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BERLIN (AP) – Slow down in the race to vaccinate its citizens against COVID-19, Germany faces an unknown problem: an overabundance of vaccines and not enough weapons to inject them.
Like other countries in the European Union, its national vaccination campaign lags far behind that of Israel, Britain and the United States. Now there are more and more calls in this country of 83 million people to ditch the rulebook, or at least rewrite it a bit.
Germans watched with morbid fascination in January as Britain trained an army of volunteers to administer coronavirus vaccines, then marveled that the UK – far more affected by the pandemic than Germany – had succeeded to vaccinate more than half a million people on certain days.
Drive-through vaccination centers in the United States and COVID-19 injections dispensed in American drugstores in grocery stores have sparked perplexity in Germany – that is, until the country’s plans for appointments -you ordered for vaccines in specialized centers are overwhelmed by demand.
Britain and the United States “had a much more pragmatic approach” to vaccination, said Hans-Martin von Gaudecker, professor of economics at the University of Bonn. “What normally makes the German bureaucracy stagnant and reliable becomes an obstacle in a crisis and costs lives.”
The European Medicines Agency has approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for all age groups, but several EU countries, including Germany, have imposed stricter age limits.
With its stockpile of AstraZeneca vaccine doses set at 2 million, Germany is seeking to make more people eligible for vaccines that have so far been limited to a fraction of the population: people in the priority group who are under 65 years.
France changed tack earlier this week, allowing some people over 65 to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine after initially limiting its use to younger people. Health Minister Olivier Veran said the vaccine would soon also be available to people over 50 with health conditions that make them more vulnerable.
France, which with more than 87,000 deaths is among the highest coronavirus tolls in Europe, had only used 25% of the 1.6 million AstraZeneca vaccines it received on Tuesday.
Age restrictions imposed by European countries on AstraZeneca have compounded problems caused by initial delivery delays and some public reluctance towards the vaccine.
Yet this week’s data from England’s Mass Vaccination Program showed AstraZeneca and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to be around 60% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in people over 70 years of age. a single dose. Analysis published by Public Health England, which has not yet been peer reviewed, also showed that both vaccines were around 80% effective in preventing hospitalizations in people over 80 years old.
Belgium and Italy are also easing their age restrictions for the AstraZeneca vaccine as they scramble to cope with an impending third peak in COVID-19 cases driven by more contagious viral variants.
In Italy, Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s new government ousted the COVID-19 emergency czar this week and put an army general with logistics expertise and experience in Afghanistan and Kosovo in charge of the COVID-19 program. country vaccination.
Denmark, on the other hand, stands out as a successful example of vaccination in the EU. The Scandinavian nation leads the bloc’s vaccination charts with little Malta and plans to vaccinate all adults by July – far ahead of the EU target of 70% of adults vaccinated by September.
Rather than withholding doses for the second required injection, Danish health authorities have followed the UK model of using all available vaccines as they arrive – an approach that more and more countries in the world have received. EU are now considering.
And all 6 million Danes have digital health records linked to a single ID number, allowing authorities to determine exactly who is eligible for vaccination and contact them directly. British authorities are also texting people directly to arrange for shots.
“There are historical reasons why we don’t have a centralized registry like in Denmark,” said von Gaudecker, citing the dark history of state oppression in Germany under Nazism and Communism.
“Of course, a state can do terrible things with data,” he said. “But it can also potentially do great things with data.”
Better targeting of the doses available to those in need is one of the ways European countries hope to stay ahead of the virus in the months to come, as more contagious variants spread.
France and Spain plan to give only one injection of the two-dose vaccines to some people who have recovered from COVID-19, arguing that recent infections act as partial protection against the virus.
Italy, France and the Czech Republic are prioritizing vaccinations in epidemic hot spots. Hungarian leader received Chinese COVID-19 vaccine this weekend, his country and Slovakia are purchasing Russian Sputnik V to supplement other vaccines supplied by the EU. The Polish president suggested that his country could follow Hungary’s lead to obtain Chinese vaccines.
The number of vaccines available in the EU could increase further next week if the European Medicines Agency follows the lead of the United States in approving the single-dose vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson. President Joe Biden has indicated that the United States is now planning to receive enough coronavirus vaccine for all adults by the end of May – two months earlier than expected.
“If we can’t vaccinate what little we have, then obviously we will have an even bigger problem when we get a lot of vaccines,” said Baerbel Bas, a lawmaker from the center-left German Social Democratic Party.
Germany’s health minister said more than 5% of the population had now received a first dose.
“But it’s clear, we need more pace,” said Jens Spahn, adding that vaccination centers will have more flexibility in deciding who to give the vaccines.
Ursula Nonnemacher, the top health official in the German state of Brandenburg, which encircles Berlin, has vowed not to leave valuable doses of the vaccine in stock by announcing the start of vaccinations on Wednesday in some doctors’ offices.
“Now we’re going overdrive,” she says.
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Raf Casert in Brussels, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Aritz Parra in Madrid, Angela Charlton in Paris, Frances D’Emilio in Rome and Monika Sciclowska in Warsaw contributed to this report.
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https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine
https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
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