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The campaign to defeat the coronavirus is gaining momentum in places, with Britain starting to distribute the second vaccine in its arsenal on Monday. But authorities in France and elsewhere in Europe are criticized for the slowness of the deployments and the delays.
In the United States, government officials have reported that vaccinations have sped up markedly after a slow start. Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, said over the weekend that 1.5 million vaccines had been given in 72 hours, bringing the total for the past three weeks to around 4 million.
Britain on Monday became the first country to start using the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, stepping up its nation-wide inoculation campaign amid soaring rates of infection attributed to a new, apparently more contagious variant of the virus.
Brian Pinker, an 82-year-old dialysis patient, received the first injection at Oxford University Hospital, saying in a statement: “I can now really look forward to celebrating my 48th wedding anniversary.”
The British vaccination program began on December 8 with the vaccine developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.
The country has recorded more than 50,000 new coronavirus infections per day over the past six days, and deaths have passed 75,000, one of the worst records in Europe.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a wave of near-closures the weekend before Christmas and warned Monday that “tough and tough” weeks are ahead and tighter restrictions are coming soon: “If you look at the numbers , there is no doubt that we will have to take more stringent measures.
Israel appears to be among the world leaders in the vaccination campaign, vaccinating over a million people, or about 12% of its population, in just over two weeks. The effort was spurred by a high quality centralized health system and the small size and concentration of the country’s population.
Elsewhere, France’s cautious approach appears to have backfired, leaving just a few hundred people vaccinated after the first week and rekindling anger over the government’s handling of the pandemic.
The slow rollout has been blamed on mismanagement, staff shortages during the holidays and a complex consent policy designed to respond to French skepticism about vaccines.
“It’s a state scandal,” said Jean Rottner, president of the Grand-Est region of eastern France, on France-2 television. “Getting vaccinated is getting more complicated than buying a car.”
Health Minister Olivier Veran has promised that by the end of Monday “several thousand” people will have been vaccinated, with the pace accelerating during the week. But that would still leave France well behind its neighbors.
French media broadcast graphs 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 topped 200,000, and Italy’s over 100,000. Millions of people have been vaccinated in the United States and China.
The European Union has also faced growing criticism of the slow rollout of COVID-19 shots across the bloc of 27 countries of 450 million people.
European Commission spokesman Eric Mamer said the main problem “is a problem of production capacity, a problem that everyone is facing”.
The EU has signed six vaccine contracts with various manufacturers. But only the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been approved to date across the EU. EU drug regulators are expected to decide on Wednesday whether to recommend authorization for the Moderna vaccine.
Some aspects of Britain’s vaccination plans have also sparked controversy.
British health officials want to give the first dose to as many people as possible immediately, rather than keeping the vaccine in reserve to ensure recipients get their second injection on time a few weeks later. The plan requires lengthening the time between doses up to 12 weeks.
While two doses are needed to fully protect against COVID-19, one dose provides a high level of protection.
Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said policymakers were forced to balance potential risks and benefits amid the disaster.
“We have a crisis situation in the UK with a new variant that’s spreading quickly, and as it has become clear to everyone in 2020, delays are costing lives,” Evans said. “When the resources in doses and in the number of people to be vaccinated are limited, vaccinating more people with potentially less effectiveness is clearly better than more complete effectiveness in only half.
In the United States, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has rejected such a strategy, saying on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the science “just isn’t there” to support this approach.
The deployment to the United States was marked by a multitude of logistical hurdles, a patchwork of state and local government approaches and confusion. Some people do not know where and when to get the vaccine.
Fauci acknowledged over the weekend that “we are not where we want to be” but expressed optimism that momentum will pick up again 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.”
India, the second most populous country in the world, on Sunday authorized its first two COVID-19 vaccines – both from Oxford-AstraZeneca developed by an Indian company. The move paves the way for a massive immunization program in this 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 United States. It also reported around 150,000 deaths.
None of the approved vaccines require the ultra-cold storage that some others do. Instead, they can be stored in refrigerators, making them easier to handle in less developed parts of the world.
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Associated Press editors around the world contributed to this report.
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