LONDON – The suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine by most European governments has further threatened an already-laden vaccination campaign on the continent and threatens to rattle the vaccination effort in dozens of other countries around the world.
No country in the European Union is achieving its goal of vaccinating 70 percent of its population by September. Hundreds of millions of people across Europe are still hampered by some of the most severe coronavirus infections in the world, and millions of others envisage further tightening of rules to tackle a third wave of coronavirus.
The head of the European Medicines Agency said on Tuesday that regulators are still studying concerns about the possibility of rare side effects with the AstraZeneca vaccine, including blood clots and abnormal bleeding. But there was “no indication that vaccination caused these conditions,” the agency’s executive director Emer Cooke told a news conference.
“While the investigation is ongoing, we are still firmly convinced that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine to prevent Covid-19, with the associated risk of hospitalization, outweigh the risk of side effects,” she added.
The assurance, a day after several key European countries suspended AstraZeneca vaccinations, added to the confusion and mixed messages surrounding the vaccine’s deployment. The stakes can hardly be higher. It could delay tens of millions of people amid a third outbreak of the virus and potentially undermine public confidence in the vaccine, which could have implications far beyond Europe.
The European Union’s vaccination efforts are marked by political infighting, a shortage of supplies and a lack of solidarity. And because the strategies of many countries are heavily dependent on the AstraZeneca vaccine, the decision to suspend its use while the bloc’s regulatory body investigates its safety concerns will be further delayed.
“AstraZeneca is a very important part of European investment,” said Don Goldmann, a professor of epidemiology at the TH Chan School of Public Health in Harvard. “It’s going to be delayed and much harder to have enough of the alternative vaccines to have a coordinated rapid response.”
Spain, France, Italy, Germany and others have stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine. All the governments in Europe that have suspended it have said they are acting out of an abundance of caution while the bloc’s regulatory body reviews the data.
The World Health Organization has reacted quickly to movements of European governments hoping to prevent a broader panic. It was said Monday that there is no evidence to suggest the AstraZeneca vaccine is unsafe.
Millions of people in dozens of countries have received the AstraZeneca vaccine with few adverse effects reports, and it has previously been tested in tens of thousands of people for safety.
The AstraZeneca vaccine, developed in partnership with the University of Oxford, is designed to be the workhorse of the global vaccination effort – with approximately two billion doses to be ordered in more than 70 countries this year.
It is sold with a non-profit model and is much cheaper than other vaccines. It can be stored more easily and has already been shipped to low- and middle-income countries that have signed up for the global Covax vaccine program.
But after a new suspension on Monday, the only major country in the European Union to have fired the shots was Poland, which is already firmly in the grip of a third wave of the pandemic that is rapidly moving across the continent.
The Czech Republic, which has had the highest infection and death rates in the world in recent weeks, is also still using the vaccine. Several smaller countries in the bloc also did not suspend it, creating a confused landscape for an exhausted public.
The EU has ordered 300 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccines, accounting for about 17 percent of its total orders, which are distributed among six vaccine manufacturers. This makes it one of the most important components in national vaccination campaigns, according to data compiled by the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.
Andrea D. Taylor, the assistant director of programs at Duke University’s Global Health Innovation Center, said the suspensions came at a critical time. Even before the break, the bloc was well behind its goal of vaccinating 70 percent of the population by 22 September.
“If you look at the numbers, you can clearly see that it is not on the right track to reach the goal,” she said. “Even without the break, I do not see a scenario in which they would meet a vaccination rate of 70 percent in September.”
She warned that all projections are based on a series of very moving targets, including production schedules.
Without widespread distribution of the vaccine, governments are turning to the tool they have been using for the past year: locks. The rules in Europe were much more restrictive and were imposed much longer than almost anywhere else in the world.
The pain – financial, physical and psychological – is difficult to measure, but no one doubts whether it is real and getting worse.
When Italian officials announced a new national exclusion on Monday, the reaction was a mixture of anger, resignation, sadness and concern.
Mauro Bolognesi, 65, smoked a cigarette in front of his vintage shop while looking at the closed shutters around him in the popular Navigli area of Milan.
“I’m not going to make it if it lasts another year,” he said.
“It’s awful,” Franca Gonella, 65, said as she walked her dog in front of the prime minister’s palace in Rome on Monday – one of the few activities Italians can do outside the home. ‘If you’re going to lock everyone up, they’ll have to cover us with vaccines. The problem is that there are no vaccines. ”
What you need to know about rolling out vaccines
The decision to suspend the AstraZeneca vaccine will only make matters worse.
According to the European Center, the European Union has had nearly eight million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine unused since Sunday, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. The 27 countries in the bloc, and three close neighbors, have vaccinated about 42 million people among them.
In contrast, the United States now vaccinates more than 2.4 million people every day, with more than 100 million doses.
While the AstraZeneca vaccine has already been approved in dozens of countries, it has not yet been approved by US regulators. The results of its clinical trial in the United States have not yet been reported, and the company has not requested permission for emergency use from the Food and Drug Administration.
Many public health officials fear that the United States may still have to endure its own new wave of infections caused by more contagious variants – especially as states open up completely and even eliminate simple measures such as masking requirements. But vaccines are being rolled out with an urgency that is simply not seen in Europe.
And the AstraZeneca suspensions have thrown the already slow and confusing European deployments into deeper disorder.
Rossella Crea, 46, a high school teacher in Verona, northern Italy, received her AstraZeneca shot on March 1. in May.
“I feel disoriented,” she said, “I think we should be vaccinated in general, but this AstraZeneca one worries me.”
In Spain, the nationwide suspension came just as some local politicians put pressure on the central government to extend the use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine to people over 55 years of age. Several other European countries have recently raised similar age thresholds before stopping use.
And some public health experts in Spain are questioning the suspension. In a column published by the newspaper El Mundo on Tuesday, Juan Martínez Hernández, an epidemiologist, described the suspension as a “mistake”. If such a vaccination program comes to a halt, even if there is no causal link yet, he asks, “are we ready to accept the expansion and stabilization of Covid-19 in Europe and the world?”
Although there is great concern that the decision to discontinue the use of the vaccine could harden skeptics and promote the anti-vaxxers, there are still many who do not want to.
Jean Imbert, a 70-year-old retiree who administered his first dose of AstraZeneca vaccine on March 7, said he had “no worries” about his shot after Monday’s announcements.
Mr. Imbert said there had been an overreaction in many European countries, adding that “if the ban on the vaccine lasts too long, we will have more deaths due to delayed vaccination” than due to vaccinations.
Reporting was contributed by Monika Pronczuk of Brussels, Emma Bubola of Rome, Melissa Eddy from Berlin and Constant Méheut from Paris.