Coronavirus live news: inoculation in EU begins as UK set to approve second Covid vaccine

A 96-year-old living in a care home in central Spain has become the first Spaniard to be vaccinated against Covid-19, in an event broadcast by national television, AFP reports.

She felt “nothing” from the shot, Araceli Rosario Hidalgo Sanchez said with a smile after being injected.

With her short white hair, the pensioner living in the Los Olmos retirement home in Guadalajara got up slowly after pulling on her black jacket and walked off using a frame for support.

Carer Monica Tapias followed as the second Spaniard to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

The Los Olmos home was picked to kick off the country’s inoculation campaign because it sits near a Pfizer storage depot, where vaccines were delivered from Belgium Saturday ahead of nationwide distribution.

No cases of Covid-19 have so far been detected among the staff or residents.

“It’s a great source of pride and a great satisfaction for us, we’re representing all the retirement homes in Spain,” director Marina Vadillo said Thursday.

After the European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine last Monday, the way is open for injections across the 27-member bloc.

The Sunday Times says the jab developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca is expected to be approved for use in the UK by Thursday. In an interview AstraZeneca as chief executive Pascal Soriot says: “We think we’ve figured out the winning formula to maximise the protection offered”. He believes the vaccine will work against mutations of the virus, but admits further tests will be required to prove this.

The Sun on Sunday says the Oxford jab will be approved on Monday and the first injections are expected to be rolled out a week later.

Cases of the new variant strain first detected in the UK have been confirmed across Europe including in France, Spain, Denmark, Italy, Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden and the Netherlands, as well as around the globe in Australia, Japan and Lebanon.

And Dr Barbara Yaffe, the associate chief medical officer of Canada’s Ontario province, said the first two confirmed cases were a couple from the country’s Durham region with no known travel history, exposure or high-risk contacts.

People living in Ontario, like those in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and much of England, are now living under lockdown measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.

The Czech Republic started administering vaccinations against the new coronavirus on Sunday, part of a push against the pandemic across the European Union.

Prime Minister Andrej Babis was the first to get the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at the Central Military Hospital in Prague, just before other hospitals in the capital and second-largest city Brno started to distribute the 9,750 doses the country has received so far.

“The vaccine which arrived from the European Union yesterday, that is a hope, a hope that we will return to a normal life,” Babis said before taking the jab.

Emilie Repikova, 95, a World War Two veteran, was also one of the first to be inoculated, shortly after Babis.

The country closed non-essential shops, services and ski lifts and enforced a stricter curfew from Sunday as it seeks to curb another rise in COVID-19 infections and hospitalisations.

Welcome to a Sunday edition of our Coronavirus live blog covering both the UK and global developments on the virus.

The official vaccination programme against coronavirus gets underway in several EU countries today. In some places inoculations began last night when health workers in Hungary, Slovakia and Germany got their first injections of the Pfizer/BioNtech jab. The Czech prime minister, Andrej Babis, was vaccinated this morning at a military hospital in Prague.

In the UK there is speculation in the Sunday papers that the Oxford/AstraZeneca will get approval for use this week and perhaps as early as tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the largest hospital in Wales has used social media to appeal for help from medical students to treat intensive care patients.