EU launches coordinated vaccination campaign

Germany, Slovakia, and Hungary began administering the first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine a day early on Saturday, prioritizing health workers and the elderly. In Rome, 29-year-old nurse Claudia Alivernini received the country’s first shot on Sunday at the Spallanzani infectious disease hospital. France began its campaign at a nursing home in a poor region outside of Paris on Sunday. The first shipments of the vaccine arrived in hospitals across the continent on Friday after the bloc approved the shots last week.

How is the continent handling the pandemic? The European Union has confirmed more than 16 million infections and more than 336,000 deaths since the pandemic began. Officials have detected a new strain of the virus first reported in the United Kingdom in France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Canada.

Dig deeper: Read Emily Belz’s report on the technology behind two leading U.S. vaccines.