A resident in a center for the elderly receives a vaccine, this Monday in Montpellier (France) .Guillaume Horcajuelo / EFE
The vaccination campaign is progressing at different rates in the main European countries.
Criticism is raging in France, where until January 1 the dose had been administered to only 516 people, and also in Germany, where as of Sunday there were more than 238,000.
Even in the United Kingdom, where until this Monday approximately one million people have started the process and among the population there is no perception of slowness, the scientific community has asked the Government for more ambition in its goal of supplying one million doses a week so that it reaches the goal of two million, in order to combat the third wave of the pandemic, exacerbated by a new strain of the virus that is transmitted 50% to 70% faster.
In the Netherlands, vaccination will start this Wednesday.
In France, where 67 million people live, the government insists that it has opted for the right strategy.
However, and after the barrage of criticism, both political and scientific, rained down by the extreme slowness of the first days, this Monday the accelerator was stepped on and "several thousand people" were vaccinated throughout the country and the rate will continue to increase to Throughout the week, the Minister of Health, Oliver Verán, has promised after visiting a hospital in Paris where the doses are administered.
The president, Emmanuel Macron, who in his year-end speech assured that he will not tolerate an “unjustified slowness”, has been very annoyed by the low rate of vaccination and this Monday he urgently summoned Verán, together with the prime minister, Jean Castex, already senior managers of the Executive.
France is the country with the largest anti-vaccination movement in Europe, with only 40% of citizens willing to be vaccinated against covid-19, one of the reasons for the slowness of a campaign that requires the written consent of each person before receiving the dose, which has greatly slowed down the process in its start-up, as well as the fact of having prioritized on-site vaccination in residences, instead of in vaccination centers.
These facilities are already available, there are currently 27 and before the end of the week there will be a hundred, Verán has announced, with which vaccinations are expected to multiply exponentially.
Especially because, after the criticism, in addition to the elderly in nursing homes and the vulnerable staff who care for them, the French Government decided this weekend to also open this first phase of immunization to medical staff over 50 years of age.
Executive spokesman Gabriel Attal assured on Sunday that the country has already received 500,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and that another additional half million will arrive "every beginning of the week."
The goal of the French Government is to have vaccinated the first million by February.
This figure has already been reached in the United Kingdom, a country with a similar population (almost 67 million people).
Here the vaccination campaign began on December 8, after being the first country to authorize the distribution of the drug from Pfizer and BioNTech.
In the first week, more than 137,000 people received the first dose.
The daily rate, among the more than 750 medical centers throughout the country participating in the campaign, is about 40,000 doses.
During the Christmas week, the rate slowed slightly to 36,000 daily doses, but the rollout did not stop during the holidays.
From this Monday, hospitals have half a million doses of the Oxford and Astrazeneca vaccine.
The Boris Johnson Government's goal is to deliver one million doses a week.
For now, the British health authorities have given the go-ahead to extend the planned space between the two doses (about 21 days) to 12 weeks, in order to speed up the mass vaccination of the population with the available doses.
According to data compiled by the Our World In Data website, the United Kingdom has already vaccinated 1.39% of its population, only behind Israel (14.1%) and Bahrain (3.6%) in percentage. In Spain, where around 100,000 doses have been administered, 27% of those received, only 0.2% of its population has started this process,
reports Emilio de Benito
.
The data for Spain are at the level of Italy, which has inoculated a quarter of the vaccines it has received to date, with about 119,000 injections out of the total of almost 480,000 doses that have reached until January 1.
The Italian vaccination campaign began on December 27 and the first to receive the injection were health workers, followed, to a lesser extent, by caregivers and seniors from nursing homes.
Delays in Italy
Some regions, such as Lombardy, Sardinia or Calabria, are experiencing a marked delay for different reasons such as shortages of staff or resources or holidays for doctors.
The Undersecretary of Health, Sandra Zampa, has admitted a delay in vaccinations, "which can be recovered", and has indicated that the Government is considering opening night shifts or holidays to inoculate the injections, in order to achieve the objective of immunize 10-13 million people by April.
The Italian health authorities intend to immunize the entire population in the coming months and the Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, has ruled out imposing the obligation to vaccinate.
Despite the delays, the commissioner for the coronavirus emergency, Domenico Arcuri, has pointed out that Italy (more than 60 million inhabitants) is the second country in the European Union with the highest doses supplied, behind Germany, in absolute numbers.
In the latter country, despite having administered more than 238,000 as of Sunday, according to the Robert Koch Institute, criticism for the slowness of the immunization process also intensifies.
The opposition believes that Angela Merkel's government has ordered few doses for a country with 83 million inhabitants.
The Government spokesman, Steffen Seibert, defended this Monday the decision to bet on the European Union way to request vaccines.
For his part, the Health spokesman, Hanno Kautz, stressed that the problem is not how many vaccines have been ordered, but rather their production capacity, reports France Presse.
In the Netherlands, even the government itself admits lack of diligence.
The Dutch Minister of Health, Hugo de Jonge, acknowledged this Monday that vaccination could have started earlier in the country: "We have not been agile enough."
In November it became known that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine would be ahead of AstraZeneca's in the market, and the minister acknowledges that he should have then asked the health authorities to have the necessary refrigerators ready to preserve the Pfizer vaccine.
If there are no delays in distribution, he hopes to have vaccinated the entire population by the summer of 2021. This Wednesday, the first will be a caregiver from a nursing home in the south of the country.
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