Vaccination in Europe: a race at several speeds - France 24

Paris (AFP)

Globally criticized for its sluggish start, vaccination against Covid-19 in Europe is in fact very heterogeneous, with some countries being more advanced than others.

At present, two vaccines are authorized within the European Union, those of Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna.

Enough to vaccinate 380 million Europeans, or 80% of the population, according to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

And AstraZeneca / Oxford's vaccine could soon enter the European market.

Currently, at least 3.06 million inhabitants of the European Union have received a first dose of the anti-Covid-19 vaccine, or 0.68% of the total population, according to an AFP count .

While vaccination strategies are not really different, with the elderly and health workers often being the priority, some countries are moving faster than others.

However, all of them are very far from Israel, which claims to be able to vaccinate 20% of its population by the end of January.

Here is an overview of the good and bad European students in this field.

UK and Denmark at the forefront

Few of the European countries have vaccinated more than 1% of their population.

While the UK recently left the EU, it is the country in the Old Continent that has vaccinated the most, with more than two million people immunized, or 3.37% of the population.

Mass vaccination centers opened Monday and the government plans to immunize 15 million people by mid-February.

Within the EU, Denmark tops the rankings, with 2% of Danes having received the injection.

On Friday, the authorities even announced that they had vaccinated all residents of the nursing homes, prompting Health Minister Magnus Heunicke to claim that his country was "at the forefront of all EU countries for this. which is the deployment of vaccines delivered ".

On the other side of Europe, Italy, one of the countries most affected by the pandemic, is also among the good students (1.19%).

Three groups have priority: healthcare workers, more than half a million of whom have been vaccinated, residents of retirement homes and the elderly.

Spain is accelerating

With 0.87% of its population having already received a dose, Spain is one of the countries rather ahead.

The country also accelerated the pace of vaccination last week, since more than half of the doses received were administered, against only 11% the previous week.

Many European countries are also in this range of 0.5% to 1% of the vaccinated population, such as Poland (0.68%), Portugal (0.69%) or Sweden (0.78 %).

Despite rather positive results (0.82% of the population vaccinated), the German government has been criticized for its slowness and for relying too much on the EU's supply of vaccines.

The controversy subsided with the announcement of the imminent arrival of the Moderna vaccine, which should make it possible to speed up vaccination.

Netherlands and France lagging behind

Critics are numerous in the Netherlands, the last European country to launch its vaccination campaign, on January 6, almost two weeks after the first.

Only 0.21% of the population is vaccinated there so far.

If Prime Minister Mark Rutte said he was "disappointed" with this delay, his Minister of Health Hugo de Jonge recognized a lack of "agility" and poor logistics to justify this delay.

Caregivers will have priority for the first injections.

In France, the vaccination campaign, favoring people in retirement homes started well on December 27, as in many EU countries.

But the launch was sluggish with only a few hundred vaccinations, when some neighbors already exceeded the hundred thousand.

As of Monday evening, more than 138,000 people had been vaccinated in the country, or 0.2% of the population, placing France at the bottom of the ranking.

Other countries also show fairly low scores, such as Belgium (0.22%) where there too retirement homes are targeted, Finland (0.32%) which claimed to have received fewer vaccines than expected, and Greece (0.48%).

In the Czech Republic (0.37%) the Minister of the Interior Jan Hamacek announced that schools, closed in the country, could be used to massively vaccinate the population.

Outside the EU, variable results

Russia, which has developed its own vaccine, Sputnik V, claimed to have injected it into "more than a million people", or less than 1% of its population.

Experts take these statistics with a grain of salt, however, as the official death toll from the pandemic in the country has been underestimated by authorities.

Among European countries that are not part of the EU, Norway (0.39%) and Serbia (0.13%) show mixed results.

In the case of the first, the authorities have chosen a cautious line by administering only half of the vaccines they receive while in the case of the second, citizens volunteers can choose which vaccine they want via a form on the internet. .

Finally, in Ukraine as in North Macedonia and Kosovo, the vaccination campaign has not yet started.

Kiev, which hopes to receive its first doses of the Chinese vaccine only at the end of March or early April, has no date to start.

© 2021 AFP