At a time when there is such an urgent demand for vaccines, Germany is putting more than 1 million unused doses in storage – partly because people are reluctant to take them.
Once Germany was praised for its coronavirus response, it administered just 15 percent of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine it received, the country’s health ministry said in a briefing on Wednesday.
Some officials blame the shaken confidence among members of the public, following statements by political leaders and false press reports questioning the vaccine’s effectiveness. Others point to a dysfunctional deployment plan that did not invite enough people to make vaccinations.
“We are working quite hard on this and trying to convince people to accept the vaccine and to rebuild trust in the vaccine in the population,” Thomas Mertens, a professor chairing the German Permanent Commission on Vaccination, told the BBC said. “But it’s a psychological problem, and it will take time to achieve its goal.”
Vaccination of vaccines in the European Union is much slower than in the United States or Britain. EU leaders with 27 countries met virtually on Thursday to find ways to speed things up amid fears that new variants could bring new waves of infection to the continent. The EU gave just 7 shots per 100 people, compared to 20 per 100 in the US and almost 28 per 100 in the UK
The UK, with one of the highest mortality rates in the world, has been praised for its vaccination strategy. This week, the German tabloid Bild splashed the trade union flag on its front page with the message: “Dear Britain, we envy you.”
Yesterday, Germany’s best-selling newspaper Bild published this front page ‘Dear Britain, we envy you’ following the troubled EU and German vaccination program and the appalling policy of abandoning vaccination against AZ, which has so far had 900,000 unused pic.twitter.com/p9Qd9zpa7R
Nick de Bois (@nickdebois) 25 February 2021
The US relied solely on vaccines manufactured by its own pharmaceutical giants, Pfizer and Moderna. But it offered much less in Europe, in part because the US bought up much of the stock and that it was also expensive and difficult to handle.
Europe relied heavily on the vaccine made by British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, which is cheaper and much easier to transport, but has not yet been approved in the US
Medical regulators in some European countries, including Germany, have also said that clinical trials do not contain enough information to ensure the effectiveness of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in people over 65.
This was strongly disputed by some experts who said that although AstraZeneca’s phase 3 trials had a small sample size for older people, there was other evidence that the shots were effective.
Furthermore, a group of Scottish universities published a study this week indicating that the vaccine reduced the risk of hospitalization by 94 per cent – higher than the Pfizer-BioNTech shot.
The decision to limit the vaccine to younger people meant that Germany could not give the most abundant vaccine in its portfolio to older people.
German states, which are responsible for their individual vaccinations, also according to media reports in the country, did not invite enough people from the second and third priority groups, including those with underlying health conditions.
Now European officials are scrambling to reassure the public, as well as to update their policies.
Germany is changing its priority list for vaccinations so that teachers are now included in the second priority group, and Jens Spahn, Minister of Health, has asked that it be given to the police and the army.
Spahn pointed out that it was a ‘privilege’ to receive the ‘safe and effective’ AstraZeneca shot, while Chancellor Angela Merkel warned people in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper that ‘as long as vaccines are as rare as it’s at the moment you can not choose what you want to be vaccinated with. ‘