The health authorities have announced that a record 157,000 people have been vaccinated against influenza this year.

No doubt, so much talk about the need to protect oneself against the influenza strain, at a time when we are experiencing a pandemic of another type of virus, has pushed many people to take the necessary precautions. Many have taken the flu vaccine for the first time in their life.

Not even the government, perhaps, thought that so many people would have taken up the influenza vaccine.

Its first batch of 100,000 inoculations finished within days, and it took several other weeks for the second batch to be imported.

The number of influenza vaccinations given during the first week of the campaign this year was similar to the number given in six months in previous vaccination programmes. The Covid-19 pandemic has clearly encouraged people to take the influenza vaccine as an added protection this winter.

The end of the year is bringing in more news about vaccines, this time the one against Covid19, with the European Union set to sanction the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on 21 December.

This vaccine is already available to thousands of people in Britain, Canada and the United States, galling some Europeans who note that BioNTech is a German company.

The European Medicines Agency said its human medicines committee “will conclude its assessment at the earliest possible time point and only once the data on the quality, safety and effectiveness of the vaccine are sufficiently robust and complete to determine whether the vaccine’s benefits outweigh its risks.”

Vaccinations cannot start to be given in Europe until the approval by the EMA, which evaluates drugs and vaccines for the EU’s 27 nations. The EU yesterday announced that vaccinations will start to be given across the EU on 27 December. Health Minister Chris Fearne said that Malta is ready to start vaccinating its citizens along with the rest of the EU.

The Maltese government had already said that the Covid-19 vaccination will be available in January; the campaign will now begin 10 days earlier, with Fearne saying that all logistics are in place for the campaign to be launched earlier than planned.

The vaccination programme will start with the front-liners and vulnerable people. Then, later, and also when other vaccines will hopefully be seeing the green light, the rest of the population will follow.

Doctors are saying that anywhere between 70 and 90 per cent of the population need to be vaccinated before we could let our guard down. The vaccination is not obligatory, but governments are urging all their citizens to be inoculated, and to make it easier it will be given for free.

It will take several weeks for the vaccination exercise to be completed. It is hoped that, by Easter, things will start returning to normal. We know that this will be a Christmas like no other; maybe this time next year we will be talking about going back to what it used to be.