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German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she will not get the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine.
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The vaccine was approved only for people under 65 in Germany, and Merkel is 66 years old.
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Recent tests have linked the AstraZeneca vaccine to a dramatic drop in the risk of hospitalization.
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But more than 1 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.
The rate at which the vaccine was launched in Europe has slowed down compared to the United Kingdom. People reportedly refused to get the AstraZeneca vaccine after European leaders doubted its effectiveness.
Merkel, 66, was asked by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine whether she would receive a dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine to counter the perception in Europe that the vaccine is ineffective.
The chancellor said she would not receive the vaccine because it was not approved for people over 65 in Germany. “I am 66 years old and do not belong to the recommended group for AstraZeneca,” she told the newspaper.
Recent tests in Scotland have linked the AstraZeneca vaccine to a dramatic drop in the risk of hospitalization among the elderly.
More than 1.4 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine are stored in Germany, while healthcare professionals administered just 240,000 doses, said Thomas Mertens, who chairs Germany’s permanent vaccine commission, this week, the New Scientist reported.
“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,” Mertens told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program.
“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.
The German newspaper Handelsblatt recently published a report, citing anonymous German health officials, who said that the AstraZeneca vaccine was only 8% effective among older people. The fact-checking website Full Fact said the Handelsblatt report was not “reliable”, and the German government and AstraZeneca denied it.
Merkel described an “acceptance problem” with the vaccine, which she said was “effective and safe”. She added that Germans cannot choose which vaccine to receive.
“AstraZeneca is a reliable, effective and safe vaccine, approved by the European Medicines Agency and recommended in Germany up to 65 years of age,” she told Frankfurter Allgemeine. “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 has faced similar problems since President Emmanuel Macron suggested without evidence in late January that the AstraZeneca vaccine appeared “almost ineffective” among people over 65.
The French Ministry of Health said on Tuesday that only 107,000 AstraZeneca vaccines were administered in the first two weeks of the vaccine’s launch, the French newspaper Le Télégramme reported. France received more than 700,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Officials in Austria, Belgium and Italy have also reported some resistance to the AstraZeneca vaccine, Agence France-Presse reported last week.
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