PARIS (AP) – France’s cautious approach to implementing a coronavirus vaccination program backfires, leaving only 500 people inoculated in the first week and reigniting anger over the way the government is dealing with the pandemic.
Amid public protests, the health minister on Monday promised to increase the pace and made a late public appeal on behalf of the vaccine, saying it offers a “chance” for France and the world to win a pandemic that has killed more 1.8 million people. President Emmanuel Macron was holding a special meeting with senior government officials on Monday to discuss vaccine strategy and other virus developments.
The slow implantation of the vaccine by Pfizer and the German company BioNTech was attributed to maladministration, lack of staff during the holidays and a complex French consent policy designed to accommodate the unusually wide skepticism about the vaccine among the French public.
Doctors, mayors and opposition politicians begged on Monday for faster access to vaccines.
“It is a state scandal,” said Jean Rottner, president of the Grand-Est region in eastern France, where infections are on the rise and some hospitals are full.
“Being vaccinated is becoming more complicated than buying a car,” he told France-2 television.
In France, a country with 67 million inhabitants, 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, with the pace accelerating throughout the week – but that still leaves France far behind its neighbors.
Germany’s first week total exceeded 200,000 and Italy’s over 100,000 – and even these countries are under pressure because they are too slow to protect the public from a pandemic that has killed more than 1.8 million people worldwide.
The United States and China, meanwhile, vaccinated millions. Britain on Monday became the first nation in the world to start giving people Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine injections, so the UK now has two vaccines approved to use.
France began its vaccination campaign on December 27 in nursing homes, because many elderly people died of the virus. But, facing the fear that people with cognitive problems would be vaccinated against their will, the government planned a lengthy screening process before vaccines could be ordered and administered.
The Macron government also makes a point of not appearing to be forcing vaccines on anyone.
Although France has lost more lives to the virus than most countries – more than 65,000 – surveys suggest that the French are unusually cautious about vaccines. They remember previous drug scandals in France, worry about how quickly these new vaccines were developed and their long-term impact, and wonder about the profits they bring to big pharmaceutical companies.
But many other French people are eager to be vaccinated and have been frustrated by the surprisingly slow implementation.
“We are doing everything we can to motivate people to be vaccinated,” said Frederic Leyret, director of St. Vincent’s Hospital in the city of Strasbourg in eastern France, whose geriatric rehabilitation center started vaccination on Monday.
He regretted a confused message from the main French authorities, which he summarizes as: “Go get vaccinated, but we will go slow because it can be dangerous”.
Now that millions of people in several countries are being injected, he said that attitudes are starting to change. The French government adjusted its policies over the weekend to allow immediate vaccination of medical workers over 50, along with residents of nursing homes. Vaccines will gradually be made available to others.
On Monday, French authorities reported 378 new deaths from the virus and said the number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized in intensive care units – more than 2,600 people – remained stable.
Similar problems have arisen across Europe.
Spain saw vaccinations move slowly during the New Year holiday, due to a lack of medical staff and freezers for the vaccine, after a batch of them was caught in a traffic jam trying to enter the European continent from Great Britain. Brittany.
Spain received a total of 718,535 doses of vaccines from Pfizer and BioNTech, but administered only 82,334 as of Monday, said Health Minister Salvador Illa. He added that officials are confident that vaccination levels will reach “cruising speed” next week, once the vacation period is over.
In Germany, where almost 265,000 coronavirus vaccinations have been reported as of Monday, impatience is growing with what is seen as a slow start. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, promised that “some things can and will improve”.
Amid criticism, a European Commission spokesman defended the European Union’s collective vaccine strategy, saying Monday that the main problem is the lack of production capacity.
The European Medicines Agency, the 27-nation bloc’s medical regulator, met on Monday to discuss approval of Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine.
___
Samuel Petrequin in Brussels, Aritz Parra in Madrid and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.
___
Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at:
https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine
https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak