PARIS (AP) – France’s cautious approach to implementing a coronavirus vaccination program appears to have been a mistake, leaving just 500 people inoculated in the first week and reviving anger over the government’s management of the pandemic.
Amid public protests, the health minister on Monday vowed to pick up the pace and made a late public petition on behalf of the vaccine, saying it offers an “opportunity” for France and the world to beat a pandemic that has killed more of 1.8 million people. President Emmanuel Macron on Monday held a special meeting with senior government officials to discuss the vaccination strategy and other virus developments.
The slow implementation of the vaccine by Pfizer and the German company BioNTech was blamed for mismanagement, staff shortages during the holidays and a complex French consent policy designed to accommodate the skepticism of the unusually wide vaccine among the French public.
Opposition doctors, mayors and politicians on Monday called for faster access to vaccines.
“It’s a state scandal,” said Jean Rottner, president of the Grand-Est region in eastern France, where infections are on the rise and some hospitals have overcapacity.
“Getting vaccinated is getting more complicated than buying a car,” he told France-2 television.
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. Health Minister Olivier Veran has promised that by the end of Monday “several thousand” people will have been vaccinated, at a rate that will increase during the week, but that still leaves France far behind its neighbors.
Germany’s first-week total exceeded 200,000 and Italy’s exceeded 100,000, and even these countries are on fire for being too slow to protect the public from a pandemic that has killed more than 1.8 million people worldwide.
Meanwhile, the US and China have vaccinated millions. On Monday, Britain became the first nation in the world to start giving people photos of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, so now the UK has two approved vaccines to use.
France began its vaccination campaign on December 27 in nursing homes, because so many elderly people have died from the virus. But in the face of fears that people with cognitive impairments would be vaccinated against their will, the government devised a screening process that requires time before vaccines can be ordered and administered.
The Macron government also wants to not seem to force anyone to be vaccinated.
Although France has lost more lives to the virus than most countries (more than 65,000), surveys suggest the French are unusually suspicious of vaccines. They recall past French drug scandals, are concerned about how quickly these new vaccines were developed and their long-term impact, and wonder about the benefits they bring to large pharmaceutical companies.
But many other Frenchmen are eager to get vaccinated and have been frustrated by the surprisingly slow release.
“We are doing everything we can to motivate people to get vaccinated,” said Frederic Leyret, director of the Saint Vincent Hospital in the French city of Strasbourg in eastern France, the geriatric rehabilitation center of the which started vaccinations on Monday.
He lamented a mixed message from top French officials, which sums it up: “I’m going to get vaccinated, but we’ll go slowly because it could be dangerous.”
Now that millions of people in various countries are injecting themselves, he said attitudes are starting to change. The French government adjusted its policies over the weekend to allow immediate vaccination of medical workers over the age of 50, along with residents of the residences. Vaccines will be gradually made available to others.
Similar problems have arisen throughout Europe.
Spain saw vaccines move slowly over the New Year holidays, blamed on the shortage of medical staff and vaccine freezers after a batch of them got stuck in a truck bottleneck. who were trying to enter the European continent from Britain. Reports from regional authorities showed that less than a fifth of Spain’s vaccine doses had been administered on Monday, more than a week after arrival.
In Germany, where nearly 265,000 coronavirus vaccines were reported Monday, impatience is growing with what is seen as a slow start. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokeswoman Steffen Seibert promised that “some things can and will improve.”
Amid criticism, a European Commission spokesman defended the European Union’s collective vaccination strategy, saying Monday that the main problem is the shortage of production capacity.
The European Medicines Agency, the bloc’s 27-country medical regulator, met Monday to discuss approval of Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine.
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Samuel Petrequin in Brussels, Aritz Parra in Madrid and Geir Moulson in Berlin collaborated.
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