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VACCINE

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

Sweden's first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine arrived early on Saturday, with the doses set to be driven during the day to each of the country's 21 regions ahead of the first vaccinations on Sunday.

Published: 26 December 2020 09:58 CET
First doses of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine arrive in Sweden
Police escort a truck carrying the Pfizer vaccine in Norway. Photo: Terje Pedersen/NTB
According to a press release from the Public Health Agency of Sweden, the first delivery had gone “according to plan”, with the vaccine parcel repacked for the regions. 
 
“It feels good that we have now reached this step and that we in Sweden can within a few hours begin offering protection against Covid-19,” Anders Tegnell, Sweden's state epidemiologist, said in the statement. 
 
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This weekend, Sweden will only receive 9,750 doses, enough to vaccinate 4,900 people, with regions likely to receive a second delivery over the New Year. eventually, Sweden expects to receive 80,000 doses a week.
 
 
According to the agency, it is working “intensively” with the 21 regions which run Sweden's health system day-to-day and with the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR). 
 
According to the agency, the first doses would be offered to those “who have the greatest need of protection”, for example, those who live in elderly care homes. 
 
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved Pfizers/Biontech's vaccine on Monday, opening the way for doses to be sent out to member states. 
 
Och redan i dag får Sverige 9 750 doser av vaccinet i en första leverans och i vissa regioner inleds vaccineringen redan under söndagen. Då vaccinet ges i två doser per person kommer denna inledande levervens att räcka till strax under 5 000 personer.
 
 

Member comments

  2. I’m curious as to how the authorities are doing their calculations.

    Sweden’s population is 10 million.

    From wikipedia, there’s approx 7 million adults who would need vaccinations. Approx 2 million are above the age of 65.

    Vaccinating 2 million people at a rate of 80,000 a week would take 25 weeks. Which means that process would be completed in roughly 6 months (this doesn’t take into consideration the second dose needed).

    This still leaves approx 5 million adults to be vaccinated.

    How do the authorities reach the conclusion that all adults in Sweden will be vaccinated by the first half of 2021?

  3. I’m curious as to how the authorities are doing their calculations.

    Sweden’s population is 10 million.

    From wikipedia, there’s approx 7 million adults who would need vaccinations. Approx 2 million are above the age of 65.

    Vaccinating 2 million people at a rate of 80,000 a week would take 25 weeks. Which means that process would be completed in roughly 6 months (this doesn’t take into consideration the second dose needed).

    This still leaves approx 5 million adults to be vaccinated.

    How do the authorities reach the conclusion that all adults in Sweden will be vaccinated by the first half of 2021?

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VACCINE

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

Whilst the EU warns that unused doses due to vaccine scepticism are piling up, Spaniards of all ages want to achieve immunity against Covid-19 as soon as possible, the data shows. 

Published: 12 July 2021 10:38 CEST
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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