Switzerland has started vaccinating civilians against Covid-19. The vaccination campaign began on Wednesday in several places in the country.

 

A 90-year-old woman living in a nursing home near the city of Lucerne was the first person to be vaccinated, according to regional authorities.

Switzerland gave the green light last Saturday to use the vaccine from the companies BioNTech and Pfizer. The first 110,000 doses of that drug would have arrived on Tuesday in the Alpine country, which counts more than 8.5 million people. The army is called in to help distribute the resource.

The elderly and people who are extra vulnerable due to health problems are first eligible for a vaccination. This is followed by care providers and people who form a household with vulnerable people.

More and more European countries are starting to vaccinate people with Pfizer’s corona vaccine. The UK began doing that earlier this month and then had a world first. Serbia, which, like Switzerland, is not a member of the EU, wants to start vaccinating on Thursday.

EU citizens still have to be patient. The European regulator EMA and the European Commission approved the vaccine on Monday. Several EU member states want to vaccinate on December 27. The Netherlands starts on January 8.