An 84-year old woman, Theresia Hofer, became the first person in Austria to receive the coronavirus vaccine on Sunday. [ Ссылка ]

An 84-year old woman, Theresia Hofer, became the first person in Austria to receive the coronavirus vaccine on Sunday.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, said Hofer had told him how happy she was to have had the shot, as it meant she would be able to see her family again.

Kurz said the start of Austria's vaccination programme was "the beginning of victory against the pandemic."
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Austria is part of the EU's coordinated launch of the programme, which is aimed at stopping an outbreak that has killed a third of a million people across the bloc's member states.

The first COVID-19 vaccinations in Austria were administered in the special outpatient department for Vaccinations, Travel and Tropical Medicine of the Medical University of Vienna on Sunday. The inoculations were performed by Prof. Dr Ursula Wiedermann-Schmid, head of the National Vaccination Committee, and Prof.

Dr Thomas Szekeres, president of the Austrian Medical Association. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Health Minister Rudolf Anschober were also present at the venue to witness the start of the national vaccination campaign. Under Austria's three-phase COVID-19 vaccination strategy, residents and staff in nursing homes are first in line to receive the jab. The second group will include medical workers and people in other vulnerable categories. Phase three of the program, which is set to begin in April, will see the vaccine available to the general public.

Until 8 November, terminal C of Tegel airport used to be where Berliners took off for weekend breaks across the Schengen area. From Sunday, the disused runway hopes to see the start of a journey towards a more permanent destination: herd immunity to Covid-19 by mass vaccination. Departure: delayed. Arrival time: unclear.

From 8.30am, Tegel will serve as a control centre for 60 minivans filled with four-person mobile “vaccination teams” who will pick up Berlin’s first 18,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine from a secret location, then administer them to vulnerable people in care homes across the city, initially prioritising dementia sufferers who struggle to adhere to social distancing.

The starting gun will be fired in several European countries at the same time: the 12.5 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine that will arrive in EU countries before the end of this year are part of a 300-million dose bulk order signed by the European Commission.

As a result, vaccination will start on 27 and 28 December not just in the economic powerhouses of Germany or France, who could theoretically have outbid smaller competitors, but also in Luxembourg, Belgium, Spain, Austria and Bulgaria. The Republic of Ireland will begin its process on Wednesday.

In Italy, the first European country to be hit by the pandemic and the one with the highest Covid-19 death toll (more than 70,000), a nurse in Rome will be the first person to receive Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccination on Sunday.

The nurse works at the Spallanzani infectious diseases hospital, where a couple from Wuhan were the country’s first two confirmed coronavirus cases to be treated in late January.

As he warned citizens to maintain their guard as much as possible over Christmas, Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, said the development of vaccines was “a sign of hope for us all”.

After the spring saw northern EU member states squabble with those in the south over a united fiscal response to the pandemic, Christmas is promising to bring some longed-for unity.

A perfectly synchronised take-off across the continent has been hard to achieve, however. Vaccines in the Netherlands won’t be administered until 8 January, as the IT system required for planning and registering the vaccinations won’t be ready in time for the new year. In non-EU Switzerland, a broader immunisation campaign won’t start until 4 January.

Some states jumped the gun: Hungary started vaccinating yesterday, after enough doses to vaccinate 4,875 people arrived in Budapest on Saturday morning. In the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, a 101-year-old woman in a care home become the country’s first to receive the jab on Saturday afternoon.
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