The campaign to defeat the coronavirus is growing faster in some places, and Britain will start releasing the second vaccine in its arsenal on Monday. But the authorities in France and elsewhere in Europe are coming under fire due to slow rollouts and delays.
In the US, government officials reported that vaccinations have accelerated significantly after a sluggish start. Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases, said at the weekend that 1.5 million shots had been fired within 72 hours, bringing the total to about 4 million over the past three weeks.
Britain on Monday became the first country to start using the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, pushing the nationwide vaccination campaign amid rising infection rates blaming a new and seemingly more infectious variant of the virus.
Brian Pinker, an 82-year-old dialysis patient, received the first shot at Oxford University Hospital and said in a statement: “I can now really look forward to celebrating my 48th wedding anniversary.”
Britain’s vaccination program began on December 8 with the shot developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.
The country has recorded more than 50,000 new coronavirus infections in the past six days, and deaths have climbed over 75,000, one of the worst tolls in Europe.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a wave of near-exclusions the weekend before Christmas and warned on Monday that ‘difficult, difficult’ weeks lie ahead and that stricter restrictions are coming soon: ‘If you look at the numbers, there is no doubt to take stricter measures. ”
Israel appears to be among the world leaders in the vaccination campaign, having vaccinated more than 1 million people, or about 12% of its population, in just over two weeks. The effort has been reinforced by a high-quality centralized health care system and the small and concentrated population of the country.
Elsewhere, France’s cautious approach seems to have backfired, with only a few hundred people vaccinated after the first week, sparking outrage over the government’s handling of the pandemic.
The slow rollout was blamed on mismanagement, staff shortages during the holidays and a complicated consent policy designed to accommodate vaccine skepticism among the French.
“This is a state scandal,” Jean Rottner, president of the Grand-Est region in eastern France, said on France 2 television. “Getting vaccinated becomes more complicated than buying a car.”
Health Minister Olivier Veran has promised that by a few thousand a few thousand people will be vaccinated, with the rate increasing through the week. But it will still leave France well behind its neighbors.
French media have broadcast maps comparing vaccine figures in different countries: In France, a country of 67 million people, only 516 people were vaccinated in the first six days, according to the French Ministry of Health. Germany’s first week total exceeded 200,000, and Italy more than 100,000. Millions have been vaccinated in the US and China.
The European Union has also come under increasing criticism over the slow rollout of COVID-19 shots across the 27-nation bloc of 450 million inhabitants.
EU Commission spokesman Eric Mamer said the biggest problem was ” a matter of production capacity, an issue that everyone faces. ”
The EU has concluded six vaccine contracts with a variety of manufacturers. But only the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has so far been approved across the EU. EU drug regulators are expected to decide on Wednesday whether to recommend the authorization of the Moderna vaccine.
Aspects of Britain’s vaccination plans have also sparked controversy.
British health authorities want to give the first dose to as many people as possible immediately, rather than keeping the vaccine in reserve to ensure that recipients get their second chance a few weeks later. The plan requires you to extend the time between doses to 12 weeks.
While two doses are required to fully protect against COVID-19, one dose provides a high level of protection.
Stephen Evans, a professor of pharmaco-epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said policymakers are being forced to balance the potential risks and benefits at the center of the disaster.
“We have a crisis situation in the UK with a new variant that is spreading rapidly, and as it became clear to everyone in 2020, delays are costing lives,” Evans said. “When there are limited resources of doses and people to vaccinate, showing more people with potentially less efficacy is demonstrably better than more complete efficiencies in just half.”
In the United States, Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services, rejected such a strategy, saying on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the scientific data “just isn’t there” to support the approach not.
The deployment in the US was marked by a multitude of logistical barriers, a patchwork of approaches by state and local governments and confusion. Some people are not sure where or when to get a chance.
Fauci admitted at the weekend that ‘we are not where we want to be’, but he expressed optimism that the momentum would increase by mid-January. He said President-elect Joe Biden’s goal of vaccinating 100 million people in his first 100 days in office was “realistic”.
On Sunday, India, the second most populous country in the world, approved its first two COVID-19 vaccines – the Oxford-AstraZeneca one and the other developed by an Indian company. The move paves the way for a major vaccination program in the desperately poor country of 1.4 billion people.
India has confirmed more than 10.3 million cases of the virus, second in the world behind the US. About 150,000 deaths have also been reported.
None of the approved vaccines require the ultra-cold storage that some do. Instead, it can be stored in refrigerators, making it easier to handle in less developed parts of the world.
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Associated Press writers around the world contributed to this report.