The European Commission has revealed that 70% of its adult population across the 27-member bloc has been fully vaccinated against Covid, reaching a target set earlier this year.
On Tuesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen took to Twitter to praise the achievement of the milestone, stating that 70% of the EU’s adult population is fully immunized against Covid, representing more than 250 million people.
She implored Europeans to still “remain vigilant” despite the high inoculation rate as the pandemic is not yet over, and also called on citizens to get vaccinated quickly to avoid another wave of infections and new, emerging variants.
Von der Leyen also added that the EU must stretch its inoculation campaign beyond its borders “to help the rest of the world vaccinate,” proclaiming that the pandemic will only end “if we defeat it in every corner of the globe.”
The high immunization rate is not, however, equally distributed among its 27 member states. While Denmark has fully vaccinated over 70% of its population and is poised to lift all Covid curbs in September as the virus is no longer deemed to be a critical “threat,” around a fifth of Bulgarians are double jabbed.
Brussels announced at the end of July that it was on track to reach its target of fully vaccinating 70% of the EU population by the end of summer, after inoculating 57% of adults across the bloc.
The EU’s vaccination campaign was slammed as being “unacceptably slow” by the World Health Organization’s European director at the end of March. The bloc’s sluggish rollout was due to a combination of slow negotiations with manufacturer AstraZeneca, as well as distribution and production issues with companies Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
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