” said Tobias Krueger, the operator of a German nursing home where immunisations began. The first person at the home to be immunised with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 101-year-old Edith Kwoizalla, dpa news agency reported.
In Hungary, health workers were vaccinated at the Southern Pest Central Hospital in Budapest. Authorities in Slovakia also planned to begin administering their first doses on Saturday. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen celebrated the vaccine rollout, calling it “a touching moment of unity”. The rollout marks a moment of hope for a region that includes some of the world’s earliest and worst-hit virus hotspots — Italy and Spain — and others like the Czech Republic, which were spared early on only to see their health systems near their breaking point in the fall.
France, which got its first shipment of the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Saturday, will start administering it on Sunday. The French government is hoping to get around one million people vaccinated in nursing homes during January and February, and then a further 14-15 million in the wider population between March and June. France reported over 20,000 new infections on Friday for the second day running, something not seen since November 20. In a concerning development, the health ministry said on Friday that a man who recently arrived from London had tested positive for a new variant of the virus that has been spreading rapidly in southern England.
Japan, Spain, Switzerland and Sweden also found small numbers of infections involving the potentially more transmissible variant, most linked to travel from the UK. Denmark, Lebanon, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands are other countries that have so far reported cases of the new UK strain.
In the UK, harsher Covid curbs now apply to millions more people. On Saturday, around six million people in east and south-east England have gone into tier four, highest Covid level. Lockdowns have also started in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
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