A 101-year-old woman in an elderly care home became the first person in Germany to receive a coronavirus vaccine shot, the NDTV reported.
According to the report, along with the centenarian woman, other residents of the care home and staff were administered the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine.
Edith Kwoizalla was one of around 40 residents and 10 staff in a care home in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt to receive a jab of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the home's manager Tobias Krueger told AFP.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine became the first to get the go-ahead for use in the West, when Britain gave its approval on December 2.
The European Union on Saturday announced that the first vaccine doses had been delivered to all member states. The vaccines developed by BioNTech and Pfizer arrived by truck in warehouses across the continent on Friday and early Saturday after being sent from a manufacturing center in Belgium before Christmas.
"It's here, the good news at Christmas," German Health Minister Jens Spahn said at a news conference Saturday. "At this moment, trucks are underway across Europe, across Germany and its regions, to deliver the first vaccine. More deliveries will follow the day after tomorrow. This vaccine is the decisive key to end this pandemic." "It is the key to getting our lives back," Spahn said.
Germany is set to launch a vaccination campaign on December 27. The first vaccine shipments will be equally distributed among all the 16 federal states. Those aged over 80, residents and staff of care homes, and frontline medical personnel are the first in line to receive COVID-19 shots.
Meanwhile, in yet another grim milestone, the overall number of global coronavirus cases has surpassed the 80 million mark, while the deaths have surged to more than 1.75 million, according to the Johns Hopkins University.
In its latest update on Sunday morning, the University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) revealed that the current global caseload and death toll stood at 80,282,523 and 1,756,584, respectively.
The US is the worst-hit country with the world's highest number of cases and deaths at 18,943,541 and 331,754, respectively, according to the CSSE.
(Inputs from ANI and IANS)
