WARSAW / SOFIA (Reuters) – Europe launched a massive COVID-19 vaccination campaign on Sunday to try to contain the coronavirus pandemic, but many Europeans are skeptical about the speed with which vaccines have been tested and approved and reluctant to get the vaccine .
The European Union has signed contracts with a number of drug manufacturers, including Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca, for a total of more than two billion doses and has set a target for all adults to be inoculated next year.
But research points to high levels of hesitation about inoculation in countries from France to Poland, with many accustomed to vaccines taking decades to develop, not just months.
“I don’t think there is a vaccine in history that has been tested so quickly,” said Ireneusz Sikorski, 41, as he left a church in central Warsaw with his two children.
“I’m not saying that vaccination shouldn’t be happening. But I am not going to test an unchecked vaccine on my children or myself. “
Research in Poland, where distrust of public institutions is deep, has shown that less than 40% of people plan to get vaccinated, for now. On Sunday, only half of the medical staff at a Warsaw hospital, where the country’s first injection was administered, had signed up.
In Spain, one of the hardest hit countries in Europe, German, a 28-year-old singer and songwriter from Tenerife, also plans to wait for now.
“No one close to me had it (COVID-19). I’m obviously not saying that it doesn’t exist because many people died from it, but for now I wouldn’t have it (the vaccine). “
An Orthodox Christian bishop in Bulgaria, where 45% of people said they would not have an injection and 40% plan to wait and see if any negative side effects appear, compared COVID-19 to polio.
“I myself have been vaccinated against everything I can be,” Bishop Tihon told reporters after receiving his injection, alongside the Minister of Health in Sofia.
He talked about anxiety about polio before vaccination became available in the 1950s and 1960s.
“We were all shaking with fear of getting polio. And then we were very happy, ”he said. “Now, we have to convince people. It is a pity.”
BIG STEP AHEAD
Widespread hesitation does not seem to take into account scientific developments in recent decades.
The traditional method of creating vaccines – introducing a weakened or dead virus, or a piece of one, to stimulate the body’s immune system – takes more than a decade on average, according to a 2013 study. influenza took more than eight years, while the hepatitis B vaccine took almost 18 years to prepare.
Moderna’s vaccine, based on the so-called messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology, went from gene sequencing to the first human injection in 63 days.
“Let’s look back at the advances made in 2020 and say, ‘That was a time when science really took a leap forward,'” said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Clinical Research Unit at the University of Oxford, which is supported by Wellcome Trust.
The Pfizer / BioNTech injection has been linked to some cases of severe allergic reactions, since it was launched in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has not revealed any serious long-term side effects in clinical trials.
Independent researcher Alpha Research said his recent research suggested that less than one in five Bulgarians in the first groups to receive the vaccine – top doctors, pharmacists, teachers and nursing staff – planned to volunteer to get the vaccine.
An IPSOS survey of 15 countries published on November 5 then showed that 54% of French people would have a COVID vaccine if one were available. The figure was 64% in Italy and Spain, 79% in Britain and 87% in China.
Further research by the FIFG – which had no comparative data for other countries – showed that only 41% of people in France would shoot.
In Sweden, where public confidence in the authorities is high, as elsewhere in the Nordic countries, more than two out of three people want to be immunized. Still, some say no.
“If someone gave me 10 million euros, I wouldn’t take it,” said Lisa Renberg, 32, on Wednesday.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki asked Poles on Sunday to apply for vaccination, saying the effect of collective immunity depended on them.
Critics said Warsaw’s nationalist leaders have too strongly accepted anti-vaccination attitudes in the past, in an effort to garner conservative support.
Additional reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk in Warsaw, Colm Fulton in Stockholm, Phil Blenkinsop in Brussels and Silvio Castellanos in Madrid; Written by Justyna Pawlak; Nick Macfie Edition