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First doses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine arrive in Denmark

The first delivery of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine arrived at Denmark's state infectious diseases agency early on Saturday morning, before being split and sent out to Denmark's five regions.

Published: 26 December 2020 11:26 CET

First doses of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine arrive in Denmark

Vans arrive at SSI's Amager HQ carrying the vaccine. Photo: Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix

“We have long been looking forward to receiving this first batch of vaccines and therefore to be able to send them out to the Danes,” the agency's director Henrik Ullum told the country's Ritzau news agency.

“It is absolutely great that we now can soon aim a direct blow at the coronavirus by treating it actively and immunising people so that they do not get sick.”

The delivery of 9,750 doses arrived in a truck from Pfizer's distribution centre in Belgium, and was split into smaller deliveries before being sent out to the regions.

The first Danish citizens to receive a dose, all residents at five different elderly care homes, will receive their first injections at 9am on Sunday morning.

Selected staff members at elderly care homes are next in line to be vaccinated.

The first delivery will be sufficient only to vaccinate about 5,000 Danish citizens, with each recipient receiving two doses with an interval of three weeks between them.

In the coming week, Denmark is set to receive a further 38,025 doses, after which about 48,000 doses a week will be delivered.

The country has requested sufficient doses to vaccinate 1.5m Danish citizens with the Pfizer vaccine.

On December 21st, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine became the first vaccine to be approved by the European Medicines Agency.

Every Danish citizen over the age of 18 is expected to eventually be offered the vaccine, but it is up to each individual whether they decide to receive it.

Member comments

Anonymous - 27 December 2020 at 02:53 CET

Is the vaccine only for Danish citizens? What about immigrants, will they receive the vaccine as well?
Anonymous - 27 December 2020 at 02:57 CET

Is the vaccine only for Danish citizens? What about immigrants, are we eligible as well?

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Vaccine scramble: How Spaniards want Covid jabs more than other Europeans

People queue to get the vaccine in Barcelona. Photo: Lluis Gené/AFP

In Spain, where the Covid-19 rollout has gone from one of the slowest in the EU to currently one of the fastest, pretty much everyone wants to get vaccinated.

With priority groups almost fully immunised, Spain is still beating daily records with 600,000 to 700,000 doses administered every day.

The spike in cases among the country’s young population has led several regions to bring forward jabs for teens and twenty-somethings ahead of people in their thirties.

Despite the apparent lack of concern for the pandemic witnessed in packed squares and streets over the past weeks, young people who have been able to take advantage of the vaccine offer have headed en masse to the vaccination centres.

When an Asturian youth called Ana Santos told a local newspaper that “after the elderly, it should be our turn to get vaccinated as it’s not as if people in their forties go out, is it?”, her comments went down like a tonne of bricks among this age group, who demanded it was their turn to reach full immunisation first.

Vaccine scepticism hasn’t been a problem for Spain as it has been for other countries, with President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen launching a warning recently that vaccine supplies are piling up, even though Brussels has reached its target of providing enough doses to fully vaccinate 70 percent of EU adults.

“If we look at the statistics, more and more doses remain unused,” von der Leyen told journalists in Strasbourg.

“This is linked to the fact that there is a greater distribution of vaccines, but in part also due to doubts about vaccination,” adding that it was crucial to reach the most sceptical parts of the population” in the face of the “worrying” presence of the Delta variant.

“Traditionally in Spain, we have had much less resistance or rejection towards vaccines, that’s always been the case,” vaccine expert at the Spanish Association of Pediatrics (AEP) Ángel Hernández-Merino told 20minutos.

“In any vaccination programme, it’s vital to count on the population being willing to accept the vaccination”.

A June 2021 Eurobarometer study found that 49 percent of people in Spain want to get vaccinated “as soon as possible”, the highest rate in the entire EU (32 percent EU average).

Whereas an average of 9 percent of EU citizens don’t ever want to get vaccinated, the rate in Spain is 4 percent. Around 63 percent of Spaniards told Eurobarometer that they couldn’t understand why people are hesitant to get vaccinated and 71 percent said Covid vaccines are the only way for the pandemic to end.

In Belgium, around a third of the population doesn’t want to get vaccinated.

In other countries where in the earlier stages of the Covid vaccination campaign it seemed that available doses were easily used up it’s now becoming evident that sprinting through the age groups doesn’t guarantee that everyone is being vaccinated.

Germany, the UK and the US, all seen as examples to Spain of how to quickly immunise a population, have all seen their campaigns slow down due to hesitancy and the summer holidays.

Spain’s Health Ministry doesn’t give data on how many people have rejected the vaccine and why, but stats do show that already more than half of the population (57.5 percent) have at least one dose and 43.3 percent are fully vaccinated.

The Spanish government has stuck to its objective of vaccinating 70 percent of the country’s 47 million people before the end of August, even though it did fall short of its June target by more than half a million doses.

Rather than vaccine scepticism, what’s been holding up Spain’s inoculation campaign have been doubts over the administration of second AstraZeneca vaccines and the decision to keep a reserve in case the country experienced delivery setbacks as it has in the past, with 2.9 million doses in storage reported in late June.

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