At 8.30 a.m., Araceli Hidalgo, a 96-year-old nursing home resident in Guadalajara, Spain, became the first person in the country to be vaccinated. In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis received a dose live on television. In Italy, which became a global hot spot in the spring, doctors and nurses at the Spallanzani hospital in Rome were the first to receive the vaccine. ...
The hopeful scenes across Europe on Sunday followed mounting frustration as Europeans watched the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, developed in Germany with German federal government funding, roll out first in a string of countries outside the E.U., including the United States, Britain, Israel and the United Arab Emirates. While the bloc has ordered more than 2 billion vaccine doses as it aims to protect all its citizens against the coronavirus, most are of candidates that have not yet been approved for use.
“There is simply too little vaccine,” Markus Söder, premier of the German state of Bavaria, told the Bild newspaper on Sunday. His state of 13 million people received 9,750 doses on Saturday, enough to protect 4,875 people.
The 200 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine ordered by the E.U. are to be divided equally among the member states according to population. Germany, with 18 percent of the bloc’s population, will receive around 36 million doses — enough to vaccinate 18 million people, just over 20 percent of its population. The country has created mass vaccination centers in sports arenas and exhibition centers.
The companies say delivery dates depend on when orders were placed. The United States and Britain submitted their orders for the vaccine during the summer. The E.U. finalized its order in November after months of negotiations. ...
ALSO SEE: Pfizer reschedules EU vaccine deliveries following "logistical issue"
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And: France takes careful vaccine approach to counter skepticism
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