Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip received coronavirus vaccination shots at Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace said on Saturday. The palace said in a statement, "The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have today received Covid-19 vaccinations.”
Queen Elizabeth, 94, and Prince Philip, 99, come under the high priority risk group of people aged over 80 who are supposed to receive the vaccination first. Thus, this makes them part of nearly 1.5 million people in the UK to have received their first doses of the vaccine.
With the spread of a highly contagious new variant of covid-19 across Britain, PM Boris Johnson has imposed a stricter lockdown and rushing with the inoculation process to curb the spread of the disease.
The Britain government plans to vaccinate the elderly, the vulnerable, and frontline workers - around 15 million people - by mid-February, to ease a new strict lockdown imposed after a spike in cases to daily records.
Meanwhile, according to government data published on Saturday, the UK became the first country in Western Europe to record over 3 million Coronavirus cases, and 59,937 coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours, taking the infection overall tally since the start of the pandemic to 3,017,409 and with 1,035 fresh cases of fatality the total number of deaths due to the disease stands at 80,868.