BERLIN (AP) – Relaxing the roadblocks in the race to immunize its citizens against COVID-19, Germany faces an unknown problem: an excess of vaccines and there are not enough weapons to inject them.
Like other European Union countries, its national vaccine campaign is far behind Israel, Britain and the United States. Now, there are an increasing number of calls in this country of 83 million to abandon the rule book, or at least rewrite it a little.
The Germans watched with morbid fascination in January as Britain trained an army of volunteers to administer coronavirus vaccines, and then marveled that the United Kingdom – affected by the pandemic far more than Germany – managed to vaccinate more than half a million of people in a few days.
The US drive-thru inoculation centers and the COVID-19 injections distributed in American grocery pharmacies have perplexed Germany – that is, until the country’s own plans for orderly vaccine consultations at specialized centers are outnumbered by demand.
Britain and the United States “took a much more pragmatic approach” to vaccination, said Hans-Martin von Gaudecker, professor of economics at the University of Bonn. “What normally makes German bureaucracy impassive and reliable becomes an obstacle in a crisis and it costs lives.”
The European Medicines Agency has approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for all age groups, but several EU countries, including Germany, have imposed stricter age limits.
With its stock of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine set at 2 million, Germany is looking to make more people eligible for vaccines that have so far been restricted to a fraction of the population: people in the top priority group under the age of 65.
France changed tactics earlier this week, allowing some people over 65 to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine after initially restricting its use to younger people. Health Minister Olivier Veran said that the injection will soon also be available to people over 50 with health problems that make them more vulnerable.
France, which with more than 87,000 dead has one of the highest rates of coronavirus in Europe, used only 25% of the 1.6 million AstraZeneca vaccines it received until Tuesday.
European nations’ age restrictions on AstraZeneca exacerbated the problems caused by delays in initial delivery and some reluctance from the public about the vaccine.
Still, this week’s data from England’s mass vaccination program showed that both AstraZeneca and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were about 60% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in people over 70 after just a single dose. The analysis released by Public Health England, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, also showed that both vaccines were about 80% effective in preventing hospitalizations among people over 80.
Belgium and Italy are also loosening their age restrictions for the AstraZeneca vaccine as they struggle to face a third spike in cases of COVID-19 caused by more contagious variants of the virus.
In Italy, the new government of Premier Mario Draghi ousted the emergency czar of COVID-19 this week and placed an army general with experience in logistics and experience in Afghanistan and Kosovo as in charge of the country’s vaccination program.
Denmark, for its part, stands out as an EU vaccination success story. The Scandinavian nation tops the bloc’s vaccination tables along with tiny Malta and hopes to vaccinate all adults by July – well ahead of the EU target of 70% of adults vaccinated by September.
Instead of withholding doses for the second necessary injection, Danish health officials followed the British model of using all available vaccines as they arrived – an approach that more EU countries are now considering.
And all 6 million inhabitants of Denmark have digital health records linked to a single identification number, allowing authorities to identify exactly who is eligible for vaccination and to contact them directly. British authorities also send text messages directly to people to prepare for the shooting.
“There are historical reasons why we don’t have a centralized registry as in Denmark,” said von Gaudecker, citing Germany’s grim history of state oppression under Nazism and Communism.
“Of course, a state can do terrible things with the data,” he said. “But you can also do great things with the data.”
Better targeting of the doses available to those who need them is a way that European countries hope to stay ahead of the virus in the coming months, as more contagious variants spread.
France and Spain plan to give just one injection 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 are prioritizing vaccination in outbreak outbreaks. The Hungarian leader took a Chinese injection COVID-19 over the weekend and his country and Slovakia are buying Sputnik V from Russia to complement other vaccines provided by the EU. Poland’s president suggested that his country could follow Hungary’s example in obtaining Chinese vaccines.
The number of vaccines available across the EU could increase further next week if the European Medicines Agency follows the US example in Johnson & Johnson’s approval of the single dose vaccine. President Joe Biden has indicated that the United States now expects to receive enough coronavirus vaccine for all adults by the end of May. – two months ahead of schedule.
“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 from Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party.
Germany’s health minister said that more than 5% of the population has already received the first dose.
“But it is clear, we need more time,” said Jens Spahn, adding that vaccine centers will have greater flexibility in deciding who to give the vaccines to.
Ursula Nonnemacher, the main health authority in the German state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin, promised not to leave any precious doses of vaccine stored when announcing the start of vaccinations on Wednesday in some doctors’ offices.
“Now we are moving to overdrive,” she 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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