Italy starts distributing big batch of Moderna jabs

A shipment of 500,000 doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine arrived in Italy late Wednesday at Rome's Leonardo Da Vinci airport and was immediately transferred to the national vaccine hub at a Pratica di Mare Air Force hangar where the distribution to the local regions began Thursday morning.

According to the Press Office of the Commission for the COVID-19 Emergency, this is the biggest single shipment of the Moderna vaccine Italy has received so far, bringing the total for the first trimester of 2021 to 830,000 doses, far below the Pfizer doses, with over 7 million and the AstraZeneca with over 2 million.

Italy has struggled with a slow vaccine rollout and only just recently passed 10 million inoculations nationwide for at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.