The beginning of the end: Europe rolls out vaccines to see off pandemic
MADRID/ROME - Europe launched a massive vaccination drive on Sunday with pensioners and medics lining up to take the first shots to see off the COVID19 pandemic that has crippled economies and claimed more than 1.7 million lives worldwide. “Thank God,” 96-year-old Araceli Hidalgo said as she became the first person in Spain to get a vaccine. She told staff at her care home in Guadalajara near Madrid she hadn’t felt a thing. “Let’s see if we can make this virus go away.” In Italy, the first country in Europe to record significant numbers of infections, 29-year-old nurse Claudia Alivernini was one of three medical staff to receive the first shots of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.
“It is the beginning of the end ... it was an exciting, historical moment,” she said at Rome’s Spallanzani hospital. The region of 450 million people has secured contracts with a range of suppliers for more than two billion vaccine doses and has set a goal for all adults to be inoculated during 2021. While Europe has some of the best-resourced healthcare systems in the world, the sheer scale of the effort means some countries are calling on retired medics to help while others have loosened rules for who is allowed to give the injections. With surveys pointing to high levels of hesitancy towards the vaccine in countries from
France to Poland, leaders of the 27-country European Union are promoting it as the best chance of getting back to something like normal life next year. “We are starting to turn the page on a difficult year,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission which is coordinating the programme, said in a tweet. “Vaccination is the lasting way out of the pandemic.”
(Reuters)