Once the darling of the pandemic, Germany now has over 1 million unused vaccines stored

At a time when vaccines are in urgent demand, Germany has more than 1 million unused doses stored – in part because people are reluctant to take them.

Once acclaimed for its response to the coronavirus, Germany administered only 15 percent of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine it received, the country’s health ministry said in an interview on Wednesday.

Some officials blame shaky confidence among the public after statements by political leaders and incorrect press reports questioning the vaccine’s effectiveness. Others point to a dysfunctional distribution plan that did not invite enough people to schedule vaccination appointments.

“We are working hard on this and trying to convince people to accept the vaccine and really rebuild the public’s confidence in the vaccine,” Thomas Mertens, a professor who chairs Germany’s Permanent Vaccination Commission, told the BBC on Thursday. “But this is a psychological problem and it will take time to reach its goal.”

The vaccine’s launch in the European Union has been much slower than in the United States or Britain. Leaders from the EU’s 27 nations met virtually on Thursday to find ways to speed things up amid fears that new variants could bring new waves of infection to the continent. The EU gave only 7 injections per 100 people, compared to 20 per 100 in the United States and almost 28 per 100 in the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom, with one of the highest death rates in the world, has been praised for its vaccination strategy. This week, the German tabloid Bild spread the union flag on its front page next to the message, “Dear Britain, We are jealous of you”.

The United States has only vaccines manufactured by its pharmaceutical giants, Pfizer and Moderna. But these inventories have been much smaller in Europe, partly because the United States has bought much of the stock and are also expensive and difficult to handle.

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Europe has been heavily dependent on the vaccine made by the Swedish-British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, which is cheaper and easier to transport, but has not yet been approved in the USA

Medical regulators in some European countries, including Germany, also said that there is insufficient data in clinical trials to certify the effectiveness of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in people over 65.

This was strongly contested by some experts who said that while AstraZeneca’s Phase 3 tests had a small sample size for older people, there was other evidence that the injections were effective.

In addition, a group of Scottish universities published a study this week suggesting that the vaccine reduced the risk of hospitalization by 94 percent – greater than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

The decision to restrict the vaccine to younger people means that Germany has not been able to give the most abundant vaccine in its portfolio to older people.

German states, which are responsible for their individual vaccination campaigns, have also failed to invite enough people from the second and third priority groups, which include those with underlying health problems, according to media reports in the country.

European authorities are now struggling to reassure the public, as well as updating their policies.

Germany is changing its priority vaccination list so that teachers are included in the second priority group, and Health Minister Jens Spahn has requested that it be handed over to the police and the army.

Spahn made a point of saying that it was a “privilege” to receive the “safe and effective” injection of AstraZeneca, while Chancellor Angela Merkel warned people in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that “as long as vaccines are as scarce as they are in the right now, you cannot choose what you want to be vaccinated with. “