Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip received COVID-19 vaccinations, Buckingham Palace said on Saturday.
"The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have today received Covid-19 vaccinations," the palace said in a statement.. The UK monarchs received the shots in the Windsor castle where they are spending the national lockdown.
Queen Elizabeth, 94, and Prince Philip, 99, are part of the high-priority risk group of people aged over 80 that are in line to receive shots.
This makes the queen and the regent part of the nearly 1.5 million people in the United Kingdom to have received their first doses of the vaccine.
With a highly transmissible new variant of the virus surging across Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has shuttered the economy and is rushing out vaccines in a bid to stem the spread of the pandemic.
The government plans to vaccinate the elderly, the vulnerable, and frontline workers - around 15 million people - by mid-February, to ease a new strict lockdown imposed after a spike in cases to daily records.
Meanwhile, The United Kingdom on Saturday became the first country in Western Europe to register over 3 million Covid-19 cases, according to government data published on Saturday.
The UK recorded 59,937 coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of infections since the start of the pandemic to 3,017,409, reported CNN.
The country also crossed 80,000 coronavirus-related deaths, with 1,035 new deaths added to the total in the past 24 hours. The total number of deaths stands at 80,868.
Deaths are up 51.3 percent from the week before, the seven-day average published on Saturday shows, while the number of people testing positive is up 22.1 percent, reported CNN.
(Inputs from ANI and PTI)
