Poland wants to vaccinate all of its adult population of 30mn people against coronavirus (COVID-19) in a giant operation slated to kick off by February, the government said on December 8.

Poland has bought 62mn doses of the coronavirus vaccine, 16mn from AstraZeneca, 16.98mn from Janssen Pharmaceutica/Johnson&Johnson, 16.74mn from Pfizer/BioNTec, 5.72mn from CureVac and 6.69mn from Moderna, the government said in the outline of the vaccination programme.

The government plans to roll out the programme in stages, beginning with groups important for fighting the pandemic – generally the medical services – and the most vulnerable, such as patients of care homes and people over 60.

“Right now we have the capacity to vaccinate 180,000 people a week,” head of the prime minster’s office Michal Dworczyk told a news conference.

There are over 1mn people working in medical services in Poland and 9.8mn people aged over 60, according to data from the statistical office GUS. From the latter group, people still active professionally will be vaccinated ahead of the retired.

The goal is for the entire population of the 38mn country to acquire immunity against the coronavirus during 2021, Dworczyk said.

“We are going to see the first effects of the vaccinations in the spring at the earliest,” Jakub Zielinski from the Warsaw University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling – who is on the government’s coronavirus task force – told news website gazeta.pl.

To date, Poland has officially recorded 1,076,180 coronavirus cases, including 20,592 deaths. Doubts exist as to the reliability of the data, however, mainly because of the limited number of tests being carried out.