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  • 2021-11-04 (xsd:date)
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  • Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission since 2019, stated on the 15th September 2021 in her speech in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg that more than 70 percent of the European adult population were fully vaccinated against COVID-19. This claim turns out to be true. Every September the President of the European Commission gives a speech on the State of the Union. Von der Leyen talks about the achievements of the past year as well as the current priorities and challenges for the upcoming year. Besides climate change and migration, the way the EU handled the pandemic was one of the biggest topics. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen claims, that more than 70 percent of adults in the EU are fully vaccinated. As the press officer of the European Commission confirms, von der Leyen refers in her speech to numbers published on the COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker which gives an overview on the vaccine development in the European Union (EU) and the European Environment Agency (EEA). It is commissioned by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). The ECDC is an agency of the European Parliament that was founded in 2005. Apart from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) it is the second most important health institution in the EU. Every EU member state must report to the Vaccine Tracker The Vaccine Tracker’s data is curated through The European Surveillance System (TESSy). The ECDC refreshes their data on a regular basis from Monday to Friday at 11 AM. Every country of the EU or the EEA must report all accessible vaccination data at least twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to the ECDC. In the statistics, the number of doses administered to the total population are divided by the size of the corresponding population. In addition to the Vaccine Tracker, ECDC publishes a weekly report on the epidemiological situation in the EU/EEA to ensure transparency. Besides accumulated data and figures the report predicts the further course of the pandemic. The report that refers to the week before von der Leyen’s speech (12th September 2021) records 71.3 percent of fully vaccinated people aged 18 years and older. Thus, Ursula von der Leyen quotes the primary source correctly. Our World in Data confirms vaccination rate As already stated, the ECDC is an official agency that distributes their data to other health institutions, which is why it was difficult to find an independent secondary source that didn’t work with or was closely connected to it. Such a source is Our World in Data. The online publication informs about the development in the world and the problems that occur in it. The platform was founded in 2011 as a collaborated effort between the University of Oxford and the non-profit organization Global Change Data Lab. Edouard Mathieu, Head of Data at Our World in Data since 2020 and former data scientist at the University of Oxford, comments with own calculations on the number of fully vaccinated adults in the EU/EEA: According to our latest data (en)
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