PARIS (AP) – France’s cautious approach to rolling out a coronavirus vaccination program appears to have backfired, leaving barely 500 people vaccinated in the first week and renewing anger over dealing with the pandemic by the government.
Amid public outrage on Monday, the Health Minister promised to speed up the pace and made a late public plea on behalf of the vaccine, saying it represents an “opportunity” for France and the world to overcome a pandemic. which killed more than 1.8 million people. people. President Emmanuel Macron held a special meeting with top government officials on Monday to discuss vaccine strategy and other virus developments.
The slow roll-out of the vaccine by Pfizer and the German company BioNTech has been blamed on mismanagement, staff shortages during holiday vacations and a complex French consent policy designed to meet the unusually broad vaccine skepticism among the French public.
Doctors, mayors and opposition politicians on Monday called for faster access to vaccines.
“It’s a state scandal,” said Jean Rottner, president of the Grand-Est region of eastern France, where infections are on the rise and some hospitals are overcapacity.
“Getting vaccinations is getting more and more complicated than buying a car,” he said on France-2 television.
In France, a country of 67 million people, only 516 people were vaccinated in the first six days, according to the French Ministry of Health. Health Minister Olivier Veran promised that “several thousand” people will be vaccinated by the end of Monday and that the pace will continue throughout the week – but that still leaves France far behind its neighbors.
Germany’s total in the first week exceeded 200,000 and Italy’s more than 100,000 – and even those countries are under fire for being too slow to protect the public from a pandemic that killed more than 1.8 million people worldwide .
The US and China have now vaccinated millions. Great Britain became the first country on Monday in the world to give people shots of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, so the UK now has two approved vaccines to use.
France began its vaccination campaign on December 27 in nursing homes, as so many elderly people have died from the virus. But fearing that people with cognitive difficulties would be vaccinated against their will, the government devised a time-consuming screening process before the vaccines could be ordered and administered.
Macron’s government doesn’t want to give the impression that it is imposing vaccines on anyone.
While France has lost more lives to the virus than most countries – more than 65,000 – polls suggest the French are unusually wary of vaccines. They recall past French drug scandals, are concerned about how quickly these new vaccines were developed and their long-term effects, and wonder what profits they bring to large pharmaceutical companies.
But many other French are keen to get vaccinated and are frustrated by the surprisingly slow rollout.
“We are doing everything we can to motivate people to get vaccinated,” said Frederic Leyret, director of Saint Vincent Hospital in the eastern French city of Strasbourg, whose geriatric rehabilitation center started vaccinations on Monday.
He lamented a mixed message from leading French officials, which he sums up as, “Get vaccinated, but we’ll go slow because it can be dangerous.”
As millions of people are being injected in multiple countries, he says attitudes are starting to change. The French government changed its policy this weekend to allow immediate vaccinations for medical workers over 50, in addition to nursing home residents. Vaccines will gradually be made available to others.
Similar problems have arisen all over Europe.
Spain saw vaccinations progress slowly over the New Year holidays, attributed to a shortage of medical personnel and freezers for the vaccine, after one party of them was caught in a bottleneck of trucks trying to enter mainland Europe from Britain. Reports from regional authorities showed that on Monday, more than a week after arrival, less than a fifth of Spain’s vaccine doses had been administered.
In Germany, where nearly 265,000 vaccinations against the coronavirus were reported on Monday, impatience is growing with what is seen as a slow start. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesperson, Steffen Seibert, promised that “some things can and will improve.”
Amid the criticism, a spokesman for the European Commission defended the European Union’s collective vaccine strategy, saying Monday that the biggest problem is a shortage of production capacity.
The European Medicines Agency, the medical regulator for the 27-country bloc, met on Monday to discuss approval of Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine.
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Samuel Petrequin in Brussels, Aritz Parra in Madrid and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed.
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