The European Union, which has just passed the 100 million dose mark, has one of the most advanced COVID vaccination campaigns in the world, but remains in the shadow of countries like Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States.
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The 27 administered at least 101.28 million doses to more than 73 million people, or 16.4% of their population, according to data collected by AFP from official sources on Wednesday at 12 p.m. GMT. Of these, more than 28 million people, or 6.3% of the population, completed the vaccination process with a second dose.
More than 12% of the 820 million doses injected worldwide were injected into the EU, which concentrates less than 6% of the world’s population.
Malta and Hungary in the lead
In the EU, two countries stand out: Malta and Hungary, which respectively gave doses to 40.4% and 31.4% of their populations. Very critical of the European management of vaccination, Hungary quickly made the choice, to accelerate its campaign, to import Russian vaccines Sputnik V and Chinese Sinopharm, not validated by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to date. , in addition to the Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccines used in the EU.
At the other end of the scale, the two most lagging countries are Bulgaria (6.8%) and Latvia (8.3%). Their vaccination campaigns, which are mainly based on AstraZeneca / Oxford, whose vaccine is less expensive than its competitors, suffered from the repeated setbacks of the Swedish-British alliance (delivery delays, side effects).
The four most populous countries of the Union – Germany (16.8%), France (16.8%), Italy (15.8%) and Spain (17%) – meanwhile gravitate around the European average. .
In comparison, six in ten Israelis (61.6%) have already received at least one dose, almost one in two Britons (47.5%) and more than one in three Americans (37%).
In the shadow of the world champions
With 22.6 injected doses (first and second) per 100 inhabitants, the European Union greatly exceeds the world average (10.6). It also does better than many big countries like Brazil (14.5), China (12.2), Mexico (9.5), India (8.1), Indonesia (5.9 ), Bangladesh (3.9), Japan (1.4) or the Philippines (1).
But the Union remains a good distance from the champions of the sector, such as Israel (119 doses per 100 inhabitants), the United Arab Emirates (93), Chile (64), the United Kingdom (59) or the United States ( 58).
- Listen to the correspondent for the Arte channel in Israel, Stéphane Amar with Benoit Dutrizac on QUB Radio:
Malta (58 doses per 100 inhabitants) is the only country in the Union to appear in the World Top 10.
This indicator, not to be confused with the percentage of people who have received at least one dose, makes it possible to compare the progress of vaccination campaigns taking into account the first and second doses.
Vaccination speeds up
Each day of the past week, 2.4 million doses have been injected into the European Union. This means that 0.54% of the EU population received a dose every day. This pace, accelerating thanks to increased deliveries, is 2.5 times faster than the world average (0.22%), but half that of the United States (1.02%).
Hungary (1.16%) is currently the fastest country in the EU, and even the fastest country in the world, excluding micro-states. Only two countries with less than 100,000 inhabitants do slightly better: San Marino (1.52%) and Seychelles (1.39%). In the EU, Malta (1.03%) and Germany (0.65%) complete the podium.
France, meanwhile, ranks 12th out of 27, administering doses to 0.54% of its population each day (364,000 daily injections), which is exactly the European average.