Hungary, Germany and Slovakia started mass COVID-19 vaccine before EU's plan

Hungary, Germany and Slovakia began their COVID-19 vaccination campaign on Saturday, a day before the European Commission's planned coordinated roll-out over all member states.

EU member states got the first shipment of just under 10,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine on Saturday but vaccination was not expected to start across the bloc's 27 nations until Sunday. But Hungary's Minister for Human Resources, Miklos Kasler, said in a statement the vaccines had been delivered to the South-Pest Hospital Centre in Budapest and that healthcare workers had started getting the jab.

"Today, we have taken a significant step in curbing the epidemic," he added.

Slovakia's Health Ministry said in a Facebook post on Saturday evening that "vaccination will begin in the university hospital in Nitra today".

Immunisation also began in a German nursing home.

"Every day that we wait is one day too many," said Tobias Krueger, operator of a nursing home in Halberstadt, in the northeastern region of Saxony-Anhalt.

It is unclear why both eastern nations started their vaccination campaign a day earlier than the European Commission's coordinated roll-out planned for.

In a video published on Twitter, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that Europe "is starting to turn the page on a difficult year.

"Today is delivery day and day vaccination against COVID-19 is beginning across the European Union."

"Our European Immunization Days are a touching moment of unity," she added.

The Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine, which needs two shots, was approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) on December 21. The EU has secured up to 300 million doses through an Advance Purchase Agreement and expects the first 200 million doses to be produced by September 2021.

But it has also struck similar deals with other pharmaceutical companies including Sanofi-GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, CureVac, and Moderna. These deals mean the bloc "has secured enough doses of vaccines for our whole group of 450 million people," von der Leyen said in her video.

The EMA is expected to decide whether to allow the Moderna vaccine on January 6.