Hungary and Slovakia stole a march on their fellow EU nations as they began vaccinating people against COVID-19 on Saturday, a day ahead of rollouts in several other countries, including France and Spain as the pandemic surges across the continent.
In Germany, a small number of people at a care home for the elderly were inoculated on Saturday, a day before the country's official start of its vaccination campaign.
Mass vaccination across the European Union, home to almost 450 million people, would be a crucial step toward ending a pandemic that has killed more than 1.7 million around the world, crippled economies and destroyed businesses and jobs.