COVID vaccine: Who in Europe is leading the race to herd immunity?

In terms of the absolute number of vaccinations, Germany and the United Kingdom -- which approved its first COVID-19 vaccine on December 2, nearly three weeks before the EU -- are racing ahead with immunising their people.

This means they might initially be low down in this ranking, which does not necessarily mean they are struggling to get jabs in arms.

The UK and Germany have administered the most vaccines overall, but they trail Malta and Iceland in terms of vaccinations per capita of population.

To see what was happening in Europe, we compared a country's GDP per capita against the number of vaccines administered per 100,000 people.

A handful of relatively poorer countries - by European Union standards - began vaccinating later and have covered fewer people. The list includes nations such as Ukraine, Moldova, Albania, Montenegro and Belarus.

There is also a handful of countries, like Turkey, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria that chose to give it to politicians first. In some instances, this could be a way of trying to allay the fears of a vaccine-sceptic population.

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