Hamburg, Germany – The USA has a long way to go with its coronavirus distribution of vaccines, but is far ahead of most other countries. This includes Germany, where many have chosen to wait for one vaccine over the other, instead of just getting the most available photo.
The USA has 60 million doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine ready to launch the moment the FDA authorizes it. As CBS News correspondent Chris Livesay reports, this vaccine is now available in Germany, where cases of COVID-19 have been on the rise recently. The difficult part was getting the Germans to accept.
At Germany’s largest vaccination center in Hamburg, 35-year-old surgeon Johannes told us he was looking forward to getting his first injection, so he could stop worrying so much about the risks of potentially taking the disease from the hospital to his partner and his newborn child.
But now that the offer of an AstraZeneca injection has arrived, Johannes admits he is “a little scared”.
“I thought I was getting the [Pfizer]- BioNTech vaccine, but now I heard that there is a decision that I do not understand, “he said.” I was very disappointed. “
It is a scene that takes place in the most powerful country in Europe. Germany has already received more than 1.4 million doses of the drug AstraZeneca, and they have been distributed to vaccination centers across the country, such as Hamburg.
But research suggests that about half of Germans do not want this.
More broadly, the European Union, which has organized the purchase of all doses of the vaccine collectively for its 27 member states, has secured a whopping 400 million doses of the vaccine developed in the United Kingdom.
Clinical trials suggested that AstraZeneca’s formula was between 60% and 90% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infection – less than the 95% effectiveness that Pfizer / BioNTech reported in its trials.
So Germany’s national vaccine committee refused to approve AstraZeneca for people over 65, citing the lack of data from tests that prove it worked well in these older individuals.
The reaction was rapid, significant and even spread outside Germany to other large European countries, including France, where the vaccine was only recently released for use in older people.
On Thursday, Germany seemed determined to finally reverse the course, as the national vaccine committee formally recommended that the government authorize the injection of AstraZeneca for use in all adults, including those over 65, bowing to pressure of experienced doctors in the country.
But the damage was already done and it may take some time to correct. Many Germans simply don’t trust the AstraZeneca vaccine – despite new data from the UK’s real world that suggest the injection is actually more effective than the Pfizer vaccine in preventing hospitalization – a surprising breakthrough, according to immunologist Thomas Jacobs.
“We don’t have the best and the second best; we have two very effective and safe vaccines,” he told CBS News, referring to drugs approved for use in Germany. He said there may be “a little” of simple snobbery when it comes to Germans wrinkling their noses at the vaccine developed by the British in favor of Pfizer, which was, after all, done in part by the German company BioNTech.
The director of the Hamburg vaccination center said it was a distinctly first-world problem.
“You know, it’s the people – you want the best,” Dirk Heinrich told Livesay. “You want to drive a Porsche if you get the chance, instead of another car.”
With many Germans refusing AstraZeneca’s “other car”, most of the doses that are already in Germany are stored in a refrigerator.
Compared to almost 15.3% of Americans who got their first vaccine, less than 6% of Germans got it.
But, as Johannes told CBS News, “we all want to get back to normal life”, and the change in perception of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Germany may help to increase the already growing number of injections administered there and across Europe.
Chancellor Angela Merkel left to defend the AstraZeneca vaccine earlier this week. She met on Wednesday with state leaders from across Germany to discuss the next phase of the country’s pandemic response, where life is still largely blocked.