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German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she will not take the coronavirus vaccine for AstraZeneca.
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The vaccine is approved for only people under 65 in Germany, and Merkel is 66.
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Recent trials have linked the AstraZeneca vaccine to a dramatic decline in hospitalization.
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But more than 1 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.
The rate of deployment of European vaccines has slowed behind that of the United Kingdom. People have apparently refused to take the AstraZeneca vaccine after European leaders questioned its effectiveness.
Merkel, 66, was asked by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine whether she would receive a dose of AstraZeneca’s vaccine to counter the perception in Europe that the vaccine was not effective.
The chancellor said she would not get the vaccine because it was not approved for people over 65 in Germany. “I am 66 years old and do not belong to the recommended group for AstraZeneca,” she told the newspaper.
Recent trials in Scotland have linked AstraZeneca’s vaccine to a dramatic decrease in the risk of hospitalization among the elderly.
More than 1.4 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine are in Germany, while health workers administered only 240,000 doses, said Thomas Mertens, chairman of the permanent commission for vaccines, this week, reports the New Scientist.
“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,” Mertens told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program.
“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.
The German newspaper Handelsblatt recently published a report citing anonymous German health officials, who say that AstraZeneca’s vaccine is only 8% effective among older people. The fact-checking website Full Fact said Handelsblatt’s report was ‘unreliable’, and the German government and AstraZeneca denied it.
Merkel described an ‘acceptance problem’ with the vaccine, which she said was ‘effective and safe’. She added that Germans could not choose which vaccine they would receive.
“AstraZeneca is a reliable, effective and safe vaccine approved by the European Medicines Agency and recommended in Germany for up to 65 years,” she told the Frankfurter Allgemeine. “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 has faced similar problems since President Emmanuel Macron proposed in late January without evidence that AstraZeneca’s vaccine appears ‘quasi-ineffective’ among people over 65.
The French Ministry of Health said on Tuesday that only 107,000 AstraZeneca tubes had been administered in the first two weeks of the vaccination, the French newspaper Le Télégramme reported. France has received more than 700,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine.
Officials in Austria, Belgium and Italy also reported some resistance to AstraZeneca’s vaccine, Agence France-Presse reported last week.
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