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…
