BERLIN (AP) – Slow race blocks to immunize its citizens against COVID-19, Germany faces an unknown problem: an excess of vaccines and not enough arms to inject them.
Like other European Union countries, its national vaccine campaign lags far behind that of Israel, Britain and the United States. There are now growing calls in this country of 83 million to abandon the rulebook or at least rewrite it a bit.
The Germans watched with morbid fascination in January as Britain trained an army of volunteers to fire coronavirus shots, and then marveled that the UK, which was far worse off by the pandemic than Germany, managed to vaccinate more than half a million people in a few days.
U.S. inoculation centers and COVID-19 beatings in American grocery store pharmacies caused confusion in Germany, that is, until the country’s own plans for orderly vaccine appointments at specialty centers they were overwhelmed by demand.
Britain and the United States “had a much more pragmatic approach” to vaccination, said Hans-Martin von Gaudecker, a professor of economics at the University of Bonn. “What normally makes the German bureaucracy solid and reliable becomes an obstacle in a crisis and costs lives.”
The European Medicines Agency approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for all age groups, but several EU nations, including Germany, imposed stricter age limits.
With its stock of AstraZeneca vaccine doses exceeded 2 million, Germany wants more people to benefit from the shots that have so far been limited to a fraction of the population: people in the highest priority group who have less than 65 years.
France changed tactics earlier this week, allowing some people over the age of 65 to get the AstraZeneca vaccine after restricting its use to young people. Health Minister Olivier Veran said the shot would soon also be available for people over the age of 50 with health problems that make them more vulnerable.
France, which with more than 87,000 deaths, has one of the highest coronavirus tolls in Europe, had only used 25% of the 1.6 million AstraZeneca vaccines it received as of Tuesday.
European nations ’age restrictions on AstraZeneca exacerbated problems caused by initial delays in delivery and some public reluctance toward the vaccine.
However, data from this week’s mass vaccination program in England showed that both AstraZeneca and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were about 60% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in people over 70 years of age. after a single dose. The analysis published by Public Health England, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, also showed that the two vaccines were about 80% effective in preventing hospitalizations among those over 80 years of age.
Belgium and Italy are also easing age restrictions for the AstraZeneca vaccine as they struggle to cope with a third rise approaching in COVID-19 cases driven by more contagious virus variants.
In Italy, the new government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi ousted the emergency tsar COVID-19 this week and put an army general with experience in logistics and experience in Afghanistan and Kosovo at the head of the vaccination program of the country.
Meanwhile, Denmark stands out as a success story in EU vaccination. The Scandinavian nation leads the bloc’s vaccination tables alongside small Malta and expects to vaccinate all adults by July, well ahead of the EU’s target of 70% of adults vaccinated in September.
Instead of withholding doses for the second required shot, Danish health authorities followed the British model of using all available vaccines as they arrived, an approach now being taken into account by EU countries.
And all 6 million people in Denmark have digital health records linked to a single identification number, which allows authorities to identify exactly who is fit for vaccination and contact them directly. British authorities also send text messages directly to people to set fire.
“There are historical reasons why we don’t have a centralized register like Denmark,” von Gaudecker said, citing Germany’s grim history of state oppression under Nazism and Communism.
“Of course, a state can do terrible things with data,” he said. “But you can also do great things with data.”
A better way to target the doses available to those who need them is a way in which European countries expect to stay ahead of the virus in the coming months, as more contagious variants spread.
France and Spain plan to administer only one shot 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 prioritize vaccinations in outbreaks. The Hungarian leader received a Chinese shot COVID-19 over the weekend and his country and Slovakia buy Russian Sputnik V to supplement other vaccines delivered by the EU. The President of Poland has suggested that his country can follow Hungary’s leadership to obtain Chinese vaccines.
The number of vaccines available across the EU could rise further next week if the European Medicines Agency keeps track of the US in approving the single-dose vaccine manufactured by Johnson & Johnson. President Joe Biden has indicated that the United States now plans to deliver enough coronavirus vaccine to all adults by the end of May. – two months earlier than expected.
“If we can’t vaccinate what little we have, we will obviously have an even bigger problem when we get a lot of vaccines,” said Baerbel Bas, a legislator for the center-left German Social Democratic Party.
The German Minister of Health said that more than 5% of the population has now received a first dose.
“But of course, we need more tempo,” said Jens Spahn, who added that vaccination centers will receive more flexibility in deciding who to give the vaccines to.
Ursula Nonnemacher, the top health official in the German state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin, vowed not to leave any precious doses of vaccine in storage, as she announced on Wednesday the start of vaccinations in the practices of some doctors.
“We’re now switching to overdrive,” he said.
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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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