450m People, 27 Nations: Europe's Vaccination Campaign In Full Swing

Vaccine Drive Comes As A Respite For A Region That Has Seen 350k+ Covid Deaths

EU’S V-DAY: In Italy, the first country in Europe to record significant numbers of infections, nurse Claudia Alivernini, 29, was on Sunday the first person to be inoculated with the shot developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. ‘Today Italy reawakens. It’s #VaccineDay,’ PM Giuseppe Conte tweeted

From nursing homes in France to hospitals in Po-land, older Europeans and the workers who care for them rolled up their sleeves on Sunday to receive coronavirus vaccine shots in a campaign to inoculate more than 450 million people across the European Union. The inoculations offered a rare respite as the continent struggles with one of its most precarious moments since the pandemic began.

Despite restrictions on movement, shuttering of restaurants and cancellations of Christmas gatherings, the virus has stalked Europe into the dark winter months. The spread of a more contagious variant of the virus in Britain has raised such alarm the much that continental Europe rushed to close its borders to travellers coming from the country. “We start turning the page on a difficult year,” Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president tweeted. “The #Covid19 vaccine has been delivered to all EU countries.” More than 3,50,000 people in the 27 nations that make up the EU have died from Covid-19 since the bloc’s first fatality was recorded in France on February 15.