Europe lifts vaccine suspension amid surge
Governments across Europe raced Friday to lift suspensions on Astrazeneca’s coronavirus vaccine and reassure an exhausted and anxious public that it was safe amid a new wave of infections that led many countries to reimpose harsh restrictions on movement and businesses.
German officials warned that plans to ease restrictions by Easter would have to be put on hold and said that more measures might be needed in the weeks ahead. Paris was one of many cities across France where people were essentially ordered to stay at home. Italy entered its third national lockdown Monday, and Poland will put in place its own lockdown Saturday.
The rapid moves to tighten what were already relatively stringent restrictions came as nearly every country in Europe that had halted use of the Astrazeneca vaccine — including France, Germany, Italy and Spain — said they would start using it again.
Across all of Europe, the official death toll surged past 900,000 last week, according to the World Health Organization. But this spring, it was supposed to be different.
The latest outbreaks are a stark reminder that not enough people have been inoculated to seriously blunt the impact of a new wave of infection.
“There are not yet enough vaccine doses in Europe to stop the third wave by vaccination alone,” Germany’s health minister, Jens Spahn, said Friday. “Even if the deliveries from EU orders come reliably, it will still take a few weeks until the risk groups are fully vaccinated.”
The mass vaccination efforts across the European Union were thrown into deeper turmoil this week as more than a dozen countries suspended the use of the Astrazeneca vaccine while reports of a possible link to a small number of cases of blood clots and abnormal bleeding were probed.
On Thursday, the bloc’s medical regulator, the European Medicines Agency, said its review came to the firm conclusion that the vaccine was “safe and effective.”
Political leaders rushed to try to undo any damage to the public’s trust and faith in Astrazeneca and vaccines more broadly — with a number of them rolling up their sleeves and getting the shots themselves to drive the point home.
In France, where vaccine skepticism runs deep, Jean Castex, the country’s 55-year-old prime minister, flashed a thumbs up at television cameras after getting his first dose of the Astrazeneca vaccine at a military hospital in the Val-de-marne area, southeast of Paris.
While faith in Astrazeneca remains high in Britain, where the vaccine was developed in partnership with researchers at Oxford University, Prime Minister Boris Johnson got a shot Friday as he sought to ease the minds of millions in the country who had already received it.
But the challenge for leaders across much of Europe is much deeper than restoring faith in one vaccine. They must now find a way to deliver more vaccines to the people that need them most at a time when the virus is once again claiming some 2,000 lives a day.
“The number of people dying from COVID-19 in Europe is higher now than it was this time last year,” said Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s European director. “It is in Central Europe, the Balkans, and the Baltic States where case incidence, hospitalizations and deaths are now among the highest in the world.”
Across Europe more broadly, promises to ease restrictions by Easter are now being reversed. In Germany, where cases are rising rapidly, officials warned of “difficult weeks ahead.”
“The rising case numbers may mean that we are unable to take any further steps toward opening up in the weeks to come,” Spahn told reporters Friday. “On the contrary, we may even have to take steps backward.”