BERLIN — From nursing homes in France to hospitals in Poland, older Europeans and the workers who care for them rolled up their sleeves on Sunday to receive coronavirus vaccine shots in a campaign to protect 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 coronavirus pandemic began.
Despite national lockdowns, 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 that much of continental Europe rushed to close its borders to travelers coming from the country, effectively plunging the nation as a whole into quarantine.
In Germany, a nursing home in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt chose not to wait for Sunday’s planned rollout of the vaccination campaign across the European Union, inoculating a 101-year-old woman and dozens of other residents and staff members on Saturday, hours after the doses arrived. People were also vaccinated on Saturday in Hungary and Slovakia.
Early Sunday, dozens of minivans carrying coolers filled with dry ice to keep the doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine from rising above minus 70 degrees Celsius fanned out to nursing homes across the German capital as part of the wave of immunizations. The rollout comes as Europe’s largest nation is confronting its deadliest period since the start of the pandemic.
With nearly 1,000 deaths recorded in Germany every day in the week before Christmas, a crematory in the eastern state of Saxony operated around the clock, straight through the holiday, to keep up.
“I’ve never had to see it this bad before,” said Eveline Müller, the director of the facility, in the town of Görlitz.
More than 350,000 people in the 27 nations that make up the European Union have died from Covid-19 since the first fatality was recorded in France on Feb. 15. And for many countries, the worst days have come in recent weeks. In Poland, November was the deadliest month since the end of World War II.
While doctors have learned how to better care for Covid-19 patients, an effective medical treatment remains elusive. So the rapid development of vaccines is being hailed not only as a remarkable scientific achievement, but also as hope for a world knocked off its axis.
Yet the joy that greeted the news of successful vaccine candidates in November has been tempered as the rollouts in Britain and the United States have underscored the challenges ahead.
Vaccination campaigns in Russia and China, meanwhile, are using products that have not cleared the same regulatory hurdles as those created by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, the vaccines currently being rolled out in the West.
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