WARSAW / SOFIA (Reuters) – Europe on Sunday launched a major vaccination program against COVID-19 to try to curb the coronavirus pandemic, but many Europeans are skeptical about how quickly vaccines have been tested and approved. they resist firing.
The European Union has secured contracts with a number of drug manufacturers, including Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca, for a total of more than two billion doses and has set a goal for all adults to be inoculated every year. coming.
But polls have pointed to high levels of hesitation toward inoculation in countries from France to Poland, and many are accustomed to vaccines that take decades to develop, not just months.
“I don’t think there is a vaccine in history that has been tested so quickly,” Ireneusz Sikorski, 41, said as she walked out of a church in central Warsaw with her two children.
“I do not say that vaccination should not take place. But I’m not going to try an unverified vaccine on my children or myself. “
Surveys in Poland, where mistrust in public institutions is deep, have so far shown less than 40% of people plan to get vaccinated. On Sunday, only half of the medical staff at a Warsaw hospital where the first shot was administered in the country had been registered.
In Spain, one of the most affected countries in Europe, German, a 28-year-old singer and music composer, originally from Tenerife, also plans to wait now.
“No one near me has had it (COVID-19). Obviously, I’m not saying it doesn’t exist because a lot of people have died, but at the moment I wouldn’t have it (the vaccine). “
An Orthodox Orthodox bishop in Bulgaria, where 45% of people have said they would get no shots and 40% plan to wait to see if any negative side effects appear, compared to COVID-19 with polio.
“I myself am vaccinated against all I can be,” Bishop Tihon told reporters after receiving the shot, alongside Sofia’s health minister.
He talked about anxiety about polio before vaccination was available in the 1950s and 1960s.
“We were all shaking for fear of catching polio. And then we were very happy, ”he said. “Now we have to convince people. It is a pity.”
GREAT JUMP Forward
The widespread hesitation does not seem to take into account the scientific evolution of recent decades.
According to a 2013 study, the traditional method of creating vaccines – introducing a weakened or dead virus or a piece of one to stimulate the body’s immune system – is an average of ten years. A pandemic flu vaccine took eight years, while the hepatitis B vaccine took almost 18 years.
The Moderna vaccine, based on so-called messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology, went from gene sequencing to the first human injection in 63 days.
“We will look back at the progress made in 2020 and say,‘ It was a time when science took a leap forward, ’” said Jeremy Farrar, director of the University of Oxford’s Clinical Research Unit, which has the support of Wellcome Trust.
The Pfizer / BioNTech trait has been linked to some cases of severe allergic reactions, as it has been deployed in the UK and US. No serious long-term side effects have been reported in clinical trials.
The independent survey Alpha Research said its recent survey suggested that less than one in five Bulgarians in the first groups who were offered the vaccine (top doctors, pharmacists, teachers and staff at the nursing homes) planned to volunteer to shoot.
An IPSOS survey in 15 countries published on November 5 then showed that 54% of French people would have a vaccine against COVID if one were available. The figure was 64% in Italy and Spain, 79% in Britain and 87% in China.
A subsequent FIFG survey, which had no comparative data for other countries, showed that only 41% of people in France would take the shot.
In Sweden, where public confidence in the authorities is as high as anywhere else in the Nordic countries, more than two out of three people want to be immunized. Still, some say no.
“If someone gave me 10 million euros, I wouldn’t take it,” Lisa Renberg, 32, said Wednesday.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Sunday urged Poles to sign up for the vaccine, saying the herd’s immune effect depended on them.
Critics have said Warsaw nationalist leaders have too much accepted attitudes against vaccination in the past to gain conservative support.
Additional reports by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk in Warsaw, Colm Fulton in Stockholm, Phil Blenkinsop in Brussels and Silvio Castellanos in Madrid; Written by Justyna Pawlak; Edited by Nick Macfie