The administration of COVID-19 booster jabs has now exceeded 100,000, Health Minister Chris Fearne announced on twitter on Wednesday.

The announcement came as the latest data from the EU’s health agency suggests that the higher the country’s vaccination rate, the lower its death rate.

Fearne himself got his third jab on Tuesday along with shadow health minister Stephen Spiteri. 

The European Commission published a chart on Tuesday which showed Malta continues to have one of the highest uptakes of vaccines in the bloc and has the lowest death rate. 

According to the European Centre for Disease Control, 92 per cent of the adult population is now fully vaccinated while the country is the only one to have a zero death rate per million population over the last 14 days.

It is beaten only by Ireland, which has a vaccination rate of 93 per cent, the chart shows.

At the lower end of the ECDC scale, Bulgaria has only vaccinated 29 per cent of its population and has the highest number of deaths compared to its population at 325 people per million.  

The European Medicines Agency has previously warned its members to “close the gap” on vaccinations to stop the surge in COVID cases, with the unjabbed driving a rise in hospitalisations. 

The EMA is due to discuss an application by Pfizer-BioNTech to extend its COVID vaccine to children aged five to 11 years tomorrow.

Vaccines are 'a powerful tool'

Commenting on the vaccination rate data, Malta’s public health chief said vaccines “have consistently shown that they are a powerful tool”.

Charmaine Gauci said the country had followed an evidence-based approach in its actions during the pandemic.

“Booster doses have been rolled out through a strategy to protect those who would benefit most,” she said.

“The data shows persistently that vaccines are highly protective against COVID-19-related severe disease, hospitalisation and death.”

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.