EU starts vaccination drive against coronavirus

The European Union has begun rolling out vaccines against coronavirus infections on Sunday across its 27 member states in a drive to inoculate approximately 450 million people.

Vaccination drive is being carried out following approval of the BioNTech-Pfizer jab by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).   

"Today, we start turning the page on a difficult year. The COVID-19 vaccine has been delivered to all EU countries. Vaccination will begin tomorrow across the EU," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a video she tweeted Saturday.

"The #EUvaccinationdays are a touching moment of unity. Vaccination is the lasting way out of the pandemic," she added.

"The European Union has secured enough doses of vaccines for our whole population of 450 million people," she said. "We also secured vaccines for our EEA neighbours like Iceland or Norway," she mentioned.

Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine shipments have arrived to EU countries on Saturday and in the first phase, most countries received just under 10,000 doses. The vaccine has been made available to all the EU countries at the same time. 

While three members -- Germany, Hungary and Slovakia — started vaccinations a day early on Saturday, rest are supposed to take leads from them on rolling out the vaccines in the market.

Germany gave first vaccine shots to elderly people on Saturday. Hungary, on the other hand,  administered its first vaccine doses to frontline health workers in Budapest. Slovakia also vaccinated some of its health care workers in the first phase.

The vaccination process in EU countries started a week after the UK Prime Minister announced that a new covid strain has been found which is expected to be 70 per cent more aggressive.

As of now, 45 countries across the world have started vaccination drive against the virus which have killed hundreds of thousands of people.