The campaign to beat the coronavirus is growing rapidly in some places, and Britain is starting to deliver the second vaccine to its arsenal on Monday. But authorities in France and other European countries are under fire for slow deployments and delays.
In the U.S., government officials reported that vaccinations have accelerated markedly after a slow start. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, said over the weekend that 1.5 million shots were administered in 72 hours, bringing the total for the past three weeks to about 4 million. .
On Monday, Britain became the first nation to start using the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, which stepped up its nationwide inoculation campaign amid high rates of infection guilty of a new and apparently more contagious 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 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 a day over the past six days and deaths have risen from 75,000, one of the worst tolls in Europe.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a wave of closures almost the weekend before Christmas and warned on Monday that “hard and tough” weeks are ahead and that there will soon be stricter restrictions: “If you look at the numbers , there is no doubt that we will have to take tougher action. “
Israel appears to be among the world leaders in the vaccination campaign, inoculating more than a million people, or about 12% of its population, in just over two weeks. The effort has been driven by a centralized, high-quality health system and by the country’s small concentrated population.
Elsewhere, France’s cautious approach seems to have come back, leaving only a few hundred people vaccinated after the first week and rekindling anger over the government’s management of the pandemic.
The slow deployment has been attributed to mismanagement, staff shortages during the holidays and a complex consent policy designed to accommodate vaccine skepticism among the French.
“It’s a state scandal,” Jean-Rottner, president of the Grand-Est region of eastern France, told France-2 television. “Getting vaccinated is getting more complicated than buying a car.”
Health Minister Olivier Veran promised that by the end of Monday “several thousand” people will have been vaccinated, at a rate that will increase during the week. But this would still leave France far behind its neighbors.
The French media aired graphs comparing vaccine figures from several countries: in France, a nation of 67 million people, only 516 people were vaccinated in the first six days, according to the French Ministry of Health. The German total in the first week exceeded 200,000 and that in Italy exceeded 100,000. Millions of people have been vaccinated in the US and China.
The European Union also faced growing criticism over the slow deployment of COVID-19 features in the 27 million 450 million population block.
EU Commission spokesman Eric Mamer said the main problem “is a problem of production capacity, an issue that everyone faces”.
The EU has sealed six vaccine contracts with several manufacturers. But only the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been approved so far for use across the EU. EU drug regulators are expected to decide on Wednesday whether it is recommended to authorize the Modern vaccine.
Aspects of British vaccination plans have also sparked controversy.
British health authorities want to give the first dose to as many people as possible, instead of keeping the vaccine in reserve to make sure recipients receive the second shot on time a few weeks later. The plan requires extending the time between doses to up to 12 weeks.
Although two doses are needed to completely protect yourself from COVID-19, one dose offers a high level of protection.
Stephen Evans, a professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said policymakers are forced to balance the potential risks and benefits amid the disaster.
“We have a crisis situation in the UK with a new variant spreading rapidly and, as has become clear to everyone during 2020, delays are costing lives,” Evans said. “When dose and people resources to vaccinate are limited, vaccinating more people with potentially lower efficacy is demonstrably better than half-complete efficacy.”
In the United States, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar rejected this strategy and told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that scientific data “is simply not there” to support this approach. .
Deployment in the United States has been marked by a large number of logistical obstacles, a mosaic of approaches by state and local governments, and confusion. Some people don’t know where or when a shot can be fired.
Fauci acknowledged over the weekend that “we’re not where we want to be,” but expressed optimism that the momentum will increase in mid-January. He said President-elect Joe Biden’s goal of vaccinating 100 million people in his first 100 days in office is “realistic.”
On Sunday, India, the second most populous country in the world, authorized its first two COVID-19 vaccines: the Oxford-AstraZeneca and another developed by an Indian company. The movement paves the way for a huge inoculation program in the desperately poor nation 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 has also reported about 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 it easier to handle in less developed parts of the world.
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Associated Press writers from around the world contributed to this report.