BRUSSELS – Coronavirus vaccination in Europe plunged into a full-blown crisis on Wednesday as Spain became the first country to suspend vaccinations in part due to lack of doses, and a dispute escalated with AstraZeneca over the drugmaker’s announcement that he would reduce the delivery of his vaccine by 60. percentage due to production shortages.
The European Union has been plagued by a number of problems since it approved its first coronavirus vaccine, manufactured by Pfizer and BioNTech in December, and rushed to launch a major vaccination campaign weeks behind rich countries such as the United States and Britain.
Although full of cash, influence and bargaining power, the bloc of 27 countries behind those countries, as well as others such as Israel, Canada and the United Arab Emirates, have found and made similar efforts to get enough doses for their citizens, even if struggling many countries around the world, especially poorer countries, to secure any countries.
The European Commission, the bloc’s executive, last week set a target of vaccinating 70 per cent of its population by this summer, a target set by European Council President Charles Michel four days later. difficult ‘was completed.
By this week, only 2 percent of EU citizens had received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, according to numbers collected by Our World in Data, compared to about 40 percent of Israelis. The figure in Britain was 11 per cent, and just over 6 per cent in the United States.
In a rare bit of good news, French drugmaker Sanofi said on Wednesday that it will help produce more than 100 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, starting this summer, but the doses are likely to come too late to make the vaccination plans for the first times to save. half of 2021.
Pfizer this month told the European Union and other countries outside the United States that it had to drastically reduce vaccine deliveries by mid-February to upgrade its plants to increase production, which had to increase serious supply problems in the region.
But it was AstraZeneca’s sudden announcement last week that delivery would drop by 60 percent in February and March, which really boosted European Union vaccination plans. Many countries in the first quarter of the year based their strategies on the expectations of millions of doses of the vaccine, which are cheaper and easier to store than others. AstraZeneca said it had production problems at one of its factories, but did not specify what it was, or gave details on how it was addressed and when.
The AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to be approved for use in the European Union on Friday, and the bloc expected about 80 million doses to be delivered over the next two months.
Since the company now says it cannot keep its promise, it is unclear when the goal of the block can be achieved.
Some critics have blamed the European Commission for the mess. The commission has entered into agreements on behalf of its 27 member states to secure a total of 2.3 billion vaccine doses from various companies. However, some of the agreements fell behind weeks ago by the United States and Britain. AstraZeneca and some European opposition politicians say the delay puts the block at the back of the line for deliveries.
But the commission slammed the criticism.
“We reject the logic of ‘first-come first-served’,” Stella Kyriakides, a bloc commissioner of the bloc, told a news conference on Wednesday. ‘It may work at the neighborhood butcher, but not in contracts and not in our advanced purchase agreements. “There is no priority clause in the advanced purchase agreement,” she said.
AstraZeneca had to ‘fulfill its contractual, social and moral obligations’, she said.
The bloc’s drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency, is also accused of being too bureaucratic and taking too long to authorize vaccines. The agency rejected the criticism and defended its processes more thoroughly by spending more time on clinical trials and repeatedly returning to pharmaceutical companies for more information.
The vaccine crisis in the European Union is against an increasingly raging second wave of the coronavirus, prolonged closures in most member states, and widespread panic over the spread of at least two highly contagious variants of the virus that are returning national health systems to their knees. France, which has imposed restrictions on social and economic life since a second wave of coronavirus began to overwhelm it in late October, is now considering entering into an even stricter closure such as the one it imposed in the spring.
The pain of supply shortages is being felt across Europe, and Spain announced on Wednesday that it will suspend the vaccination program in Madrid for two weeks, warning that Catalonia, in the north-east of the country, could follow suit.
“Tomorrow our refrigerators will be empty,” said Josep Maria Argimon, a local health official in Catalonia, referring to the dwindling supply of the vaccine.
The deputy head of Madrid’s regional government, Ignacio Aguado, said at a news conference that the administration of the second vaccine should take precedence and that Madrid does not have enough supplies to continue with the first round of vaccinations.
Mr. Aguado called on the central government to urgently demand extra supplies from the European Union, saying it “should go to Brussels and get more doses” for Spain.
The sentiment was also expressed by local government leaders in other EU countries.
“My conviction is that there is a real shortage of vaccines,” Martine Aubry, the mayor of the northern French city of Lille, said this month when she asked the French government to “tell the truth”. François Rebsamen, the mayor of Dijon, in northeastern France, denied ‘the failure of the central government’s vaccination.
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Answers to your vaccine questions
Although the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, medical workers and residents of long-term care institutions are likely to be first. If you want to understand how this decision is made, this article will help.
Life will only become normal when society as a whole gets enough protection against the coronavirus. Once countries approve a vaccine, they will be able to vaccinate at most a few percent of their citizens in the first few months. The unvaccinated majority will still be vulnerable to infection. A growing number of coronavirus vaccines offer strong protection against disease. But it is also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they are infected, because they experience only mild symptoms or not at all. Scientists do not yet know whether the vaccination also blocks the transmission of the coronavirus. For the time being, even vaccinated people will have to wear masks, crowds inside, and so on. Must avoid. Once enough people are vaccinated, it will be very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people who can become infected. Depending on how quickly we as a society reach the goal, life by the fall of 2021 could begin to approach something as normal.
Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that may be approved this month clearly protect people against Covid-19. However, the clinical trials that have yielded these results have not been designed to determine whether people who have been vaccinated can still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. It remains a possibility. We know that people who are naturally infected by the coronavirus can spread it while experiencing no cough or other symptoms. Researchers will study this question intensively as the vaccines begin. Meanwhile, even vaccinated people will have to think of themselves as possible distributors.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is delivered like a shot in the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection will not be different from what you received before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccinations, and none of them have reported serious health problems. But some of them felt transient discomfort, including pains and flu-like symptoms that usually last a day. It is possible that people after the second shot may be planning to take a day off from work or school. Although these experiences are not pleasant, it is a good sign: it is the result of your own immune system encountering the vaccine and getting a powerful response that will provide long-lasting immunity.
No. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use a genetic molecule to replenish the immune system. That molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse with a cell so that the molecule can slide. The cell uses the mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. Each of our cells can contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules at any one time that they produce to make their own proteins. Once those proteins are made, our cells cut the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules that make up our cells can only survive for a few minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is designed to resist the cells’ enzymes a little longer, allowing the cells to make extra viral proteins and trigger a stronger immune response. But the mRNA can only take a few days at most before being destroyed.
And in Germany, the richest and largest country in the bloc, regional leaders were hesitant about the shortages, blaming their own government and the European Union.
“I must say that I am completely disappointed with how it played out,” Manuela Schwesig, governor of the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, said last week.
‘We had a very clear agreement – we in the states prepare the vaccination centers and set everything up. We did it. The logistics are there and we can offer a vaccination to all our citizens, ‘said me. Schwesig said on the ZDF public television network. “But we can not use it because we do not have enough vaccines.”
Experts said delays in ordering and approving vaccines, and the current shortages, were not the only problems.
“Some countries have planned the whole process well in advance and done their job in an efficient and effective way,” said Rosanna Tarricone of Bocconi University in Milan. But although the EU countries “have announced their plans, they have not really planned anything properly.”
In parts of the European Union, especially in its poorer eastern flank, people have struggled to access vaccines due to a lack of trained nurses, needles and syringes, or poor administration and communication with citizens.
Despite growing concerns and political outbursts, experts have warned against British policy of allowing up to twelve weeks between the first and second doses of two-dose vaccines such as the Pfizer and Moderna doses.
In the European Union, regulators have recommended allowing a maximum of three weeks between the two doses of Pfizer, or four weeks in the case of the Moderna vaccine.
“In the EU, everyone at national level is trying to go as fast as possible, because that is what we need to do,” said Jean-Michel Dogné, a professor at the University of Namur in Belgium and adviser to the European Medicines Agency agency. and the World Health Organization. “But we have to be careful about giving the second dose and expecting new vaccines to come.”
Raphael Minder reported from Madrid, Melissa Eddy from Berlin, and Constant Meheut and Aurelien Breeden from Paris.