The first COVID-19 patient being taken to the new intensive care unit in Milan, Italy. File/AP

Gulf Today Report

Several EU nations were set to begin vaccinating their most vulnerable groups on Sunday as part of efforts to end a COVID-19 pandemic that has crippled economies and claimed more than 1.7 million lives around the world.

Europe has some of the best-resourced healthcare systems in the world as new coronavirus variant spread internationally and the WHO warned the current pandemic will not be the last.

The sheer scale of the effort means that some countries are calling on retired medics to help out while others have loosened rules for who is allowed to give the injections.

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The first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab arrived in hard-hit Italy, Spain and France on Saturday, ready for distribution to retirement homes and care staff.

The approval and roll-out of vaccines has boosted hopes that 2021 could bring a respite from the pandemic, which has killed more than 1.7 million people since emerging in China late last year.

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With surveys pointing to high levels of hesitancy towards the vaccine in countries from France to Poland, leaders of the 27-country European Union are promoting it as the best chance of getting back to something like normal life next year.

"We are starting to turn the page on a difficult year," Ursula von der Leyen, president of the Brussels-based European Commission coordinating the programme, said in a tweet.

"Vaccination is the lasting way out of the pandemic."

However, in a video message ahead of the first International Day of Epidemic Preparedness, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was time to learn the lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic.

"History tells us that this will not be the last pandemic, and epidemics are a fact of life," said Tedros.