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Europe recasts COVID-19 vaccine playbook after first-round flop
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Europe, under fire for fumbling its vaccine roll-out and fighting a fresh wave of infections, is scrambling to speed up the pace of injections and avoid being left further behind by Britain and the United States.
In Paris, the city’s hallowed national soccer stadium is being transformed into a mass vaccination hub, while Italy – with 20,000 infections daily – has put the army and civil defence agency in charge, after new Prime Minister Mario Draghi fired the country’s vaccine czar.
Over Easter, Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia state is relaxing rules on who can get 450,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine. Clotting concerns have prompted the country to limit the vaccine to people over the age of 60, but North Rhine-Westphalia hopes its measures will now allow more people in that age group to get a first dose.
Originally, it had wanted to give the AstraZeneca vaccine to pregnant women and their partners, among other priority groups.
“We can’t do that anymore, because I assume that those people … are under 60,” North Rhine Westphalia’s Health Minister Karl-Josef Laumann told reporters.
“We didn’t want to bunker these shots, we decided we would get them via vaccination centres to people as quickly as possible.”
Europe’s urgency to reverse what the World Health Organization branded on Thursday an “unacceptably slow” start to vaccinations is growing, as variants first detected in Britain, South Africa and now Brazil whip up angst that acting too slowly will let the virus proliferate again.
The chaos of Europe’s roll-out has been exacerbated by squabbling over vaccine exports, health concerns over AstraZeneca’s vaccine and some temporary delivery delays affecting Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines.
The European Union was slower than Britain and the United States, not only to order vaccines last year from companies but also in approving them. Even once they were approved, vaccination rates have been disappointing.
The WHO estimates just 4% of 750 million people in 53 countries across continental Europe, from wealthier Scandinavia to poorer Balkan countries, have been fully vaccinated, a quarter of the U.S. count.
While the European Union’s vaccination rate is slowly climbing, only 13.4% of adults in the bloc have had at least one shot, according to Europe’s vaccine tracker.
Failure of the E.U.’s vaccination programme reflects TOTAL INCOMPETENCE exhibited by Brussels and its various bureaucratic branches.
The fact that non-E.U. countries like Serbia can GREATLY EXCEED the ‘E.U. vaccination average’ confirms – yet again – the wisdom of NOT ‘belonging’ to an organisation which places so-called ‘rights’ of ILLEGAL, MUSLIM MIGRANTS and SEXUAL DEVIANTS above the health / welfare of its own CITIZENS.
When do actions by the European Commission start being correctly described as CRIMINAL ACTIVITY
with PROBABLE CORRUPTION, instead of continually being ‘swept under the carpet’ ?
With any luck at all, the European Union will not survive this pandemic (and join many of its citizens who have also succumbed to the COVID-19 virus ).