Update on the status of COVID-19 vaccination in Italy-April 2023

We accessed the online, freely available database of the Italian Ministry of Health, retrieving the most import data on the status of COVID-19 vaccination in the country as for April 12, 2023. An analogous search was conducted in the website of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). vaccine coverage of the total Italian and European population aged 12 years or older (i.e., 54.0 million inhabitants), stratified according to the different number of administrations. The first and second doses of the primary vaccination cycle were received by 91.6% and 90.2% of the total Italian eligible population, whilst the penetration of the booster doses has then considerably declined over time. In particular, although the third booster was received by 75.0% of eligible Italian subjects, the percentage of those who received the fourth and fifth booster (administered only to older people) declined to 11.1% and 0.9%, respectively. Globally, vaccine coverage was always higher in Italy compared to the entire Europe for the first three vaccine doses, but become then lower for the second and third boosters. As concerns the type of vaccines administered in Italy, the largest part encompassed mRNA-based vaccines (Pfizer/Biontech: 73.2%; Moderna: 18.4%), with a marginal number of people who received the Oxford-AstraZeneca (7.7%), Janssen (0.7%) and Sanofi (0.1%) vaccines. Although estimating the residual number of both unvaccinated and uninfected people is virtually impossible, our analysis attests that over 90% of the Italian population aged ≥ 12 years has received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, whilst half of these may also have developed hybrid immunity due to former, concomitant or subsequent SARS-CoV-2 infections.