The vaccinee toll keeps on increasing in the European Union. As of Tuesday August 31, the goal set by the European Commission at the beginning of the vaccination campaign is met: 70% of the adults are now fully vaccinated in the EU. The Union is now one of the world's regions vaccinating the most, according to EU organization spokeswoman Dana Spinant.
Although the EU Commission President is happy to have achieved this goal, she does not intend to stop in such a good way. "We must go further! We need more Europeans to vaccinate", Ursula von der Leyen insists on in a video shared on social networks. The leader also plans to "continue supporting our partners".
70% of adults in EU are fully vaccinated.
— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) August 31, 2021
I want to thank the many people making this great achievement possible.
But we must go further!
We need more Europeans to vaccinate. And we need to help the rest of the world vaccinate, too.
We'll continue supporting our partners. pic.twitter.com/VxdvZlrwYv
"We cannot stop here. New variants make it necessary for us to go beyond 70% to be safe. We need to go one step further. We need to urgently address the worrying vaccination gap between our member states and be ready to deploy booster vaccines if the scientific evidence shows that this is the way forward", Stella Kyriakides, Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, said.
"It is important that this progress is distributed in a more balanced way so that there are no pockets where the virus can spread and mutate", Dana Spinant said earlier in August, warning against variant risks in the event of uneven vaccination.
Therefore, in Europe, somes countries are more ahead of their vaccination campaigns than others. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control condemns gaps between EU countries: in Bulgaria, the percentage of adults fully vaccinated only reaches 20%. It goes up to 32.8% in Romania, 49% in Slovakia, and 58.1% in Poland. On the contrary, 72.5% of adults are fully vaccinated in France, 70.6% in Germany, 76.7% in Spain, 82.4% in Portugal and 85.5% in Ireland.
