Officials in Germany are defending AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine and pushing it back against people who avoid it, hoping to get another sting instead.
Regulators have approved both the survey developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, as well as the survey developed by Pfizer and the German company BioNTech, but it seems that different efficacy rates of clinical trials have threatened a Pfizer-BioNTech -jab to keep out.
This shot has yielded efficiencies in trials of as high as 95%, compared to 60% for the AstraZeneca jab in a review by European regulators.
Experts believe that the direct comparison of the figures is misleading and is not a good reason to refuse the AstraZeneca jab, but the message has managed not to reach a large part of Germany’s population.
Only 187,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been given so far in Germany, Reuters reported on Monday. The country expected to deliver 1.5 million doses of the vaccine by the end of last week.
On one vaccine in Berlin that only spread the AstraZeneca sting, there are less than 200 people a day for 3,800 appointments, The Times of London reported on Monday.
The head of one vaccination center told Business Insider Deutschland, Insider’s sister publication in Germany, that people are reluctant to take the vaccine because of skepticism about its effectiveness.
One German expert told the German publication Die Welt that ‘really disastrous communication’ is to blame for the widespread skepticism about the vaccine.
In January, for example, German officials denied a report by the newspaper Handelsblatt that officials feared the shot was only 8% effective in people over 65. The office of German health minister Jens Spahn said it it appears that the newspaper has the figure of 8% with the share of the trial participants who were 56 to 69 years old.
There was confusion from the beginning about the action of the vaccine. Back in November, AstraZeneca quoted an “average” efficiency of 70% in its announcement of the preliminary results in the late stages, after incorrectly giving some of the participants in the trial a dose that was not intended.
Analysis by the European Medicines Agency later concluded that the jab was approximately 60% effective when given two full doses, lower than the competitors of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which increased the effectiveness by more than 90% to their respective trials reported.
Experts said the data were not comparable, however, and that the actual data showed promising results at sites where the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine had been rolled out.
Anecdotal reports of flu-like side effects from the first vaccination of the vaccine came from France and Sweden, which in some cases temporarily took health workers out of service for a day.
The German government and local health experts are now trying to dispel confusion over the efficacy and safety of the vaccine.
Street art depicting the vaccines Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca-Oxford and Sputnik V, as if distributed by an old gum machine.
Gerald Matzka / photo alliance via Getty Images
“The AstraZeneca vaccine is safe and extremely effective,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief spokeswoman Steffen Seibert said in a tweet on Monday.
On Wednesday, the most senior official in the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen, also defended the AstraZeneca shot.
Von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission and a German belonging to Merkel’s CDU party, told the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper that she would “take the AstraZeneca vaccine without thinking, just like the products of Modern and BioNTech / Pfizer. “