Europe launches a cross-border vaccination program of unprecedented scale on Sunday as part of efforts to end a COVID-19 pandemic that has crippled economies and claimed more than 1.7 million lives around the world, Reuters reported.

Axar.az reports that the region of 450 million people has secured contracts with a range of suppliers for over two billion vaccine doses and has set a goal for all adults to be inoculated during 2021.

While Europe has some of the best-resourced healthcare systems in the world, the sheer scale of the effort means that some countries are calling on retired medics to help out while others have loosened rules for who is allowed to give the injections.

With surveys pointing to high levels of hesitancy towards the vaccine in countries from France to Poland, leaders of the 27-country European Union are promoting it as the best chance of getting back to something like normal life next year.

“We are starting to turn the page on a difficult year,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the Brussels-based European Commission coordinating the program, said in a tweet.

“Vaccination is the lasting way out of the pandemic.”