Eastern European lags in vaccination rate, while Western Europe is a leader

BRUSSELS — More than 70 percent of the European Union’s adult population has been fully vaccinated, making it one of the world’s vaccination leaders. But some Eastern European countries are lagging far behind, exposing the bloc to new waves of infections and creating a divide that E.U. officials and experts say could hamper recovery efforts.

While 80 percent of the adult populations in countries like Belgium, Denmark and Portugal have been fully vaccinated, in Bulgaria that figure plunges to only about 20 percent, while in Romania it lags at around 32 percent, according to the European authorities.

The high numbers in Western European countries are an achievement that few would have believed possible earlier this year, when E.U. member countries, embroiled in sluggish rollouts, quarreled with bloc officials and vaccine makers over delivery issues.

But vaccination rates in Eastern and Central Europe are all below the bloc’s average, with Bulgaria and Romania among the starkest examples. Those countries, along with the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, also have some of the highest excess mortality rates across the European Union during the pandemic — one measure of how many deaths the coronavirus has caused. ...