- German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she will not take the coronavirus vaccine for AstraZeneca.
- The vaccine is only approved for children under 65 in Germany, and Merkel is 66.
- Recent trials suggest that the AstraZeneca vaccine has been linked to a dramatic decline in hospitalizations.
- But more than a million jabs have been left unused, and many Germans do not know if they are effective.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she will not take AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine because she is too old. It comes as millions of Germans refuse to take the vaccine because they do not trust it.
The rate of rollout of European vaccines has dropped dramatically for the UK, in part because millions of people have allegedly refused to take the AstraZeneca vaccine due to the great mistrust of the AstraZeneca vaccine after European leaders questioned its effectiveness.
Merkel, 66, was asked by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allegemeine whether she would receive a dose of AstraZeneca’s vaccine to counter a widespread perception in Europe that the vaccine was not effective.
But the chancellor said she would not do so because it was not approved for use at age 65 in Germany, though recent trials in Scotland have shown that the vaccination of AstraZeneca has been linked to a dramatic decline in the risk of hospitalization among older recipients.
“I am 66 years old and do not belong to the recommended group for AstraZeneca,” she told the newspaper.
More than 1.4 million doses of AstraZeneca’s bait are sitting unused in Germany because of the Germans’ unwillingness to take the vaccine, officials said in a health briefing this week, while only 240,000 were administered, the New Scientist reports.
“We are working quite hard on this point and trying to convince the people to accept the vaccine and to really gain the trust of the vaccine in the population,” Thomas Mertens, chairman of Germany’s permanent commission on vaccines, told the BBC Radio 4’s Today program said. .
“But as you may know, it is also a kind of psychological problem, and it will unfortunately take some time to achieve this goal,” he said.
This comes after Handelsblatt, a German newspaper, published a report citing anonymous German health officials, which says that AstraZeneca’s vaccine is only 8% effective. The fact-checking website FullFact said Handelsblatt’s report was “unreliable” and that the German government as well as AstraZeneca had denied the story.
Merkel acknowledged that there was an ‘acceptance problem’ with the vaccine, which she said was ‘effective and safe’, and warned that Germans could not choose which vaccine they would receive.
“Astra-Zeneca is a reliable, effective and safe vaccine approved by the European Agency for Medicine and recommended in Germany for up to 65 years,” she told Frankfurter Allegemeine. “All authorities tell us that this vaccine can be trusted. As long as the vaccines are as scarce as at present, you can not choose what you want to vaccinate with.”
France also has similar problems as Germany, after President Emmanuel Macron proposed without providing evidence that AstraZeneca’s vaccine was ‘quasi-ineffective’ among the 65-year-olds.
The French Ministry of Health said on Tuesday that only 107,000 AstraZeneca push-ups had been administered in the first two weeks of the vaccination, the French newspaper La Télégramme reported, despite the fact that the country had received more than 700,000 doses.
Officials in Austria, Belgium and Italy have also begun to report some resistance to the British vaccine, France24 reported.