- German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she will not vaccinate against AstraZeneca coronavirus.
- The vaccine is only approved for people under the age of 65 in Germany, and Merkel is 66.
- Recent tests have linked a dramatic drop in hospital admissions to the AstraZeneca vaccine.
- But with more than 1 million jobs left unused, many Germans are unsure about their effectiveness.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she will not take the COVID-19 vaccine for AstraZeneca because she is too old.
The pace of vaccine rollout in Europe is slower than in the United Kingdom. People have reported taking the AstraZeneca vaccine after European leaders questioned its effectiveness.
Merkel was asked by the German newspaper Frankfurter Gaeljemin whether she would receive a dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine to understand if such a vaccine was not effective in Europe.
The chancellor said she would not get the vaccine because it was not valid for people over 65 in Germany. “I am 66 years old and not of the recommended group for AstraZeneca,” he told the paper.
Recent trials in Scotland have linked the drastic drop in the risk of hospitalization in the elderly to the AstraZeneca vaccine.
More than 1.4 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine are sitting on storage in Germany, while healthcare workers have given only 240,000 doses, Thomas Mertens, who chairs Germany’s standing commission on the vaccine, said this week, according to a New Scientist report.
“We are working very hard on this issue and trying to persuade people to accept the vaccine and really gain the trust of the population in the vaccine,” Mertens told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program.
“But you know, this is also a kind of mental problem, and unfortunately, it will take some time to reach this goal,” he said.
The German newspaper Handelsblatt recently published a report, citing unnamed German health officials, saying that the astraZeneca vaccine is effective in only 8% of the elderly. The fact-checking website Fulfect said Handelsblatt’s report was “unreliable” and was denied by the German government and AstraZeneca.
Merkel described the “acceptance problem” with the vaccine, which she said was “effective and safe.” He added that the Germans could not choose which vaccine they could receive.
“AstraZeneca is a reliable vaccine, effective and safe, approved by the European Medicines Agency and recommended in Germany up to the age of 65,” he told Frankfurter Gejljamin. “All officials are telling us that this vaccine can be trusted. As long as these vaccines are currently so rare, you can’t choose the vaccine you want to fight.”
Since France faced such problems, President Emmanuel Macron has suggested without evidence that the AstraZeneca vaccine is “semi-ineffective” in people over 65 years of age.
France’s health ministry said on Tuesday that only 107,000 Astrazeneca jobs had been given in the first two weeks of the vaccine rollout, despite the French newspaper La Telegram reporting that more than 700,000 doses had been received in the country.
Officials from Austria, Belgium and Italy have also begun to show some resistance to the British vaccine, France 24 reports.
