LONDON:  Queen Elizabeth II has urged people to get COVID-19 vaccinations while adding that her own jab “didn’t hurt at all.”

“Once you have had the vaccine, you have the feeling you are protected, which I think is very important. As far as I can make out, it (getting the dose) was very harmless. It was very quick, and I’ve had lots of letters from people who have been very surprised by how easy it was to get the vaccine. And the jab — it didn’t hurt at all,” the Queen said in a video call with health officials leading the Covid-19 vaccine rollout in the United Kingdom.

The constitutional monarch said people must get vaccinated thinking about other people rather than about themselves adding that the COVID-19 pandemic is a strange battle that everyone is fighting.

“I think it is obviously difficult for people if they’ve never had a vaccine; they ought to think about other people rather than themselves… It’s not here we have got the virus, we have got it everywhere — it’s a strange battle that everybody is fighting,” the Queen added.

According to CNN, Britain’s monarch and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip received their vaccinations at Windsor Castle on January 9.

The Queen was meeting with the four senior officers overseeing the vaccine rollout in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Nearly 19 million people in the UK have received at least one dose of the vaccine, in one of the world’s fastest rollouts. Prince Charles, tested positive for COVID-19 and went into isolation in March last year.

The 72-year-old later said he was lucky to only experience mild symptoms, adding he had “got away with it quite lightly”.

The UK has recorded more than 4 million cases of Covid-19 and 122,303 deaths, the highest in Europe, according to Johns Hopkins University. (ANI)