Officials in Germany defend AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine and push back against people who avoid it in hopes of getting another shot instead.
Regulators have approved the shot developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University as well as the shot developed by Pfizer and the German company BioNTech, but varying efficacy rates from clinical trials seem to have prompted many to hold off a Pfizer-BioNTech shot.
That shot has shown efficacy in studies of as much as 95%, compared to 60% for the AstraZeneca shot in a review by European regulators.
Experts say comparing the numbers directly is misleading and not a good reason to refuse the AstraZeneca shot – but the message has not reached much of the German population.
So far, only 187,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been given in Germany, Reuters reported Monday. The country expected to have delivered 1.5 million doses of the vaccine by the end of last week.
At a vaccination site in Berlin that only distributed the AstraZeneca shot, less than 200 people a day arrived for 3,800 appointments, The Times of London reported Monday.
The head of a vaccination center told Business Insider Deutschland, Insider’s sister publication in Germany, that people were reluctant to take the vaccine due to skepticism about its effectiveness.
A German expert told German publication Die Welt that “truly disastrous communication” was the cause of widespread skepticism about the vaccine.
For example, in January, German officials denied a report from the Handelsblatt newspaper that officials feared the shot was only 8% effective in people over 65. The office of German Health Minister Jens Spahn said it appeared that the newspaper mixed the 8% figure with the proportion of trial participants aged 56 to 69.
From the outset, there was confusion about how the vaccine worked. In November, AstraZeneca cited an “average” efficacy of 70% in its announcement of late-stage preliminary trial results after mistakenly giving some of its subjects a lower-than-target dose.
Analysis by the European Medicines Agency later concluded that the shot was approximately 60% effective when two full doses were given, lower than the competitors of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which reported greater than 90% efficacy after their respective studies.
However, experts have said the data is not comparable, and real-world data shows promising results in places where the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine has been introduced.
Anecdotal reports of flu-like side effects from the first shot of the vaccine come from France and Sweden, which in some cases temporarily took health workers off work for a day.
The German government and local health experts are now trying to dispel the confusion about the vaccine’s efficacy and safety.
Street art with the Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca-Oxford and Sputnik V vaccines as if they were distributed by an old gumball machine.
Gerald Matzka / photo alliance via Getty Images
“The AstraZeneca vaccine is both safe and highly effective,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a tweet Monday.
On Wednesday, the European Union’s highest official, Ursula von der Leyen, also defended 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 she “would take the AstraZeneca vaccine without thinking, just like the products from Moderna and BioNTech. / Pfizer. “