Authorities in Germany are defending the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine and resisting people who are avoiding it, in the hope of receiving a different injection.
Regulators approved both the injection developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford and the injection developed by Pfizer and the German company BioNTech, but the different rates of effectiveness of clinical trials seem to have led many to try to resist a Pfizer-BioNTech jab.
This injection produced testing efficiencies of up to 95%, compared to 60% for the AstraZeneca jab in a review by European regulators.
Experts say comparing the numbers directly is misleading and is not a good reason to refuse the AstraZeneca injection – but the message did not reach much of Germany’s population.
Only 187,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been administered so far in Germany, Reuters reported on Monday. The country expected to have delivered 1.5 million doses of the vaccine by the end of last week.
A vaccine website in Berlin that distributed only the AstraZeneca vaccine saw less than 200 people arriving a day for 3,800 consultations, The Times of London reported on Monday.
The head of a vaccination center told Business Insider Deutschland, Insider’s sister publication in Germany, that people were reluctant to get the vaccine because of skepticism about its effectiveness.
A German expert told the German publication Die Welt that “really disastrous communication” was to blame for widespread skepticism about the vaccine.
In January, for example, German authorities denied a report in the Handelsblatt newspaper that authorities feared that the shot was only 8% effective in people over 65. The German Health Minister Jens Spahn’s office said it appeared that the newspaper mixed the 8% with the proportion of trial participants who were 56 to 69 years old.
There has been confusion about the vaccine’s performance from the beginning. In November, AstraZeneca cited an “average” 70% effectiveness in its announcement of the preliminary results of the final-stage study, after it gave some of its study participants a lower than intended dosage amount.
The European Medicines Agency’s analysis later concluded that the jab was about 60% effective when two full doses were administered, less than competitors from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which reported efficacy over 90% after their respective tests.
Experts said the data are not comparable, however, and the real-world data is showing promising results in places where the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine was launched.
Anecdotal reports of flu-like side effects from the first injection of the vaccine have left France and Sweden, which in some cases temporarily removed health workers from the commission for a day.
The German government and local health experts are trying to end confusion about the vaccine’s effectiveness and safety.
Street art depicting the Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca-Oxford and Sputnik V vaccines as if they were being distributed by an old gum machine.
Gerald Matzka / Alliance image via Getty Images
“The AstraZeneca vaccine is safe and highly effective,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a tweet on Monday.
On Wednesday, the European Union’s top official, Ursula von der Leyen, also defended the AstraZeneca’s shot.
Von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission and a German who belongs to Merkel’s CDU party, told the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper that “he would take the AstraZeneca vaccine without a second thought, as would the products of Moderna and BioNTech / Pfizer.”