- German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she will not get the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine.
- The vaccine was only approved for children under 65 in Germany, and Merkel is 66 years old.
- Recent studies suggest that the AstraZeneca vaccine is associated with a dramatic drop in hospitalizations.
- But more than a million jabs have not been used, with many Germans uncertain about its effectiveness.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she will not get AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine because she is too old, a comment that comes when millions of Germans refuse to get the vaccine because they don’t trust her.
The pace of vaccine release in Europe has fallen dramatically behind the UK, in part because millions of people are refusing to take the AstraZeneca vaccine due to widespread distrust of the AstraZeneca vaccine after European leaders doubted its effectiveness.
Merkel, 66, was asked by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allegemeine whether she would receive a dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine to try to contain the widespread perception across Europe that the vaccine is ineffective.
But the chancellor said no, because it was not approved for use in people over 65 in Germany, although recent tests in Scotland have shown that the AstraZeneca vaccine appears to be linked to a dramatic drop in the risk of hospitalization among older recipients .
“I am 66 years old and do not belong to the recommended group for AstraZeneca,” she told the newspaper.
More than 1.4 million doses of AstraZeneca’s jab are not used in storage in Germany because of the Germans’ reluctance to get the vaccine, officials said at a health briefing this week, while only 240,000 were administered, reported the New Scientist .
“We are working hard on this point and trying to convince people to accept the vaccine and really gain the public’s confidence in the vaccine,” Thomas Mertens, who chairs Germany’s permanent committee on vaccines, told BBC Radio 4’s Today. .
“But, as you may know, this is also some kind of psychological problem and, unfortunately, it will take a while to reach that goal,” he said.
This comes after Handelsblatt, a German newspaper, publishes a report citing anonymous German health officials, who say the AstraZeneca vaccine was only 8% effective. The fact-checking website FullFact said Handelsblatt’s report was not “reliable” and that both the German government and AstraZeneca denied the story.
Merkel admitted that there was an “acceptance problem” with the vaccine, which she said was “effective and safe”, and warned that the Germans could not choose which vaccine they would receive.
“Astra-Zeneca is a reliable, effective and safe vaccine, approved by the European Medical Agency and recommended in Germany up to 65 years of age,” she told Frankfurter Allegemeine. “All authorities tell us that this vaccine is reliable. While vaccines are as scarce as they are at the moment, you cannot choose what you want to vaccinate with.”
France is also facing problems similar to those in Germany after President Emmanuel Macron suggested, without providing evidence, that the AstraZeneca vaccine was “almost ineffective” among those over 65.
France’s health ministry said on Tuesday that only 107,000 AstraZeneca vaccines were administered in the first two weeks of the vaccine’s launch, the French newspaper La Télégramme reported, despite the country having received more than 700,000 doses.
Officials in Austria, Belgium and Italy have also started to report some resistance to the British vaccine, France24 reported.