Africa aims to have 60% of its 1.2 billion-strong population vaccinated against COVID-19 within the next two to three years, according to the head of the continent's public health agency.

"We hope that for that for this to be meaningful, our 60% must be reached in the next two to three years," John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a press briefing Thursday. "We should be deliberate in this."

More than 2.2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, including over 52,000 deaths, have been reported across the vast continent so far, representing a fraction of the world's cumulative count.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin announced Friday the official start of a mass COVID-19 vaccination program in the Russian capital.

Residents are now able to sign up online to be vaccinated, and Sobyanin said some 5,000 people had registered in the first five hours since the launch.

"Teachers, doctors, social workers, those who today most of all risk their health and lives," the mayor wrote in a brief post on his blog Friday.

The announcement comes two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin unexpectedly ordered large-scale vaccination to start next week, despite earlier statements from the government saying the country has yet to produce enough vaccine doses to do so.

The mass inoculation campaigns will use Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine, called Sputnik V, which the health ministry controversially registered in August before starting crucial late-stage clinical trials. Vaccinations will be voluntary, with the drives first focusing on teachers and doctors.

Russia was still vaccinating volunteers as part of its phase 3 trial, which has so far only managed to inoculate 20,000 of a planned 40,000 people.

Putin has said that Russia will soon produce 2 million doses of Sputnik V, but it's unclear how many doses have been been produced so far and how many people will be able to be vaccinated from next week. The country has run into serious manufacturing hurdles and had to significantly cut its planned production from 30 million to 2 million by the end of the year.

ABC News' Patrick Reevell contributed to this report.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex said COVID-19 vaccinations will not be made compulsory but "will be free for all" in the country's social security system.

"Getting a vaccine is also about protecting others. It is a choice of trust, we must be as numerous as possible to get a vaccine," Castex said at a press conference Thursday evening, while unveiling the country's vaccination strategy.

France will launch a COVID-19 vaccination campaign within weeks, pending regulatory approval by the European Medicines Agency. The program will run throughout 2021, staggered over three categories of people.

The first phase is slated to begin in January, with vaccines administered to nursing home residents and staff, representing 1 million people. A second phase starting in February will see 14 million people inoculated, based on age and medical criteria. The third and final phase, beginning in March, will target the remainder of the population who wish to be vaccinated.

Through deals clinched by the European Union, France has secured some 200 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from several pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology firms that developed them and have applied for temporary authorization. Castex said that's enough doses to inoculate 100 million people -- more than France's entire population.

As of Friday afternoon, France's health ministry had confirmed a total of 2,257,331 cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, including 54,140 deaths.

ABC News' Ibtissem Guenfoud contributed to this report.

An additional 993 deaths from COVID-19 were registered in Italy on Thursday, marking a new all-time high, according to data from the country's civil protection agency.

Italy's previous single-day record of 969 new fatalities from the disease was set in late March, when the country was the epicenter of the pandemic in Europe.

The Italian civil protection agency also reported 23,225 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 31,772 patients currently hospitalized with the disease, including 3,597 in intensive care.

Since the start of the pandemic, Italy has confirmed more than 1,664,829 million cases, including at least 58,038 deaths, according to the civil protection agency.

The country has the eighth highest case load in the world, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

ABC News' Phoebe Natanson contributed to this report.