Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

In Korea, few hobbies are as common as hiking up the country's modest mountains, but the way of getting to the top isn't universally shared.

Our correspondent compares the Sprint and Selfie approach with a more sedate summiting.

And it's been a tough year even for Britain's royal family.

One branch broke off to live in America,

a popular Netflix series took a scathing view of its family values and plenty more.

But make no mistake, through it all, it remains a beloved institution. First up, though.

This weekend in nursing homes in Germany and hospitals in Italy, the European Union began to inoculate its citizens against the coronavirus with the Pfizer-Biontac vaccine.

Although Europe took weeks longer than America or Britain to approve the vaccine,

that hasn't stopped the bloc from calling its development a uniquely European story,

created by a German company manufactured in Belgium.

The vaccine is made available at the same time to all EU countries,

and people will start taking the vaccine in essence, in Rome, in Helsinki, in Sofia, you just name it.

Despite the attempts to line up vaccine distribution across the continent,

as with so many other European matters,

the message of unity has stumbled upon meeting the reality of coordination.

Well, this is really quite a remarkable project.

Christopher Lockwood is the economist's Europe editor.

The EU is rolling out across its entire territory of 27 countries, 450 million people,

a vaccination program which has relied on it buying centrally up to 2 billion doses of various vaccines.

And that is going to be distributed to every country in the EU, and then the

countries themselves will do the actual vaccinations. And this central European approval for that

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