The member countries of the European Union officially launched a coordinated campaign on Sunday to administer the COVID-19 vaccine to adults among its 450 million citizens, representing a ray of hope on the continent.
On Sunday morning, doses of the vaccine began to be administered to the people most vulnerable to the disease and to health workers.
The vaccine, developed by Germany’s BioNTech and US pharmaceutical company Pfizer, began arriving in the bloc nations on Friday. The EU has had some of the earliest and strongest virus epicenters in the world, including Italy and Spain.
Other EU nations, such as the Czech Republic, were spared the worst at the start of the pandemic, but later their health systems were close to breaking point.
In total, the EU has registered at least 16 million cases of coronavirus and more than 336,000 deaths from the disease.
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