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The doctors refused the vaccination.
“I am not an ‘antiviral’,” says a nurse who has been working in a Berlin hospital for more than 20 years and did not want to make her name public. But the man assures that the doctors hurt what the politicians ask of them.
“How can it be that the same people who have been directly involved in COVID-19 for almost a year and have a very high risk of infection should protect themselves with a less effective vaccine?” Asks the nurse rhetorically. He assures by asking the same question in writing to the German Health Minister, Jens Spahn, and to Dilek Kalayci, health director in Berlin.
The doctor says he should have been vaccinated with AstraZeneca against COVID-19. Studies have shown that it is less effective than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Therefore, the man rejected this vaccine. About a quarter of his famous colleagues did the same.
In Germany, as of Thursday, AstraZeneca was only recommended for people under 65 and was considered unsuitable for seniors. Therefore, it is proposed, in particular, to target professional groups that, due to the risk of infection, are vaccinated as a priority: medical professionals and nurses.
“It just came to our attention then.” I don’t expect any special attention to be paid to us, but it doesn’t seem fair that they take care of us less than all the other citizens of the country, “says the man. He feels that later, when there is no Such a shortage of vaccines, the population will receive a greater proportion of the more effective Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
In the face of the pandemic, a lot was demanded of doctors and nurses. As a result, many of them are overwhelmed by the underestimation of politicians and society. They also experience a constant fear of infection, wanting to be protected like all patients.
AstraZeneca has nowhere to put the vaccine
The AstraZeneca vaccine was approved in the European Union in late January and was released relatively recently. You don’t get as much praise from healthcare professionals. Not everyone is skeptical, but they would not be so satisfied with it that it has already become a serious problem in Germany.
Interview for the newspaper “Rheinische Mail” even Frank Ulrich Montgomer, the pocket president of the World Medical Association, has essentially stated that the AstraZeneca vaccine is the second choice for many. “We cannot ignore the fact that it is less effective,” he said, adding that people at higher risk of infection, such as medical personnel, should be vaccinated with more effective vaccines.
Similar statements and reports of supposedly strong lightning-fast side effects have spread across the internet. So it is not surprising that when they find out that AstraZeneca is offered to them in Germany, they do not visit the vaccination office. Officials in Hessen have quietly admitted that they simply have nowhere to put this vaccine because people reject it.
The Land of Saxony reported that almost all vaccination centers have free appointments. The German Red Cross reported that in nearly 50 cases, people either failed to show up for prescribed vaccines or tried to get a different vaccine. News comes from various parts of the country about cases in which Germans who came to get vaccinated have asked for another vaccine. As a result, unused stocks of AstraZeneca vaccine accumulate in refrigerators.
The avalanche of bad news for Health Minister J. Spahn does not end there. Vaccines were approved late, stocks were low, and health professionals are now skeptical of the vaccine, the use of which has been blessed by leading authorities. The state has bought the power of the vaccine, but people seem to reject it. In March, the country will reach hundreds of thousands of doses of the vaccine. So how will this vaccine be used in the future?
Many do not understand the true benefits of the vaccine.
It is known that the ambiguous news about the vaccine among the population has sown distrust. However, the AstraZeneca vaccine is an important weapon that should advance the possible victory date against a pandemic. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced that a vaccine will be offered to everyone in the country in September. The policy plan is now in serious jeopardy.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines alone may not be enough to vaccinate at least 50 million Germans in the fall. Therefore, there is a need to better explain to the public the important role that AstraZeneca can play in the fight against a pandemic. The image that is currently being seen can be boldly called a public relations disaster.
Objectively speaking, the AstraZeneca vaccine can slow down a pandemic fairly quickly, whether it is given to bus drivers, cashiers, or nurses. Summarizing the results of the studies conducted during the vaccine approval process, the efficacy of the vaccine at the two doses was 60%.
Needless to say, this number seems small compared to the results of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which have a reported efficacy of up to 95%. However, it should be understood that this percentage does not indicate how many people are affected by the vaccine and how many are not. Indicate the percentage that reduces the risk of COVID-19 infection in all (!) Vaccinated people compared to unvaccinated people.
A little math can help you understand better. Experts say that even ordinary doctors cannot adequately understand the importance of the vaccine to society. “Many doctors don’t even understand basic statistics because that is not their area of expertise. Unfortunately, widespread mass blindness is just detrimental to the numbers, ”says Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
During the coronavirus pandemic, calculating the risk of infection took on infinite importance. The probability of getting sick is never equal to one hundred percent. Even if the person is not vaccinated and works in a hospital. After all, not everyone gets seriously ill, in many cases they don’t even feel bad.
So, to find out how well the vaccine works, the manufacturers divide the tens of thousands of people who participate in the vaccine trials into two groups. Some get the vaccine and others get the placebo. Then it is necessary to wait for a statistically significant number of cases to appear.
A comparison of the two groups shows the number of cases in which the vaccine prevented the disease. If the vaccine doesn’t work, roughly the same number of patients are seen in both groups. If the vaccine provides protection, the number of infected people is less than in the placebo group.
In pre-marketing studies, AstraZeneca gave the active substance or placebo to about 10,500 people. 218 subjects developed COVID-19. But 154 of them had received placebo and 64 had been vaccinated. Therefore, during the study, vaccination helped prevent the disease in 90 people, which means that the vaccine reduced the risk of coronavirus infection by about 60 percent.
Talk about side effects – soap bubble
You will not argue with the numbers. Pfizer and Moderna work better, but the AstraZeneca vaccine still significantly reduces risk. Even more important is the incidence of serious diseases that can be prevented by vaccination. And it is becoming increasingly clear that all the vaccines that have been approved in the European Union so far are almost 100% protected against severe cases of the disease. This means that many of those who are seriously ill would be treated in the hospital and their lives would be in danger, and the vaccine would become a relatively mild form of the disease.
This is especially true for the AstraZeneca vaccine: according to a recent review, after the second dose, none of the participants became so seriously ill that they had to be hospitalized or died.
German Health Minister Spahn was quick to assure him that he would be vaccinated with AstraZeneca as soon as it was his turn.
Christian Drosten, famous in Germany not only as a scientist but also as the creator of a very popular web page about the evolution of a pandemic, said that many things were misunderstood in the public sphere. The AstraZeneca vaccine is a very good product, not a “second choice”.
Requests for confidence in the value of the vaccine are urgently needed, as many German hospitals and emergency services have refused to be vaccinated with AstraZeneca. The large number of reports of a strong side effect on the Internet has contributed greatly to this.
A hospital in Braunschweig was particularly affected. Of the 88 workers vaccinated, 37 became ill. “I felt like someone had let me go through a meat grinder,” said intensive care nurse Kati Schmidt. He spent two days in bed. As news of the side effects spread throughout the hospital, the desire to vaccinate evaporated for many. Senior physician Nicholas Bollenbach, a passionate cyclist, was one of the last vaccinated staff members at this hospital and the following night he also felt the usual symptoms. “He’s as exhausted on Saturday as after a 200-kilometer bike race,” he says.
Frankly, neither Bollenbach nor his colleagues experienced any side effects. These are not actually side effects, they are reactions to the vaccine that have been observed and reported in all studies. These symptoms disappear within a few days.
Last year, New York scientist Florian Krammer noted that the Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines caused stronger reactions than conventional vaccines. “You need to communicate it very clearly,” says Krammer, and people who have been vaccinated differently will mistakenly think, “The vaccines have made me sick.”
To avoid a sudden labor shortage in hospital wards or ambulance services, authorities issued a recommendation to distribute vaccines between wards, not to vaccinate all staff at once.
It should be noted that AstraZeneca is mainly administered to younger people, with more reactions. Their immune system is more active than that of the elderly, which makes them more sensitive to vaccines.
But will these scientific explanations suffice when many people already think that AstraZeneca is second-rate compared to the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines?
Is it any wonder that the German Red Cross in Saxony is announcing that in some vaccination centers, consultation with prescribers ‘takes longer’ if the vaccine used is AstraZeneca? For example, data from an online survey shows only 2.8 percent. Germans who want to get vaccinated are more likely to choose an AstraZeneca product.
Experts like Drosten believe that the real risk lies in mutations in the virus. He is more concerned about the South African strain than the “British” mutation, but other options can be expected in the future.
It is not yet clear how the vaccines approved to date against the mutations will work.
