Europe’s Been Cautious About Vaccines. Now It’s Paying the Price.
Here’s why vaccination rates in most European countries are only about a third of what they are in the U.S.
Even as the number of daily deaths from Covid-19 in the United States has fallen to levels we haven’t seen in months, continental Europe is now in the middle of a third wave of Covid infections, with a number of countries, including France, imposing new shutdowns in order to try to control the virus. This may be, in part, because Europe’s rollout of Covid vaccines has also been far slower than that of the U.S. and the U.K, and now it’s facing a new issue: Dramatically increased skepticism among many Europeans about the AstraZeneca vaccine.
This is a serious problem, given that the AstraZeneca vaccine is widely used in Europe, as opposed to the U.S. where it has yet to be approved. And it’s partly a self-inflicted problem. A couple of weeks ago, after a small number of reports of people getting blood clots after taking the AZ vaccine, a dozen European countries, including Germany, France, and Italy, suspended the use of the shot. There had only been around 30 reports of clotting out of roughly 20 million shots given, but policymakers decided, somewhat mysteriously, that the smart thing to do was to stop vaccinating people until the European Medicines Agency (EMA), which had already approved the vaccine, declared that it was safe and effective.
This decision was likely informed by the fact that Europeans are, on the whole, more skeptical of vaccines than Americans are. (France, in particular, is a hotbed of anti-vax sentiment.) The bet these governments made was that pausing vaccinations and allowing the EMA to do a review of the data would dispel people’s anxieties about the vaccine and instill more confidence in the process.
Unsurprisingly, this did not work. The EMA said last week that the AstraZeneca vaccine was safe and effective, and that it is “not associated with an increase in the overall risk…
