BRUSSELS – Coronavirus vaccination problems in Europe turned into a major crisis on Wednesday, when Spain became the first country to partially suspend immunizations due to lack of doses and a dispute intensified with AstraZeneca over the announcement by the pharmaceutical company that it would reduce deliveries of its vaccine by 60 percent due to declines in production.
The European Union has been plagued by a litany of problems since it approved its first coronavirus vaccine, made by Pfizer and BioNTech, in December and rushed to start a vast immunization campaign weeks behind wealthy nations like the United States and Britain. .
Although full of money, influence and weight in the negotiations, the bloc of 27 nations found itself behind these countries, as well as others like Israel, Canada and the United Arab Emirates, mounting similar efforts to obtain sufficient doses for its citizens, even so many countries around the world, especially the poorest, struggle to secure some.
The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, last week set a goal of having 70% of its population inoculated by summer, a goal that was dismissed four days later by European Council President Charles Michel as “difficult”.
This week, a mere 2 percent of EU citizens had received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, according to figures collected by Our World in Data, compared with about 40 percent of Israelis. The figure in Britain was 11% and just over 6% in the United States.
In rare good news, French drugmaker Sanofi said on Wednesday that it would help produce more than 100 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, starting this summer, but those doses would likely come too late to save vaccination plans for the first half of 2021.
Pfizer informed the European Union and other countries outside the United States this month that it had to drastically cut its vaccine deliveries by mid-February to upgrade its factories to increase production, adding to the serious supply problems facing the region.
But it was AstraZeneca’s sudden announcement last week that it would cut deliveries in February and March by 60 percent, that really changed the European Union’s vaccination plans. Many countries built their strategies around the expectations of millions of these doses of this vaccine, which is cheaper and easier to store than others, in the first quarter of the year. AstraZeneca said it was experiencing production problems at one of its factories, but did not specify which ones they were or provide details on how to treat them and when.
The AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to be approved for use in the European Union on Friday, and the bloc expected about 80 million doses to be administered in the next two months.
With the company now saying it cannot deliver on its promise to deliver on the promise, it is unclear when the bloc’s goal will be achieved.
Some critics blame the European Commission for the mess. The commission struck deals on behalf of its 27 member states to guarantee a total of 2.3 billion doses of vaccines from various companies. But some of its deals were weeks behind those signed by the United States and Britain. AstraZeneca and some European opposition politicians say the delay put the bloc at the end of the delivery queue.
But the commission reacted against the criticism.
“We reject the logic of first come, first served,” said the bloc’s health commissioner, Stella Kyriakides, at a news conference on Wednesday. “This may work in the neighborhood butcher’s shop, but not in contracts and not in our advance purchase agreements. There is no priority clause in the advance purchase contract, ”she said.
AstraZeneca needed to “fulfill its contractual, social and moral obligations,” she said.
The bloc’s drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency, was also accused of being too bureaucratic and taking too long to grant authorization for vaccines. The agency rejected this criticism, defending its processes as being more complete, spending more time on clinical trial data and repeatedly turning to pharmaceutical companies for additional details.
The vaccine crisis in the European Union is pitted against a still violent second wave of coronavirus, prolonged blockages in most member countries and widespread panic over the spread of at least two highly infectious variants of the virus that are bringing national health systems to their countries. knees again. France, which has imposed restrictions on social and economic life since a second wave of coronavirus began to dominate it in late October, is now considering entering an even tougher blockade, like the one it imposed in the spring.
The pain of a shortage of supplies is being felt across Europe, with Spain announcing on Wednesday that it would suspend the vaccination program in Madrid for two weeks, and warning that Catalonia, in the north-east of the country, could follow suit.
“Tomorrow our refrigerators will be empty,” said Josep Maria Argimon, regional health official in Catalonia, referring to the reduced supply of the vaccine.
The deputy head of the regional government of Madrid, Ignacio Aguado, told a news conference that priority should be given to administering the second dose of the vaccine and that Madrid did not have enough supplies to continue with the first round of vaccinations.
Aguado asked the central government to urgently demand extra supplies from the European Union, saying it needs to “go to Brussels and get more doses” for Spain.
The sentiment was also expressed by local government leaders in other EU countries.
“My belief is that there is a real shortage of vaccines,” said Martine Aubry, the mayor of the city of Lille, in northern France, this month, when she urged the French government to “tell the truth”. François Rebsamen, the mayor of Dijon, in northeastern France, lamented “the central government’s failure to deliver vaccines”.
Vaccines for covid19>
Answers to your vaccine questions
Although the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most will likely put doctors and residents of long-term care facilities first. If you want to understand how this decision is being made, this article will help you.
Life will only return to normal when society as a whole obtains sufficient protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they will only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens, at most, within the first two months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to infection. An increasing number of vaccines against coronavirus are showing robust protection against disease. But it is also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they are infected, because they have only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists still do not know whether vaccines also block coronavirus transmission. For now, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid crowds indoors and so on. Once enough people are vaccinated, it will be very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we, as a society, achieve this goal, life may begin to approach something normal in the fall of 2021.
Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially be authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical tests that provided these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. This remains a possibility. We know that people naturally infected with the coronavirus can transmit it as long as they have no cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be studying this issue intensively as vaccines are launched. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to consider possible spreaders.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is given as an injection into the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection will be no different than the one you took before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines and none of them reported serious health problems. But some of them experienced short-term discomfort, including pain and flu symptoms that usually last for a day. People may need to plan a day off from work or school after the second injection. Although these experiences are not pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system facing the vaccine and developing a potent response that will provide lasting immunity.
No. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use a genetic molecule to prepare the immune system. This molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse with a cell, allowing the molecule to slide inward. The cell uses mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any given time, each of our cells can contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce to make their own proteins. After these proteins are produced, our cells fragment the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules that our cells make can survive just a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is designed to resist the cell’s enzymes a little more, so that cells can produce extra proteins from the virus and stimulate a stronger immune response. But mRNA can only last a few days at most, before being destroyed.
And in Germany, the bloc’s largest and richest country, regional leaders were furious at the scarcity, for which they blamed their own government and the European Union.
“I must say that I am totally disappointed with how this happened,” said Manuela Schwesig, governor of the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, last week.
“We had a very clear agreement – we in the states prepared the immunization centers and set up everything. We did that. Logistics exist and we could offer a vaccine to all our citizens, ”said Schwesig to the public television network ZDF. “But we can’t use it because we don’t have enough vaccines.”
Delays in ordering and approving vaccines and the current shortage are not the only problems, experts say.
“Some countries planned the whole process well in advance and did their job efficiently and effectively,” said Rosanna Tarricone, from Bocconi University in Milan. But, although EU countries “have announced their plans, they have not actually planned anything at all. appropriate way ”.
In some parts of the European Union, especially on the poorest eastern flank, people have been struggling to access vaccines due to a lack of trained nurses, needles and syringes or inadequate administration and communication with citizens.
Still, despite growing concerns and political repercussions, experts cautioned against the British policy of allowing up to 12 weeks between the first and second doses of two-dose vaccines, such as those from Pfizer and Moderna.
In the European Union, regulators have recommended allowing a maximum of three weeks between the two doses of Pfizer, or four weeks for the Modern vaccine.
“In the EU, at the national level, everyone tries to go as fast as possible, because that is what we have to do,” said Jean-Michel Dogné, professor at the University of Namur in Belgium and adviser to the European Medicines Agency and the World Health Organization Health. “But we need to be careful to be able to give the second dose and predict new vaccines that may come up.”
Raphael Minder contributed reports from Madrid, Melissa Eddy from Berlin and Constant Meheut and Aurelien Breeden from Paris.